Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight"

TV critics review the pilot. Pilots of shows suck.

Have you seen True Detective?
I tried to watch the first episode of season one, and I didn’t get into it at all.

writer of cokey dialogue loves cokey dialogue: news at 11
--Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl)

lol otm

xp it's kind of funny he says/thinks that (granted, he may be trolling to a certain degree) bc the only time critics just get a show's pilot is if the network is super unsure about it or if it's mad men. iirc the usual critic sample is between 3 and 6 episodes.

"Finally, the issue of white supremacy is being talked about and dealt with. And it’s what the movie’s about."

does anyone really want to hear QT of all people riff on this subject?

Most tv criticicism at this point is concurrent recaps of every episode. Several seasons of The Newsroom only got pillaged towards the end.

"So what is Hateful Eight saying about the 2010s?

I’m not trying to make Hateful Eight contemporary in any way, shape, or form. I’m just trying to tell my story. It gets to be a little too much when you try to do that, when you try to make a hippie Western or try to make a counterculture Western."

thats what will always make QT a dissappointment. him and PTA in a way. they have no interest in saying anything about the time we live in. maybe thats good in one sense. but its also just a bit empty, leading to movies that are great but dont resonate much beyond their own movie worlds.

other things i learned from that interview - QT's taste in modern movies and directors sucks. who is going to be watching american hustle in 20 years when they could be watching something from the actual 70s? but he is right about it follows at least.

Anything Else is one of his favorite films. So, y'know.

i suppose he did like afternoon delight at least (not that ive seen it) so at least his taste in modern films isnt totally confined to his director friends.

lol@at his comments about all those 'arty' cate blanchett films

him and PTA in a way. they have no interest in saying anything about the time we live in.

i think PTA absolutely does, but he has little to no interest in saying it in any direct fashion through stories taking place in the present time, other than in magnolia. but there will be blood and the master are both thematically relevant to aspects of modern society/politics/etc, especially the former

tarantino...not so much. (although i'm sure someone could and will make a case for the original hateful eight script being an on-the-nose allegory for modern ideological/racial conflict; i'm not entirely sure such a reading would hold up)

xpost

Is he friends with Woody? Even so, that doesn't even come close to justifying Anything Else as the best WA film since 1992, let alone one of the very best films in that time frame.

QT also an avowed fan of the Richard Gere remake of Breathless, iirc.

otm, also PTA's body of work is basically a continuous exploration of Southern California history. Even though it's not capital-T topical, on some level his films almost always tend to trace how we ended up where we are.

xp

I haven't seen Breathless 2.0 in 30+ years, but it WAS made by a talented guy, Jim McBride, so it must've had good stuff in it. Probably more discerning ppl would pick David Holzman's Diary tho.

I think the ending of Inherent Vice addresses the present by implication.

thats what will always make QT a dissappointment. him and PTA in a way. they have no interest in saying anything about the time we live in. maybe thats good in one sense. but its also just a bit empty, leading to movies that are great but dont resonate much beyond their own movie worlds.

― StillAdvance, 24. august 2015 12:48 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That was my problem with QT for a long time, but I think it's changed over the last decade. Inglourious Basterds is especially good at this, but Death Proof and Django Unchained tries this as well.

PTA definitely seems to want to do this, I think, I just don't think he has something very smart to say. Punch-Drunk Love still his best.

Be careful what you wish for, StillAdvance. I personally don't need to see Tarantino's Ferguson movie.

at the risk of being lazy (ive prob said this before somewhere), i think PTA doesnt have much to say that hasnt been said by earlier filmmakers he looks up to (who *did* say things about the eras they lived in). he might be looking at the past, in a way that allows you to trace LA or US history, but i think any historical movie would do this in some fashion, thats yknow, the point of looking at history! i dont expect him to come out with some franzen-esque script addressing Big Modern Issues (though yknow, WHY NOT?), but its just easier for someone like him and QT to go digging in the past than face the present.

idk man no one should address things the way franzen does, ever in the history of ever lol

i like franzen, though i hope the new one doesnt address his latest big issues like freedom did, where it was more about him addressing the issue than how he did do

*did so

I think both QT and PTA (love 'em or hate 'em) are very much about the present. I don't really understand the complaint here unless the what you are looking for very "on the nose" kind of filmmaking in which case yeah I guess they're maybe not your bag.

I think Tarantino's point in the interview is that movies (and Westerns especially) always end up being about the era in which they're made, and Hateful Eight will too. Just that he thinks self-defeating and unnecessary to try to make a Western that "reflects the era."

Is modern life not that inspiring?
No, it's not that. I would really like to do a movie set in the present. It just keeps working out that that’s not the case. I do feel that I need to do at least one more Western — I think you need to make three Westerns to call yourself a Western director. But it would be really great to do another movie where a TV’s on in the background, or somebody turns on a radio, and then I can score my scene that way, and then turn it off when I want the music to stop. Or they get into a car and drive for a while, and I can actually do a little montage of them driving to some cool song. That would be really great. I haven’t done that in a long time, and I’m really looking forward to it.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/how-quentin-tarantino-would-fix-it-follows.html

"In Django Unchained, the villains were slave owners. In Inglourious Basterds, they were Nazis. If you were to make a similar movie in 2015, who would the bad guys be?

Those two movies are very specific and kind of stand alone from the rest of my filmography, so that question is jumping from the assumption that it would be something cut into that mode. I think it would be something closer to either Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, or Pulp Fiction, or something even realer than that. "

he should have done a first nations/native american revenge movie.

though the lack of film industry interest in native american issues/history is pretty pathetic so i wouldnt bet on it.

Would love to see Tarantino's version of the Squanto story

Double crossing, slave trading, lots of blood

reading about the disney version, it just sounds like a 'good indian' story, about an indian who helps the settlers, until the ending at least. is wikipedia missing the righteous-vengeance part of the story?

Death Proof

My favorite (I think intentionally) conspicuous contemporary QT moment comes in Death Proof, when this self-consciously retro revenge car chase thriller morphs from time capsule '70s to a car chase on a busy road where every vehicle seems to be a modern suburban minivan. I only saw the movie once, but the one time I thought that bit was hilarious.

PTA's big films definitely seem more interested in "how we got here," though for sure some of his movies hover in this weird timeless purgatory a la QT. Like, when is Reservoir Dogs set? Pulp Fiction? Jackie Brown? Hard Eight? Punch Drunk Love? Magnolia? Doesn't really matter. They're stagey set-piece character studies first and foremost. Hated "Django," but "Basterds" was sort of brilliantly pomo in the way its sensibilities bounced around. I'm looking forward to more stuff like that, revisionist genre works twisted a bit by QT's perspective.

Kind of wish Tarantino would dip his toes back into TV a bit. Not as a writer or (barf) actor, but as a director of someone else's material. He's done that once or twice, right? Maybe an ER or something like that?

He did a two-part episode of CSI.

xpost ER and CSI. He'll only do acronymed shows.

He's hinted at moving over to TV once his tenth movie is done. Tarantino's Twin Peaks.

xpost - i think the reaction to DP made him retreat into safer genre stuff...

like, before that, QT was prob taking a few more risks

I don't know if Basterds or Django are safer, but they're definitely smarter. At least the former is.

another reason is that you wouldnt get someone like QT doing a native american venge-fest is that well, its just cooler and more acceptable to be doing films about jewish and african american atrocities, than it is NA ones (though thats perhaps for another thread)

smarter how?

Well, I really like the revisionism of "Basterds" as actual audacious revisionism. As in, they actually kill Hitler! Et al. Which, along with all the movie stuff, I think comments loudly about the role (or frequent role) of film as escapism and/or wish fulfillment, which of course is another aspect of revenge. It's pretty all tied together for me, though I haven't seen the movie in years. "Django" is much less smart. Dumb, even. But I think "Basterds" is the most complex and thoughtful thing he's done.

xpost

Never saw Django, but I think you're selling Basterds short. If you reduce it to premise alone (grindhouse movie about badass Jewish unit that kills Hitler), then, yeah, it seems easy and stupid, but in execution the movie had a lot more going on than that. It feels like half the movie doesn't even feature those guys! And it is filled with long, tense scenes with pretty unconventional rhythms.

I don't even really love Basterds, I just think that saying it's dumber/safer than, like, the Kill Bill movies seems weird to me.

Yeah, "Basterds" would have been largely the same san said Basterds, who were easily the weakest and most expendable link in the movie.

Even Kill Bill, the first one is just dumb fun, but the second one is much more complex and sensitive, iirc, which somewhat recontextualizes the first (which of course was not originally intended to be a first, just the first part of one epic).

maybe not safer or dumber, but def QT really out to crowd please more than ever. its like thats his great aim right now, or has been the last 2 films at least.

Django was dumb fan service. But Basterds is pretty weird and Death Proof challenging in its dullness alone. And kinda subversive, in the sense that the violent revenge aspect of the former is its least consequential, and the latter is overwhelmingly (iirc) four girls sitting around and talking. First Kill Bill was prob peak Tarantino crowd please. Probably also his most virtuoso filmmaking, though, so I can dig it. Shame he keep bsing about retirement, because I look forward to seeing what kind of movies really old QT starts to make. Kind of wild how not prolific the guy is, though. He seems like the sort of dude who would crank out films, a la almost all of his icons. Save Leone, I guess.

Despite some plot implausibilities, I enjoy Django more than Basterds tbh

One of my favorite scenes in Tarantino is when that girl in Death Proof gets an sms she's been waiting for, and it's outside and the music starts playing, and all of a sudden it's as if he's redoing Umbrellas of Cherbourg for a few seconds. Then it's back to badass, but I love the little islands of feelings he puts in there sometimes.

I think Django is both better and smarter than Basterds, but I enjoyed both.

the story of Squanto that's told in the 1491 book is insanely epic

he works for everyone and no one, he's like a triple agent, he crosses the Atlantic like 5 times, survives countless capture attempts, it's nuts

Django and Basterds would both be improved by someone with enough power to make Tarantino do some editing. I love Death Proof and one of the reasons is that he had to keep it relatively short and tight due to the double-feature structure.

Death Proof is probably my 2nd-favorite Tarantino movie (fave being Kill Bill Vol 1)

i dont know why he is so slow in making movies - i imagine he would be writing all the time, but maybe he is thinking of his legacy, or maybe the weinsteins want to maximise on the power of a QT film, so only want one every so often so they can really work it fully. though youd think he might do some smaller projects here and there too.

Eh who needs another Four Rooms.

yeah are people forgetting how shit is extra work was in the 90s?

he's smart to play to his strengths, write/direct his own material + make "event" movies