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

Kingsman: The Secret Service Review

When super spy Harry Hart loses a member of his team in the late 90s, he makes a promise to look out for the young son of the man who died trying to save him. Seventeen years later, Eggsy is a wayward teen with a permanently distraught mother and violent scumbag of a step father. When Eggsy is arrested for stealing a car, Harry Hart seeks out the troubled youth and offers him the chance to become a part of the mysterious and super secret spy agency known as the Kingsman. Seeing what Harry Hart can do, the gadgets he uses, and the class he oozes, Eggsy agrees to sign up to the competitive training regime that could see him taking on billionaire lisping megalomaniac Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson).

It is very clear from watching Kingsman that director Matthew Vaughn is not ready to give up on directing a Bond film yet. Whether he will ever get the gig in the future on the back of this film is very questionable. Kingsman is more like the film we would get if Tarantino ever gets to make a Bond film. It’s self-referential and smart, has a brilliantly foul mouth and is uber-violent from start to finish. Not to mention the fact that it takes an outsider’s perspective on Britain and fills the film with stereotypes of the class system, from the stiff upper lipped suited gents of the Kingsman to the ‘yeah bruv’ yoof of working class ladland.

Early contender for best scene of the year?

Kingsman takes great pleasure in pinching from Bond films, while giving tradition a good shake up. Valentine’s lisp, blade footed hench-woman and mountain lair all feel like they border on homage and parody, whereas other moments indulge in characters talking conventions before shockingly subverting what audiences have come to expect in these films.

To take the Tarantino comparison further, Matthew Vaughn really knows how to revel in the joy of a good splash of ultra-violence. The scene where Firth’s skilled spy is unleashed on a church congregation to the sounds of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird is one of the most excitingly executed, thrillingly shot and edited and funniest massacres in film history. Nothing in the rest of the film can touch it, but that doesn’t stop Vaughn from trying.

With its cast including Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Michael Caine, Samuel L. Jackson and Mark Hamill, it’s a wonder that Taron Egerton even gets a look in as Eggsy. Doubters may think that he is a poor man’s substitute for the swagger and savagery of Jack O’ Connell but Egerton emerges as a winning choice to hold the film together, charming with his sly grin and convincing with his way with an umbrella.

Though there is a worrying undercurrent of upper class superiority and even scepticism about those who campaign  about climate change, if you can cast those niggling fears aside, there surely won’t be a more gleefully violent film than Kingsman this year. 

Watch the trailer:

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Son of a Gun

Big Hero 6

Inherent Vice 

Birdman

A Most Violent Year

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Whiplash

Testament of Youth

The Theory of Everything

American Sniper

Django Unchained Review

Tarantino is no slave to historical accuracy but he still knows how to write and direct a brilliant film.

Django Unchained is not only a riveting bit of entertainment but also has vital and brutal bits of history lesson for a person like me who knew little of the horrors of the slavery beyond the obvious. From hot boxes to scarring runaways, the film goes deeper than beatings and lynchings to show far more of the madness of slavery than I had ever encountered before. 

Does it wallow in the evil of slavery? It certainly does indulge in the N word and never shies away from the worst examples of slave torture and murder but all of this is to make the villains stand out as the nastiest pieces of work that Tarantino could conjure. Some might say it trivialises the truth of the past but it also gets every person in the cinema on side with the hero and makes for a riveting rescue and revenge mission.

It is probably Tarantino’s most conventional film to date. It has a hero on a quest, a princess in need of rescue, a father figure mentor and an evil villain who tries to stop the hero from getting his princess. It is also linear and lacking in any of Tarantino’s most excessive stylistic flourishes. Nevertheless the excellent choices of music, cartoonish violence and wonderful dialogue are present and correct making this still feel recognisably Tarantino-esque.

Django is a pleasure to watch as he attacks white supremacy throughout. He is a cool killer and a romantic hero and a joy to ride with from unchaining to violent retribution. Jamie Foxx emerges from under the long shadows of Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio to hold his own, despite both these two actors' best grand standing. His Django is noble, ruthless and seething with quiet rage. While Waltz and DiCaprio are also on top form, it is great to see Sam Jackson giving one of his finest performances in years also.

It felt to me like the anti Gone with the Wind. It is challenging, shocking and felt more historically accurate than any representations of slavery and the South that I’d ever seen before. There might be little to no evidence of Mandingo fighting and certain other excesses but the representation of slavery, oppression, torture and punishment was eye opening and powerful with much that there is recorded evidence of. There are many hateful characters here, not least Samuel L. Jackson’s hideous house slave Stephen and DiCaprio's Calvin Candie and their comeuppances are all a joy to watch.

It is wish fulfilment from start to finish. Like the killing of Hitler in Inglourious Basterds, the uprising of the slave against overseers and slave masters is cathartic, heroic and triumphant. It might trivialise it to an extent by packaging slavery as a Sergio Leone style Spaghetti western but it also opens your eyes to some of the awful and despicable behaviour of people in the past and opens the doors to debate, all while being thoroughly entertaining.

Seriously Spike Lee, please go give this movie a shot. I would love to hear your honest and considered opinion after seeing it. Not that Lee would care for this appraisal much but its Tarantino's best since Pulp Fiction.