The Hateful Eight
9.5/10
I watched The Hateful Eight the first day it came out, about a month ago, and I totally loved it! So I went back to the cinema a few days ago to have the pleasure to watch it a second time, and it was even better.
Tarantino is my favourite director and every piece of film he puts his hands on ends up to be incredible. He truly loves cinema. He looks up for the best directors and studies their work in order to improve his. His passion to film and attention to details are outstanding. As Brad Pitt himself said in an homage to Quentin’s Inglorious Basterds:
[Tarantino] is a man who believes in the power of film. […] He’s a serious filmmaker, he’s a unique voice for our time, he’s a purist. […] He’s a joy to work for, he’s a joy to work with and if you’ve happened to forgotten what you loved about movies in the first place I tell you you’ll only have to spend a night with Quentin.
When Tarantino writes a screenplay he literally thinks about everything. He doesn’t just write the story, he asks himself why a certain character is like that and what could make him/her interesting and why. He studies deeply each and every detail of someone’s personality, he knows everything about them. Even the stunts, he wants them to act, to feel what the character is going through.
And then there’s the casting, he always pays incredible attention to the this part of the pre-production. He puts so much effort in searching the right actors becasue he knows that if he wants the script to come to life he needs the best ones (for the role). And indeed he always succeeds.
But now let’s come to The Hateful Eight.
This film is a masterpiece. Shot entirely in two locations, as Tarantino himself said, “is a theatrical play”. In fact he stated that one day he would love to bring it on stage. The development of the story is marvellous. The narrative of the film slowly takes you to a point where you find yourself immersed in a sea of questions and then cleverly answers them, of course in a pure Tarantino style. As always the film is divided in chapters, all but one in a chronological order. This film is Tarantino at the nth degree. It’s purely based on dialogues, and boy he’s the king of dialogues. I was indeed very surprised, and also quite disappointed, when I found out he wasn’t been nominated for Writing — Original Screenplay. This film’s screenplay is absolutely in-fucking-credible!
The directing is outstanding, as usual, and the cinematography in particular is wonderful. The music score by Ennio Morricone is extraordinary but it’s not at all surprising knowing il maestro. The soundtrack is one of the few Oscar nominations the film has got. In my opinion it should win hands down even though, with 6 nominations, Morricone never won an Oscar (yeah, that’s unbelievable!) if we exclude the honorary one given to him in 2007. Although his music is always wonderful, in this particular movie I think he did a seriously incredible work.
I’ve heard many saying this film is not as good as the previous ones but I strongly disagree. First of all I don’t think there’s even one bad movie he made. Secondly you can’t really compare Tarantino’s movies because they’re all so different one each other. I read people commenting that this is not even nearly as good as Django but, even considering they’re both in the same period, Django and The Hateful Eight have nothing in common, so it’s not really fair to compare them. I love both of them but, as previously said, they’re very different.
Tarantino stated that he’s going to make only 10 movies in his life (this was the 8th) and after that he’d love to move to the theatrical field. This movie is a sort of transition between the two similar but with many differences worlds. His reason for doing so is that he wants to make only great movies. I like this. He’s not someone who makes a movie a year so he can get as much money as possible, he thinks through his work, he studies it and only when it’s perfect he finally makes and releases it. As we’ve seen with his last work. The Hateful Eight is done in 70mm Ultra Panavision, a format used extremely rarely in the industry and not used in decades because of its difficulties. But its wonderful result and Tarantino’s love for film made him pursues this adventure and release a film that is a masterpiece!
Am I sad that we only have 2 movies left from this genius? Yes, of course. And the worst thing is that when he’ll move to theatre I won’t be able to see it becasue I don’t live in the US. But, as I said earlier, I love that he’s not sold his soul for money but only for the beauty of film making.
