The Hateful Eight Review

In the middle of a blizzard, eight men and one female prisoner hole up in a cabin on a mountain to wait for the snowstorm to pass. Bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is transporting prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock when he picks up Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and Red Rock’s incoming new sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Arriving at Minnie’s Haberdashery, they meet four other men, some of which may or not be working with Daisy to help her escape.

Tarantino clearly doesn't give a flying f**k if you don't like the language in his movies. Most of his characters are pretty nasty bastards, so they're going to talk like bastards. Don't see The Hateful Eight if you aren’t prepared to hear a screenplay full of b***hes and n****rs as every character dispenses with politeness and splashes racist and misogynist abuse up the walls, like Tarantino splashes brains.

Therefore, fans of Tarantino will undoubtedly love this. It's talky, it's chronology gets twisted, it's divided into six titled chapters, has opening credits written in big garish yellow letters and its full of sadistic characters just itching to draw buckets of blood from each other. Respect must go to The Walking Dead's Greg Nicotero for providing the brains and bloodshed.

The Hateful Eight has six great performances, and despite spending most of the film being defiant in the face of frequent beatings, it is Jennifer Jason Leigh who is undoubtedly the standout when she finally gets let off the chain (literally). Samuel L. Jackson gets the best monologues, but Tim Roth and Walter Goggins share the big laughs that Leigh hasn't already walked off with.

The Hateful Eight's ace up its sleeve is not its late-in-the-game Channing Tatum appearance but its post-civil war setting. It's characters are all torn apart by the recent history of America's internal struggle. That's what makes what goes down in Minnie's Haberdashery so strangely topical, even with its period setting. The Hateful Eight are divided by politics, race, gender and who holds the guns and who doesn’t.The cabin is full of resentments and suspicion that still spill onto the streets of America every day.

It’s not just the 70mm widescreen that gives the characters space to develop and get a turn at grandstanding. It’s also the three hour running time. Deliberately paced, wonderfully scored by Ennio Morricone and packed with suspense and surprise, The Hateful Eight is Tarantino both staging a bit of a Reservoir Dogs reunion and therefore back to his roots, and also a showcase for how far he’s come as a filmmaker. See it for its range of colourful characters, even if the script sometimes sounds a little like it's been written by a teenager who’s just discovered some very nasty words.

Before The Hateful Eight: A Quentin Tarantino Retrospective

Before The Hateful Eight: A Quentin Tarantino Retrospective

No director in recent history deserves his name to become an adjective as much as Quentin Tarantino. One of the most controversial figures of modern American film emerged from video store geek to Sundance sensation with his both unique and familiar take on the crime film, and immediately ‘Tarantino-esque’ was coined as an exciting way to describe a slew of (often less than exciting) imitators influenced by the new director. Now Tarantino is back with what promises to be a bit of a return to his roots with The Hateful Eight looking a bit like a Western version of Reservoir Dogs.

Dabbling in genres from samurai and kung-fu flicks to historical war films, Tarantino has a definite style, numerous trademarks and a love of cult cinema that shines through in every screenplay. A writer and director often criticised for the levels of violence in his films, he is an auteur unafraid to court controversy. From sadistic bank robbers to sadistic Nazis, Tarantino’s movie worlds are littered with low-life scumbags that make life miserable for other characters.

Tarantino has been known to divide critics, filmmakers and audiences with his vicious violence, repeated racial epithets and the odd accusation of style over substance. Spike Lee called him ‘infatuated’ with the ‘N’ word after its regular use in Jackie Brown (1997) and notable uses in his previous two films. The BBFC decided to pass Reservoir Dogs (1992) uncut but only after much debate over an infamous torture scene. His later films like Death Proof (2007) and Inglourious Basterds (2009) have received somewhat less critical adulation than his earlier, more startling and fiercely independent works.

Reservoir Dogs, released in 1992 is the genre defying debut of an ambitious young video store geek burning to show his skills as both writer and director. It features a cool cast including Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth and Steve Buscemi, buckets of blood and in the middle of it all; joker Michael Madsen dancing, ear slicing and ensuring the film a place in cinematic history. Inspired by the likes of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and its colour coded criminal names, Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) and its fractured narrative structure and from further afield Ringo Lam’s City of Fire (1987), whose final act it virtually steals wholesale; it breaks the fundamental convention of a heist film. By barely showing the actual robbery and only the fallout, it focuses on characters including Tim Roth’s undercover cop and Madsen’s cold blooded psychopath and fizzes with energy, wit and bloody sadistic violence.

Only two years later, Tarantino returned with Pulp Fiction (1994), his undisputed masterpiece. Borrowing liberally from French New Wave influences such as the films of Godard and Truffaut and telling three stories linked only by gangster Marcellus Wallace, it is a tour de force of film making; stylish, sexy, swear-y and sickening. Samuel L. Jackson makes his first appearance in a Tarantino film beginning a long collaboration that continues today. Never has Tarantino’s dialogue flowed as richly as between the similarly clad gangsters to Reservoir Dogs' characters, Jules and Vincent. And never have Tarantino’s monologues been so juicily delivered as Samuel L. Jackson’s iconic delivery of Ezekiel 25:17. The non-linear narrative, brutal violence and chapter titles crystallised, confirming Tarantino as a unique director, borrowing continually from his cinematic heroes and creating memorable and original works of crime fiction.

He then adapted Elmore Leonard’s novel Jackie Brown into an infinitely more mature, but less stylish and snappily scripted homage to Blaxploitation films of the 70s. It bears all the marks of a director comfortable in his new shoes as the king of independent cinema, constantly imitated but never bettered. There is less showing off here; no memorable monologues, a mostly linear structure and a move away from the regular appearances of Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, and Steve Buscemi that had featured in Tarantino’s films so far. Pam Grier, Robert Forster and Robert De Niro all appear with Samuel L. Jackson returning as another ruthless criminal. It may bear less of the Tarantino-esque trademarks but it still stands as a classic crime caper, clever and assured filmmaking, and a wonderful homage to films that influenced Tarantino.

Kill Bill Volumes 1&2 (2003 and 2004) are the first of Tarantino's foolishly split double bills. Originally meant to be one film, a decision was made by Tarantino with most likely a great deal of input from Harvey Weinstein to cut the film down the middle and unfortunately turned one roaring rampage of revenge into two volumes that decreased in quality as a result. Kill Bill Vol. 3 might be alive and possible according to the most recent reports, no doubt due to the original films having a lot of fans with their samurai-flavoured, Shaw brothers inspired bloodletting. Owing a considerable debt to Lady Snowblood (1973) which provides a template for The Bride’s story of vengeance, it is filled with references to little known kung-fu films and proved that Tarantino was a director as comfortable with fight scenes as with dialogue. The pair of films also marked his second collaboration with his muse Uma Thurman after her iconic part as Marcellus Wallace’s moll in Pulp Fiction.

If Tarantino’s career could be divided up into chapters like one of his films, there would certainly be a chapter called “The Rodriguez Situation”. Best buddies Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez joined forces on iffy anthology Four Rooms (1995), directing separate episodes in the odd collection of stories centring on Tim Roth’s hotel bellhop. Tarantino later guest directed a scene in Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005) before the pair officially collaborated on their Grindhouse (2007) double feature, directing one film each to be marketed and screened as one cinematic experience.

Tarantino’s Death Proof suffered in comparison next to the gloriously gory thrills of Rodriguez’s Planet Terror but still has Kurt Russell as a stunt driving psycho and a fierce car chase that puts stunt woman Zoe Bell (Uma’s stunt double in Kill Bill) right where she belongs; wriggling around on the bonnet of a speeding car being slammed by Kurt Russell's death machine. Death Proof deserves the style over substance accusation of many of Tarantino’s films but the physically scratched image is wonderfully grimy and though it is completely chronological, it still features plenty of typically Tarantino-esque dialogue. Americans got to see the double bill as intended complete with fake trailers in the middle. However Britain got shafted again by the money men with another terrible decision to release both films separately.

Inglourious Basterds was a serious return to form for Tarantino. It is another blood thirsty tale of revenge and the first of what could potentially become his historical trilogy. Mixing biggest-star-in-the-world Brad Pitt with up-and-coming actors like Michael Fassbender and introducing English speaking audiences to the majesty of Christoph Waltz, it is possibly Tarantino’s most brutal and bonkers creation. Waltz’s Colonel Landa is another of Tarantino’s ingenious creations, a smooth-talking sadist who is as comic as he is hideous, almost as over the top as the astonishingly violent cinema-set climax. Nazi’s hunt Jews, Jews hunt Nazi’s and Hitler appears only long enough for Tarantino to completely rewrite the history books.

Django Unchained is a typically brutal and sadistic look at slavery in the South. Samuel L. Jackson reappears, Tarantino takes another small role as in many of his previous films, and Leonardo DiCaprio joins Tarantino’s memorable list of sick and twisted nasty bastards. It's a tough watch; both funny, cathartic and occasionally unbearable.

Untouchable Tarantino can work with anybody he chooses. From the moment he caught Keitel for Reservoir Dogs to snatching John Travolta and Bruce Willis (at career low points) in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino has a knack for canny casting. His collaborations with Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman and most recently Christoph Waltz have proved that he is a dream director to work for, despite apparently strangling Diane Kruger on the set of Inglourious Basterds. Ticking off two of the biggest and best males stars in Pitt and DiCaprio, he has confirmed that he and Johnny Depp wish to work together one day in the future. Promising to retire at 60 after a couple more films, we must savour every drop of Tarantino that he has to offer, with or without Depp.

So what is Tarantino-esque and why has it become such a commonly used word for cool characters, cooler dialogue and quality filmmaking; both cult-inspired and mainstream-influencing? His soundtracks are slick hand-picked play lists; his casts revive the careers of has-beens and introduce bright new stars and his ripping off of obscure cult cinema creates fitting homage to little seen movies. His worlds are filled with furious revenge fantasies, sadistic violence and shot through with distinctive style. From out-of-the-trunk-of-car shots, non-linear narratives, occasional uses of black and white to his foot fetish and corpse eye view shots, Tarantino is recognizable from his films' stylistic flourishes as much as his monologues and often dazzling dialogue. His influences are many; he is a cinematic magpie, taking from what he pleases, unchained by genre conventions and creating something new from the old. His impending retirement is just another reason to revisit his cinematic oeuvre ahead of The Hateful Eight’s UK release on 8^th January 2016.

Second-Hand Stories, Second-Hand Opinions

CAUTION: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS, ELEMENTS OF SATIRE AND VILLAINS IN SWIVELLY CHAIRS

A young hero, uncertain of his abilities, is one day convinced that he is serving the wrong masters and beliefs. His saviour from servitude is a woman of high status, perhaps even a princess, who leads him into the tutelage or protection of a wise figure, often male, who leads from the front. On the way, they acquire sidekicks who provide comedy through their selfish actions. They will also meet someone who competes for the princess’ attentions. There will also be an oracular figure, retired from the Great Fight , who does not believe that the hero is spiritually ready for his journey. At some point, the older male wisdom figure will sacrifice himself to protect the hero. This gives the young hero the impetus needed to face the Big Bad. But it turns out that the Big Bad is not so different from the hero, and is really just in the service of a Bigger Bad in a Big (Often Swivelly) Chair.

What movie am I talking about? Is it Star Wars? Is it The Matrix? Am I maybe talking about the Legend of King Arthur? Hell, even Austin Powers fulfils many of these criteria quite knowingly.

Actually, I’m talking about all and none of them. What I’m really doing is gearing up to troll people’s glib opinions about the film Avatar, a perfectly well-executed movie that it’s just oh-so-fashionable to hate because – drumroll please … “It’s just Pocahontas / Dances with Wolves / Ferngully in Space, and that makes it awful!”

 

… and then of course I ask the utterer specific questions about those three films and they blush because they’ve never even bloody seen a single one of them. Yes, the story of Avatar is recycled – but so is the story of any of your favourite big event movies. 

What’s genuinely criminal is that the above opinion is recycled. You heard some beard-stroking, pretentious pseudo-intellectual say it and now you parrot it to bask in the reflected cleverness.

But you are not clever. It took the fact that they are both set in a jungle / primitive wilderness for you to recognise it was the same story, and you utterly failed to notice that all these other ‘wildly original and creative films’ are the same story wearing a selection of different suits.

Is a Ferrari rubbish because it has four wheels and so does a Lada? No. It has its own specific set of merits and faults; so does Avatar. Over at Indiewire you will see how we pre-judged Avatar by its faintest resemblance to other movies and began deriding it before we even saw it. So… if a film is rubbish because it resembles another in some way, doesn’t it mean that those ten films all resemble eachother too and are thus utter garbage? Including Return of The King and District 9? If you must judge a film, judge it by its own strengths and weakness. Glib comparisons are a poor shortcut to actual thinking, and it’s an embarrassment to everyone with their own individual taste and judgment –which are easily perverted by popular opinion as I will cover in the section Cultural Edifice Complex later.

Of course you are likely to be scratching your head and saying, “hang on – how the hell is The Matrix the same as Star Wars? And how does Austin Powers fit in here?” The more astute and well-versed movie-nerds among you may even be guffawing at my omission of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress – the movie which George Lucas openly admits he stole the entire basic plotline of Star Wars from. Neither of those films is particularly dreadful, by the way.

There are so many comparisons and parallels that this article could take forever, so I’ll tackle the basic ones.

Let’s look at the heroes first. In Avatar, Jake Sully has lost his legs and also bought into the belief that he is as dumb as a sack of bricks. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is crippled by his Aunt and Uncle’s insistence that he stay behind and help with the harvest.

What are they both doing? Well, Sully serves an evil military industrial complex and soon learns that a bunch of fiercely independent tribes-people of a different race have a ‘better world-view’. Luke whines that he wants to join the fleet academy, an organisation run by the evil Galactic Empire. But, of course, he ends up with the Rebel Alliance – a collection of fiercely independent different races.

Austin Powers doubts his mojo (the Force, but for sex?) and, considering how values have changed, doubts he is serving the rights organisation . Anderson / Neo in The Matrix leads an equally dreary existence serving a mean-spirited software firm.

All of them, eventually, are contacted by a woman of high status (Leaia, Netyri, Yuki, Trinity)who leads them away. Of course, all the Big Bads in Swivelly Chairs play on these insecurities during the denouement of each story.

Sully meets Dr Grace Augustine – a wise, older woman with a confrontational streak who tries to teach him the ‘right way’. Morpheus is the wise older man with a confrontational streak who frees Neo’s mind. Obi-Wan Kenobi, General Makabe, Merlin … you get the picture, right? Oh, yeah, they all either come under threat or die to help the hero mature. Kenobi lets Vader destroy his mortal body. Morpheus throws himself into Agent Smith’s path to save Neo. Pocahontas’ father is shot at by Ratcliffe. It’s all the same junk.

Figures senior to the martial wise man, such as Yoda or the Oracle from The Matrix, dismiss the hero’s ability and becomes a boundary.

Neo becomes more machine-like, and Smith becomes more human. Vader is Luke’s dad, and still has good within him, whereas Luke brushes with the Dark Side in their final duel. Colonel Quaritch has strong loyalty and duty motives to mankind, much like Sully’s acquired motives toward the Na’vi. As Dr Evil says to Austin Powers, “we’re not so different you and I.” Having struggled against Number Two, Powers faces Dr Evil, at which point Number Two refuses to kill Powers. Vader refuses to kill Luke. Smith cannot kill Neo but must instead become one with him. The Ultimate Swivel Chair Baddies – The Architect, Emperor Palpatine, Parker Selfridge, Governor Ratcliffe, Jaffar from Aladdin for heaven’s sake … all of them rule primarily through sinister intellect and social authority rather than naked force. It’s all eerily similar.

 

 The more I think about it, the more films look the same. In Robocop, an ordinary man undergoes a transformation that gives him superhuman powers, breaks from the directives of his makers when reminded of who he really is by a woman, and faces off against a Big Bad who is backed by a Bigger Bad in a Swivelly Chair. A few years later, Verhoeven made Total Recall, a film in which –wait for it – an ordinary man undergoes a transformation to a superhuman agent, runs into a woman called Melina who shows him the truth way and introduces him to Quatto, your all-in-one wiseman and oracle figure. Along the way he fights a Big Bad who is backed by a Bigger Bad in a Swivelly Chair. In both films, the swivel chaired mastermind is played by Ronnie Cox! To make things even better, both the Big Bads are balding and … holy shit! In Return of the Jedi, when Vader’s mask is removed … HE’S BALD AS WELL! In Hook, it turns out Captain Hook is bald under the curly wig! Oh my god these films are all such derivative garbage! WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE JUST STOP THE BALDNESS!

If you’re going to be critical of Avatar because of what it shares with Dances With Wolves or more usually Pocahontas, you may as well attack it for being similar in terms of its basic plot movements and character tropes to The Matrix, that in turn for being a rip off of Star Wars, that in turn for being a rip-off of The Hidden Fortress. Django Unchained has a very similar formula. That formula is known as ‘monomyth’ and it’s been observed for decades. Just Google it. Then go to tvtropes.org to learn more about how everything is exactly the same.

…Or you can attack Avatar for its numerous actual faults. For example, Cameron fails in making us sympathise with the Na'vi because they themselves are a bunch of hypocritical, racist, discriminatory, fickle and deceitful assholes who are also dumb enough to think that just because Sully comes back with a bigger dinosaur that he can be trusted. I mean really - if the backstabber at work drives in tomorrow with a Mercedes and not the clapped out Ford they are riding in today, do you trust them more? Nope. The Direct Agency Villain, Quaritch, is the only character in the movie who is honest about his intentions, consistently risks his own life for his loyalties, and keeps his promises. Avatar should be renamed The Assassination of Miles Quaritch by the Coward Jake Sully. It’s really a tragedy about how a noble man is laid low by a traitor who just wants to get laid. A most misunderstood film.

The question still remains – why is it that people will routinely launch such a shallow, second-hand attack on Avatar yet often aggrandise stories that are – apart from the most superficial trappings – exactly the same as it? We are all suffering under a …

Cultural Edifice Complex

To an extent we all want to be seen as clever due to where our tastes lie. This makes us very easily swayed to conform to the views of culturally recognised Beard Strokers, and immensely hypocritical to boot.

 

For example, James Cameron made it very clear before the release of Avatar that he was deliberately referencing Golden Age sci-fi from the 60s and 70s, right down to the ludicrous ‘unobtainium’. He clearly set out to create a visually engaging piece of pulp sci-fi, with gorgeous design and bold characters. Smartness wasn’t part of the remit. He succeeded. Yet we attack him for his intentions, still deride the naming conventions, and whinge about how derivative his work is.

Quentin Tarantino does EXACTLY THE SAME DAMNED THING and we hail him as a ‘genius’ for being referential about old exploitation cinema. Perhaps Cameron’s only mistake was not to lay it on thick enough? Speaking of laying it on thick, what the hell was going on with the last ten minutes of Django Unchained? As soon as Waltz stops playing an active role, switch off your TV. You’ll save yourself a sudden agonising switch to stagey, pantomime acting, random silly dressage stunts that don’t fit in with anything that happened before, and what I’m hoping is simply heavy handed irony in which Django loses his Nietzschean battle and basically becomes the white man.

The reason for this disparity in our tastes is simply reputation. Critics give a film-maker or individual film a reputation for something and (so long as they stick to the famed feature) they can do no wrong. Despite being a turgid, slow, listless, preachy, Sociology-textbook bothering mess, The Dark Knight goes unchallenged as an ‘awesome film’ by many. Their reason? “Dunno. Just an awesome film.” You give them reasons why it isn’t and you are shouted down as a tasteless philistine who just didn’t understand the movie. The Joker’s famous question, “why so serious?” has been answered. It’s because people will buy any tripe if it’s packaged correctly.

The truth is these people are just upset that you blew the game. You proved them wrong, you showed that they are sheep following a trendy opinion. That made them angry because they wanted to look clever for liking that film, and so they attack you rather than explain reasons why the film or director is actually any good.

We make statues of directors and palaces of films; the effect becomes like being an English person saying something against the Monarchy or soldiers serving in the Middle East. A knee-jerking tide of tribal buffoons descends upon you with cries of “How dare you! These are fundamental institutions without which our society would crumble!”

No, they aren’t. Many republics, such as America, do just fine. Japan copes on the world stage without an extra-national army. They all have their faults and merits, which other examples of the type can easily fill in for. A film not directed by Tarantino or Nolan can do just fine without. Just make sure you’re examining the real faults and merits.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David M. Jackson sat in a big swivelly chair cackling maniacally as he wrote this article. When he isn’t sending his balding minions to confront youthful, insecure heroes he teaches and sometimes writes in exchange for Unobtanium (which money might as well be in Britain’s current economy).

You can feed his despicable lust for gold buying his first novel by clicking here.

It’s called ‘Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity’ and sees cybernetically enhanced super-cop Jennifer Carter uncover a terrible plot to overthrow the British government while on the run from the very institution she is trying to save.

It’s very violent, which he knows you’ll love because you’re a sadist. It’s mainly racists that get hurt, so it’s OK.

 He recommends waiting a while for the improved second edition, because the formatting didn’t transfer properly to all devices, goddammit!

More from David M. Jackson at I Love That Film:

Why I Love Aliens

Face It - 'The Dark Knight' is Actually Shit

Media Literacy and Intertextuality: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 4

Another major factor or framework of interpretation that must be considered is the media literacy of the viewer. If someone is very educated about the media, as in they have done a media course or they watch a lot of special features on DVD’s and are very aware of how media texts are constructed, then this is likely to have an impact on their enjoyment and interpretation of a film. A viewer who is more media literate will likely be aware of how the text is positioning them and may therefore be less suggestible to the messages of the film. This viewer will be more aware of how the preferred readings of a film are constructed and may therefore resist the ideology or messages of the film more than someone who is less aware of how films construct meanings and provoke specific emotional responses.

For example some viewers may find Kidulthood to be a realistic depiction of London’s youth whereas others may see it as a sensationalistic film that stereotypes London teens in order to sell more tickets at the box office. Some viewers will not enjoy fantasy films as much because they are overly aware of how the special effects are created and this ruins the magic for them. Some viewers may appreciate the films of Tarantino more or less than others because they are more or less aware of the references to other films that Tarantino alludes to. They may also enjoy a film such as Pulp Fiction more because they find the structure challenging and interesting compared to a traditional narrative whereas others may find the non-linear narrative confusing and pointless.

This also ties in with intertextuality which is where a film references another piece of media. This can be deliberate or unavoidable. For example spoofs such as Scary Movie deliberately reference other films such as Scream in order to parody them and make viewers who are aware of the film being referenced, laugh at the imitation. People who have seen Scream are more likely to enjoy Scary Movie as they will be more familiar with the target of the mockery. Tarantino on the other hand pays homage to films he loves such as Lady Snowblood in Kill Bill or City on Fire in Reservoir Dogs by imitating them but not to mock them and make people laugh.

However intertextuality can also be less deliberate and almost unavoidable. This is often the case with genre films and the use of stars. Any time a filmmaker wants to make a slasher film where a killer stalks a bunch of kids and stabs them one by one, that film will always have unavoidable references to the whole slasher sub-genre of horror. Similarly, any time a filmmaker casts a star such as Will Smith for example, the viewer is likely to be reminded of previous Will Smith films. If I see Will Smith on a poster, I suspect he may save the world (or at least be the hero) because I’ve seen him do this a few times. I see Jim Carrey and I expect a comedy. This can be used to sell a film or it can be used to subvert expectations but either way, the use of certain generic conventions or stars can impact the experience for the viewer, particularly if they are media literate or very knowledgeable about films.

Did you miss...?

Part 1 on active vs passive spectatorship.

Part 2 on the pleasures of film watching. 

Part 3 on frameworks of interpretation.

Read more:

Part 5 on the effects of films.

Part 6 on fandom and film fans.

Part 7 on pre and post-viewing experiences and conditions of reception.

Director Retrospectives: Part 2 Danny Boyle

In the continuing series of director retrospectives over at Filmoria, my latest is on the career of British director Danny Boyle, ahead of the release of his new film Trance. I'm seeing Trance tomorrow at a preview screening and cannot wait! It's got James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson and Vincent Cassell and looks like it might be a hypnotic blast. Early reviews are looking very good, no surprise after Danny Boyle wowed the world with the London Olympics Opening Ceremony last year!

 In advance of some of the biggest and best film releases of 2013, Filmoria writers are all contributing retrospectives of many directors' work. We have all chosen six directors who have films being released in 2013 and the idea is that in the week leading up to the new film, we will write and publish a retrospective look at that director's body of work.



The six directors I picked are some of my very favourites and others that have significant films to make their body of work worth revisiting. I take tasks like this very seriously and would like to get through all the films of each particular director before I write the pieces. I started out with Quentin Tarantino as my first director and that retrospective was published back in January ahead of the release of Django Unchained.


In the meantime other Filmoria writers have been tackling the likes of:


Sam Raimi

Pedro Almodovar
Steven Soderbergh
Walter Hill
Kathryn Bigelow
Judd Apatow
Robert Zemeckis

and many more!

I've been re-watching all of Boyle's films over the last couple of months in order to reappraise them and give this retrospective of the great director's work the respect it deserves. You can check out my Danny Boyle retrospective at Filmoria here. In case you didn't know this is the guy who gave us the likes of Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours. He's easily one of my favourite directors and definitely my favourite British director, responsible for two of the greatest British films of all time in my opinion. Please go check out the retrospective to find out more about the man and his films.

If you aren't uncontrollably dribbling and desperate to see Trance by the end then I will consider myself a failure and hang my head in shame. Choose Life! Choose reading my retrospective!