By: Declan Hertel Entertainment Editor
I love Westerns. I love the films of Quentin Tarantino. I love comic ultraviolence. I love snappy, stylized dialogue. I love single-setting stories. I love Tim Roth.
What I’m getting at is I knew I was going to love this movie before I set foot anywhere near the theatre. And boy howdy, did I.
Tarantino’s latest film brings us Minnie’s Haberdashery, a small cabin in the mountains of Wyoming, where two bounty hunters, a wanted woman, and the soon-to-be sheriff of Red Rock, WY, hole up with four other strange and seedy characters to wait out a blizzard. As everyone is locked inside, it becomes clear that not everyone is really a stranger to everyone else, and that some of them may be working toward some hidden agenda. Unraveling the mystery is the three hours’ traffic of the silver screen, and it is just freaking fantastic.
“The Hateful Eight” features a cast full of multiple-movie Tarantino collaborators, notably Samuel L. Jackson (“Pulp Fiction”) and “Reservoir Dogs” alums Michael Madsen and Tim Roth. I love when directors develop a cadre of actors: as they become more and more in tune with each other’s style and vision, it turns the process into one creative whole, rather than trying to herd a lot of disparate people toward a nebulous end. “The Hateful Eight” shines for this reason: the majority of the cast has worked with Tarantino before, several of them many times, and this camaraderie allows everyone to understand what they’re working toward and make it great.
I mentioned this in the opening, but it bears repeating: this film is really, really gory, even for a Tarantino film. If it’s likely to result in a shower of blood and viscera, someone probably does it to someone else during “The Hateful Eight.” Sure, ninety percent is played for laughs, but it’s seriously intense.
I’d also like to address one of the oddest criticisms of this movie that I have been seeing consistently: that it is boring. I have seen the word ‘boring’ used to describe this movie. This is completely unbelievable to me: if you found “The Hateful Eight” boring, I want to know what a tremendously exciting life you must lead to be bored by this film. This film is engaging, exciting, and excellent, and I think you ought to see it.
Now, in true Tarantino style, I’d like to go on a tangent: please, for the love of art, take every review you read with a grain of salt, especially negative reviews. People have vastly different tastes in art, and any review is just that one person’s opinion. Don’t take anyone’s word as gospel. I loved this movie. You may not. I have hated movies you may love. The point is that this is all just my opinion and my interpretation. And because you and I, dear reader, are not the same person, we will likely differ somewhat in our opinions. That’s part of what makes art beautiful: it may not speak to everyone, but for those it does speak to, there’s nothing better.
