Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight"

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)

http://www.toonarific.com/pics_root//00000576/brunothekidlogo.jpg

O____O

how

how was i unaware

I think this came up when Die Hard won the action movie poll but I can't find the thread

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.

I was gonna disagree with this but looking at his filmography there's literally not a single movie after pulp fiction where travolta is the correct casting decision. probably the most stellar example of an actually very good performer moving away from what made him legend in a bid for middlebrow.

willis was great in PF and only in recent years has he started to really mail it in half the time. His heart only seems to be in it when he does something like moonrise kingdom.

are you basing this on an appreciation of his work in films like striking distance and the jackal or did you just forget he made striking distance and the jackal

https://thedissolve.com/features/forgotbusters/939-a-1996-double-feature-looks-at-the-year-of-john-tr/

These days, Travolta’s personal and professional career, not to mention his religious and sexual lives, emit an enduring trainwreck fascination. But in the aftermath of his career-resurrecting performance in 1994’s Pulp Fiction, and the success of 1995’s Get Shorty, Travolta was so popular, he starred in no fewer than three of the 20 top-grossing films of 1996: Michael, Phenomenon, and Broken Arrow. Yes, there was a time when Travolta’s name in the credits actually encouraged audiences to see a film, when they assumed any film with him in a starring role must be worth seeing. It’s a testament to how popular he was in the mid-1990s that audiences paid good money to see, in Phenomenon and Michael, variations on the same sub-mediocre movie.

those movies are horrible but I don't think he was mailing it in, I mean perhaps a bit but not in the sense that you could tell he'd rather be doing something else. I mean he was napping during the action scenes in die hard 5 iirc

i definitely agree he's found new lows but dude was never exactly a reliable fount of inspiration

remember when the summer of 1994 was supposed to be about the racy, adult, and innovative Color of Night?

that that is the only richard rush movie since The Stunt Man boggles my mind

I remember the ads were all "from acclaimed director richard rush"

Related, I remember when Natural Born Killers opened and Tarantino said he was more excited to see Color of Night opening the same day.

I have a memory of Siskel and Ebert having a ball ripping this one to shreds

here it is. And they review Killing Zoe!

http://siskelandebert.org/video/54AOBG19GSHO/Color-of-Night--Killing-Zoe--Andre-1994

rewatching some moonlighting was really eye-opening cuz you can see how he delivered the "bill murray type" they wanted. hard for me to remember sometimes that die hard (the film where we learned a bill murray type could fire an automatic gun while swinging on a rope) came AFTER The Return of Bruno - he hadn't even had a blockbuster movie before he was showing stunning levels of hubris. pretty much from the beginning bruce let filmmakers know that his attention on set was a privilege, not a right. it's not really that recently stopped trying so much as he can't even be bothered to look self-impressed anymore.

bruce let filmmakers know that his attention on set was a privilege, not a right

this comes through in his nonstop smugness on-screen, I really don't like watching it. He's never been in a great movie imo (he has been in some decent-to-very-good ones, which were usually good in spite of him, incl Moonrise Kingdom)

That's partly why he's effective in Nobody's Fool: the smugness gets punctured (who wouldn't leave Bruce Willis to fuck Paul Newman?).

Willis is a true asset and not it's-all-about-me in, say, Mortal Thoughts, Death Becomes Her, Breakfast of Champions.

he's fine in The Sixth Sense too when we remembered his baldness.

eh I'm not watching that

http://wondergressive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/shrug.jpg

It just occurred to me that there were two movies prior to PF that featured both Travolta and Willis.

iirc sidney lumet said brando had a test where he'd give two similar takes to a director early on and if the director didn't notice some key magical difference brando would consider them a rube and not even bother for the rest of the shoot. it would seem like willis might have a similar philosophy but the implication then is that m night shyamalan noticed the difference.

Alfred otm re Nobody's Fool.

yeah i guess i was being a bit hyerbolic. willis isn't always great. i guess i've skipped a lot of his big action movies and seen more of this "character" roles in smaller films, in which he's usually quite charming.