• Much to praise here even if it’s Tarantino’s weakest since Death Proof in 2007 and second weakest as an auteur overall
great doorway wall-art photography here
  • The 70mm photography by QT and his DP Robert Richardson is strong especially the exteriors in the snow to start the film—such crisp photography—but I’m surprised that Tarantino and Richardson (their 4th collaboration—Kill Bill, Inglorious, Django) chose this film as their 70mm experimentation. It’s set, largely, in one room and it’s an Agatha Christie like mystery in story—hardly the world of epic that 70mm (from Lawrence of Arabia, 2001, Ben-Hur) was built for
a remarkable long opening take here that has all the promise of the 70mm photography
  • Morricone’s Oscar-winner—it’s not his best work but it’s a fantastic score. Menacing—combining a bit of The Thing (and it’s sparse, much like that score) and The Untouchables
  • Chapters and numbering the characters (in the title here)—Tarantino’s ongoing obsession with quantities
  • It’s nit-picky—but I continue to be baffled by some of Tarantino’s tangents in the screenplay—here, right at the beginning in chapter 1—we show Kurt Russell’s character with a long lull in the conversation—in a movie that runs 168 minutes
  • Russell (doing John Wayne) and Samuel L are both really good here
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its telling that most of the strong visuals are in the exteriors are in the film’s first two chapters
  • There is a really nice De Palma (from Hitchcock) 360 shot around the coffee pot and I love the work with the split diopter (with Walton Goggins and Samuel L at the end especially) but by and large it’s pretty quiet visually—there are half-hour chunks without anything going on
I love the work with the split diopter here
  • The Samuel L monologue directed at Bruce Dern isn’t quite Ezekiel from Pulp Fiction but it’s impressive and he’s such a talented actor—great match for QT’s distinct, and incredibly pleasurable, dialogue
more strong work from Samuel L. Jackson– a actor with a career filled with strong performances — many coming with Tarantino
  • Formal issues with the voice-over beginning in chapter 4. It’s frustrating—and it’s QT himself this time. “Not everybody saw this” and “somebody poisoned the coffee”
  • At chapter 5 Tarantino starts messing with the linear narrative—an auteur trademark of his
  • Love the Michael Madsen trunk shots—two of them here—I believe Samuel L has one, too
a reoccurring low-angle shot choice in Tarantino’s oeuvre — the “trunk shot”- though there’s no actual trunk here in Hateful Eight
  • Tarantino breaks away from the brilliant Morricone score (with plenty of dread in it) for the David Hess song “Now You’re All Alone” when a man is now all alone about to be killed. It’s messy and really on the nose.
  • Highly Recommend