The Hateful Eight (3/5 Stars)

Given the huge deal Quentin Tarantino, the writer/director of The Hateful Eight, made about his once-in-a-lifetime roadshow, particular aspects are decidedly underwhelming. Take for instance the promise of the movie being shot in Panavision Super 70 mm filmstock. Tarantino gushed about how it was the largest widescreen format that ever existed and that it had not been in use since the 1950’s and 1960’s for such epics like “Ben Hur” and “Cleopatra.” Well, that is wonderful if the vast majority of The Hateful Eight’s three hour run time had not taken place within a single room. This movie is no epic. So I guess its cool that he used that obsolete film stock but he sure did not need to. Or take for instance the presence of additional footage in the movie. Given that the movie is almost entirely composed of people talking in rooms, I’m not sure this movie needed more of that. In fact it probably would have been better with less. It had a new Ennio Morricone score and that’s cool because Morricone made the best Western scores of the 1960s, but this score is not as good as those old scores. The program was pretty cool except that the movie was not a timeless masterpiece so I doubt it will be a piece of memorabilia in great demand.

“The Hateful Eight” for all its grandiose presentation is decidedly a small movie. A bounty hunter named John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is taking a prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang in the near town of Red Rock. His carriage picks up two more passengers, another bounty hunter named the Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and the supposed new sheriff of Red Rock, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). There is a blizzard that will intercept them on their journey so they decide to wait it out at Minnie’s Haberdashery. They do not find Minnie at the Haberdashery. Instead they find Senor Bob (Demian Bichir) looking after the place, Oswaldo Mobray the supposed hangman (Tim Roth), General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) an ex-Confederate officer searching for his son, and Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) who is in town to visit his mother. John Ruth makes the splendid observation that one of these men is not who they say they are. Minnie’s Haberdashery is composed of a bar, a kitchen, a general store, several beds and a place to sit by the fire, but it is all one room. The blizzard sets in and everybody waits for shit to start happening.

It takes awhile. By my count it takes about an hour and a half, which in my humble opinion is too long. Most of that time is exposition, that is to say it is people talking about what other people have done in the past. Something along the lines of one character saying to another, “Don’t you know who this so-and-so is, they did some crazy shit during the war.” I wrote about this sort of thing earlier in my “Steve Jobs” review. Movies are a show not tell medium. Lots of scenes where people talk about what happened in the past are more appropriate in the play medium where it is necessitated by the lack of ability to go all over the place but rendered harmless by the immediacy of the action. “The Hateful Eight” would probably make a great play. Very little would have to be changed. As a movie it can be, from time to time, <ahem> boring. There I said it. Boring, especially during the first half. It also does not help that Tarantino, though admittedly funny and cool, is not as funny and cool as he thinks he is. Some of the look at me funny and cool lines fell flat because the movie had not yet become cool or funny enough for them.

In the meantime and through to the end there is plenty of use of the word nigger and a lot of punching the woman in the face. We can take these one at a time because Tarantino does interesting things with the first one and not so interesting things with the second.

It is fair to say that the cinematic relationship between Samuel L. Jackson and Quentin Tarantino is a special one that does something more than simply transcend the race line. For other white writer/directors it is simply enough to make a sympathetic black character that has a rounded personality and isn’t merely an appendage to the white people. Jackson and Tarantino do more than that. They create black characters in the midst of terrible racism that are also complicated to the point of being bad men themselves. It is tough to be a despicable black character when everybody else in the movie is calling nigger. In this movie, we are drawn preternaturally to Major Marquis Warren’s side because he is the ultimate underdog, the one black guy in Wyoming. We judge the goodness and badness of the other characters by how they treat him. If they have respect for him, like John Ruth, he is a good guy. If they do not, like everybody else, they are not good guys. The most interesting thing about this movie is that by the mid way point, the audience may start wondering whether Major Marquis Warren is somebody to cheer for at all. Samuel L. Jackson has I believe only been nominated for one Oscar (Pulp Fiction). I believed he should have won for Django Unchained. If he is nominated for this movie, it can be said it was deserved. He is the reason why the movie should be watched at all.

Now for the gratuitous violence done towards the woman in the story, Daisy Domergue. She is a course rude bitch with a mouth on her. In the past she has murdered people and she deserves to be hanged. For as much insight Tarantino has had about the history of race relations, he shows a general lack of knowledge about the history of women. I have not yet heard of a 19^th century (or before) story about a woman like Daisy Domergue. Nor am I likely too because no such woman or very few of them have ever existed. Tarantino has this false notion that feminism in movies consists of giving a woman a weapon (gun or sword or kung fu) and having them kick ass. It does not work that way. You see women are physically weaker than men. At some point it does not matter how good at kung fu they are. They will generally lose battles to guys who have 50 or 100 pounds on them. The astute feminist screenwriter will then give their female characters what historical women have always had, shrewdness and wiles. They will not simply make them another man. When Tarantino made “Django Unchained” he paid attention to the psychology of a slave. Jamie Foxx did not just start out badass and plucky. He had to be rehabilitated from a society that would inflict physical and psychological harm on him if he did anything out of line. When making a historical period piece about a woman it should be required that their respective psychology is taken into account because women were subject to societal pressures as well. Tarantino ignores this and his reason for doing so is to make it okay for this particular woman to be punched in the face a bunch. That is to say he has made this particular woman more of a rotten bitch than she historically has any sense in being and he did it in order to make it okay for terrible things to be done to her.

I remember there was a time when Tarantino’s movies were violent but not as violent as people thought they were. When I watched the DVD extras of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, a big deal was made by how the violence merely felt gratuitously violent because of superior moviemaking. Like in Reservoir Dogs you don’t actually see the ear being cut off, or in Pulp Fiction the samurai cut is below the screen. Contrast that with Tarantino’s last several films where the blood being spilt is generally more extreme than what it would be in real life. One could reasonably question whether if say someone blew off someone else’s head three or four feet away from Jennifer Jason Leigh would she really be splattered with that much blood and brains? I doubt it and I’m pretty sure it is in there less for realism and more because Tarantino wanted to see a woman’s face splattered with blood and brains. It sure makes one question about early Tarantino’s professions of not being as violent as people said he was. As soon as he got a decent budget to splatter blood all over the screen he went whole hog.

Nebraska (3/5 Stars)

I’m not entirely sure what Writer Bob Nelson's and Director Alexandar Payne’s relationship with the north middle of the country is, but they sure don’t seem at all impressed with it. For example, the film is shot in black and white but this doesn’t have anything to do with a particularly dark plot or mood. Instead it seems to be a judgment on the location of the movie, the empty spaces and depressed towns between Billings, Montana and Lincoln, Nebraska. It’s like Payne didn’t think they deserved color. Nothing is going on so you might as well not try to liven it up.

“Nebraska,” is a comedy and as the comedy it is trying to be it is perfect. The little hitch is that it is attempting to satirize sparseness and boredom and even a perfect satire of such subjects will invariably move slow and contain fewer jokes than the usual comedy. We are treated several times to scenes of people drinking beer, watching TV, or both. This reviewer finds that such scenes lend an odd feeling of unaccomplishment. The characters are doing exactly what I myself am doing while watching it. 

At times though the movie rises from its slumber to deliver some really good material. My favorite involves the introduction of Woody Grant's overweight nephews, Bart and Cole to his son David, played by Will Forte. David is not the most successful man in the world and sheepishly explains that he only sells stereo equipment in Billings. The nephews don’t respond because they don’t have jobs. After an awkward pause, Woody’s brother speaks up. "Bart here did some jail time.” Such is the excitement in ‘Nebraska’ where nothing happens, everyone is unemployed and overweight, and alcoholism is rampant because, fuck it, what else is there to do. In the end though, this is what keeps ‘Nebraska’ from being a ‘must-see’ movie. That is unless you are actually from Nebraska, than I guess you would have to see it because, I guess, what other movie is set in Nebraska. Then I suspect the people in the middle of the country would hate this movie. I remember raving about "Fargo" once to someone from North Dakota only to find out that everyone there despised the movie's portrayal of their accents. This movie may work the same way, though I suspect the people who deliberately left the place for greener pastures may absolutely love it. 

The plot is set in motion when the octogenerian of the family, Woody Grant, gets it in his head that he won a million dollars in a sweepstakes competition. He can’t drive and he won’t trust public transportation so he attempts to walk to Lincoln, Nebraska where the company is located. His sons, David and Ross, played by Bob Odenkirk, try to explain to him that the newsletter is a complete scam meant to sell magazine subscriptions. “I didn’t even know they still did this,” David states. He’s right. I haven’t seen one of those ‘You may have already won a million dollar’ junk mail letters in about a decade. Nothing will dissuade Woody though from setting out time and again on foot and in bad weather. 

David finally agrees to drive Woody to Nebraska because the man is really old and doesn’t have anything else going for him. A pit stop in Woody's old hometown becomes a much longer detour. Father and son walk around and take a look at the old haunts. Everything is changed and nobody recognizes Woody. Except at the bar. People recognize Woody at the bar. Woody tells everyone in the town that he has won a million dollars and for some incredibly odd reason everybody believes him.

Here, Payne’s satire of Middle America perhaps becomes too mean. It may be a little too much to believe that everyone believes Woody’s story about winning the lottery, even after his sons try to explain that it is all just a scam, but these apparently are really desperate people living in really quiet desperation. The family descends on Woody complaining about how his alcoholism cost them money over the years and demanding that they get a share of the winnings. They won’t take any talk of a scam for an answer. Everyone really really needs the money.

The performances are great, and especially noteworthy because they represent some of the finest performances in several careers, one of which is an especially long career. That would be Bruce Dern, who at 77 years old, is in his first lead role in a good movie for the first time. His Woody Grant is a alcoholic mess of well-meaning dementia. Dern does a particularly good job of seamlessly interweaving Grant’s lucid moments in with his delusions so they really seem like they are coming from the same very old person. We learn a lot about Woody Grant in this movie and by the end you sort of hope he gets his money, not for him but for what he wants to do with it. Will Forte does a great job as well in the thankless task of the straight man holding together a cast of crazy characters. Will is mainly known for comedy, notably SNL and 30 Rock, and is yet another example of a comedian ably putting together a dramatic performance. Then there is Bob Odenkirk, who has done better things (Mr. Show, Breaking Bad) but is always a delight to see on screen in any incarnation. Final mention of the two nephews played by Tim Driscroll and Devin Ratray. They gather some of the best laughs by just sitting next to each other and grinning. It's good stuff.

I expect the Academy will love this movie way out of proportion because it is about an old white person, which coincidentally is the majority demographic of the Academy. I bet they all like it even more because it is in black and white even though there is no particular reason for it. The last movie Alexander Payne made about an old white person was “The Descendants.” That won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, which was just a really terrible thing to happen. I have the sneaking suspicion that the writing for this one will be similarly nominated. It’s good writing, but it’s not great because it can't be. There isn't the ambition that is generally needed to make the writing great. Here’s hoping that it at least won’t win anything.