Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight"

one of those films where so much of what made it fresh and novel has been normalized that the stuff people DIDN'T bother to lift is often with good reason

Waltz doesn't bother me - he's cartoonish, sure, but he's hardly alone on that count, the general hamminess on display (with the notable exception of the only two virtuous main characters in the film) is part and parcel of the film's overall fairytale approach.

i like waltz but i also like imagining john malkovich planning to kill him for eating his lunch

haha true

QT can do realism + naturalistic dialogue, but IB isn't about that - it's operating in an explicitly unrealistic milieu of archetypes and wish fulfillment

i like ib more in hindsight but i still think it's a bummer tarantino has gone from an unpredictable mix of action-heavy and dialogue-heavy scenes - you never knew which the next would be - to long dialogue scenes directly leading to (if not outright discussing) the following action-heavy scenes. i have to assume he found his time-jump hijinks getting cliche but the alternative seems relatively leaden coming from him

i totally understand if people think his revenge flick period is overrated - at this point basically all well-known auteurs are "overrated" because the middlebrow audience is given so few directors with an aggressively authorial style - but i still think they're worthwhile

Rules of Attraction is a fantastic movie for this scene alone

It's also, funnily enough, the link between QT and BEE, since the director (Roger Avary) co-wrote Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Pulp Fiction, the first two uncredited. And the fact that they never worked together again is considered by some (including me) to be the main reason why QT has never bettered those early films.

is it that qt specifically needs roger avary or that qt needs a non-kiss-ass-if-still-obviously-beta collaborator

i'm with shakey, IB is the one.

for damn sure he bettered PF and RD and especially TR...and it happened when he based a movie on a novel.

IB is def my favorite

IB is best. Death Proof is also fairly underrated.

Christoph Waltz's terrible mugging ... Waltz can't perform without projecting how adorable he is

these qualities belong to the character. judging from other waltz performances (including django) they also belong to him, but qt's major talent area has always been casting.

i like the long takes tho. attendez la creme.

Did Waltz show any real acting range in the Tim Burton or Polanski films he did?

he was an absolute gargoyle in the burton movie, but i can't put that all on him.

like if you think he was unctuously over the top as an sadistic ss officer you should see him as an unsupportive husband

Four Rooms 4 lyfe yall

I'm not looking for range. His screen presence is tiresome.

I'd say his talent was casting, based on the appearance of Scrunchy Face, Waltz, and the insistence on casting himself.

callow glib frat-boy prince pretending to be a king is kind of the role scrunchy face was born to play too

not making any arguments for qt appearances though no.

destiny turns on the radio was on tv the other day. there's a movie from the 1990s.

waltz was excellent in IB but I think he was better in DU. Somewhat better as a good guy with murky motives than a delightful nazi.

though I think he'll be perfect for spectre

callow glib frat-boy prince pretending to be a king is kind of the role scrunchy face was born to play too

― playlists of pensive swift (difficult listening hour),

oh so you're not referring to Waltz

sweaty bigface is a blight on moviedom

the only time I've ever enjoyed him was Wolf of Wall St and even there it felt like he was just doing a Ray Liotta impression

The reaction to his recent films actually has me wondering if reservoir dogs would have gotten higher marks if told as a straight narrative - the tragic story of an undercover cop whose deal we knew from the get-go. Acquiring that straightforward narrative engine certainly hasn't cost him in terms of acclaim and audience

(xpost)

Fitting, as WoWS was a Goodfellas impression.

yeah the parallels are p obvious

i love pulp fiction but one time i flipped by it during the "if you had a pot belly, i would punch you in it" scene and man oh man is that not the one to flip by the movie during

― da croupier, Wednesday, October 14, 2015 1:01 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i hate this scene so much..fabienne is the nadir of tarantino's career, somehow even the characters that he plays himself cannot ever be as irritating as fabienne...

like just the way she says "blueberry pancakes" alone makes me want to event horizon myself

to make things more delicious, imagine QT playing Fabienne himself.

grindhouse has gotten this rep of deserved flop but it was one of the most enjoyable times at the theater i've had, pure glee, wes morris talked about wanting to cheer at the freeze frame on them hi-fiving after beating the shit out of kurt russell, that was exactly how i felt. think jackie brown and the kill bills are the only ones i could imagine deliberately wanting to watch anymore. i might watch true romance if i flipped past it on cable.

Rewatching KB a couple of years ago I was struck by just how well it is made. I think Tarantino is in some ways an underrated director, since so often it's the whole package of personality plus writer plus director that gets assessed. I think IB was immaculately directed as well, and after that Django was a huuuuuuuge disappointment. Just a weak script/theme/everything, and Waltz got on my nerves like nothing else.

RD stands up as an ur-indie sort of template, but I think PF and JB are both great as well, and really easy to rewatch. Grindhouse I enjoyed a lot - it's in my wheelhouse - but I recall being really disappointed by how not far the pair pushed the concept, especially RR. The trailers were all great, though, and got the idea across better than the movies.

grindhouse has gotten this rep of deserved flop but it was one of the most enjoyable times at the theater i've had, pure glee, wes morris talked about wanting to cheer at the freeze frame on them hi-fiving after beating the shit out of kurt russell, that was exactly how i felt. think jackie brown and the kill bills are the only ones i could imagine deliberately wanting to watch anymore. i might watch true romance if i flipped past it on cable.
--balls

grindhouse was def a really fun theatrical experience (saw it at midnight in college, incredibly drunk/stoned) that I can't imagine working well when watched at home and definitely didn't work when I watched the two movies as separate entities

Saw the back end of PF on one of the showtimes last night and was still pretty entertained. Travolta - who was only like 40! - seemed shockingly young and cocky to me now considering what an established post-comeback presence he was. A little like 90s LL Cool J.

that's a good comparison

haha that's a gear comparison

one of my major problems with PF, aside from its overall slapped-together feel, is the casting - I just can't really get with Travolta or Bruce Willis

maybe tarantino is Not For You.

PF is his only movie with those jackasses, and PF is his only movie where it's themes are needlessly muddled and obscured in the service of what I'm not sure exactly

his other stuff (minus Django) I love unreservedly to varying degrees

it seems weird that that bit of stunt casting bothers you and none of the other bits of stunt casting

i am still trying to parse this:

at this point basically all well-known auteurs are "overrated" because the middlebrow audience is given so few directors with an aggressively authorial style

― da croupier, Wednesday, October 14, 2015 5:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

<3 tarantino though, like i spent years thinking 'man nah just a director for teenagers' and then i watched a buncha stuff again and huh, there is more there there than i thought

it's not the stunt casting, it's the actual actors. I just don't like watching them.

I actually think they're both really well cast in that movie, but I can definitely see how what came after could cause someone to get exhausted watching them again in anything.

bruce willis isn't great there though his performance matches the script (i remember chris fujiwara writing the smartest thing about tarantino playing w/ the timeline is it lets him out the best parts of the movie at the beginning and the end), it feels as phony as that whole segment.. travolta's fantastic though, it's a shame that (w/ the exception of get shorty) after this he either was this corny dadrock hip good guy (literally an angel that smokes at one point) or a corny dad sunglasses hip bad guy. in fever and grease and even pulp fiction he was this dumb palooka a little in over his head w/ some girl just barely out of his class and playing it cool was how he got over. pulp fiction is like the beatles or "smells like teen spirit", any enjoyment i get now is tied to nostalgia or maybe noticing something i hadn't noticed before or had forgotten.

how is bruce willis stunt casting?
bruce willis is basically great in everything he does.

i am still trying to parse this:

at this point basically all well-known auteurs are "overrated" because the middlebrow audience is given so few directors with an aggressively authorial style

― da croupier, Wednesday, October 14, 2015 5:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

had a long embellishment written and then realized i don't actually know what your problem is with what i said so i'll wait and see if i find out

xpost bruce willis' stature in 1994 was pretty terrible (the same year he made North and Color Of Night) - this movie basically started the theory that "bald bruce means its a good movie" which worked for almost a decade

I haven't liked Bruce Willis in anything since a handful of Moonlighting episodes, sorry. (this is well travelled ground here)