The Hateful Eight review

Quentin Tarantino is a writer/director whose best work finds a harmony between both disciplines. His work is often stylish and idiosyncratic and brings attention to the process of whatever it is that distinguishes his filmmaking from everyone else. His scripts are often talky and verbose, with many extended dialogue sequences and as a director he dresses up his screenplays with quirky music choices, active camera work and shuffled, non-linear editing. In short, he doesn’t mind reminding his audience that they are watching a movie with a capital M. Quentin’s latest film “The Hateful Eight” is an ultra-violent, Agatha Christy-esq mystery masquerading as a western, and while it contains elements of his most patient and deliberate work as a filmmaker, it awkwardly struggles to negotiate between Tarantino the writer and Tarantino the director.

Currently there are two different versions of “The Hateful Eight” playing in theaters, a theatrical cut that plays continuously and a limited version that’s projected from 70 millimeter film stock with a five minute overture and a ten minute intermission. Both versions run pretty close to three hours, and most of the film’s running time is devoted to flowery dialogue set-pieces that build to a blood splattered third act.

Its post-civil war 19^th century America and Hangman John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is transporting a wanted murdurer named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock where she is to be killed by the state for her crimes. While traveling through the snow-covered mountains of Wyoming, he picks up black bounty hunter named Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and an ex-rebel soldier named Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Both Warren and Mannix have a war-time reputation that precedes them and has followed them into Ruth’s carriage. Together, they seek shelter from an unforgiving blizzard at a remote cabin supply shop known as Minnie’s Haberdashery.  There they meet a another motley crew of character’s that includes a British born hangman named Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a Southern General named Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) and an all-too-quiet cowboy named Joe Gage (Michael Madsen).

Many things about this situation seem strange to Ruth and Warren, as Minnie is nowhere to be found, the door is broken from the inside and the man running the haberdashery is an unknown Mexican who goes by the name Bob (Damian Birchir). The two conclude the one or more of these men are secretly working for Daisy Domergue and that an attack on their group is eminent, and because this is a Tarantino film, that’s exactly what happens.

Like his debut feature “Reservoir Dogs,” “The Hateful Eight” is essentially a chamber play in which a small cast of characters are trying to weed out a mole within the group. But this film is twice the length and bejeweled in a number of indulgent cinematic fetishes. The movie was shot by Bob Richardson in an ultra-wide cinemascope frame, and during the opening sequences through the snowy mountains the establishing vistas are magnificent to look at. This choice makes less sense when the other two thirds of the film enclosed in a single interior setting, where close-ups and quick edits are more widely utilized for the storytelling.  Legendary composer Ennio Marconi’s original score for the film is memorable and used to good effect in building tension and creating a mood for the film's sense of snowbound isolation and paranoia, and yet Tarantino still insists on dropping in moments of contemporary rock and pop music, which often clangs against Marconi’s compositions.  There’s a tonally jarring flashback sequence in the middle that could have been cut all together and at one point, for no other reason than he likes to hear himself talk, Quentin provides needless narration that overlays competently shot visual exposition.

Despite these issues, I appreciate the minimal approach to the story and setting and there's a subversive edge to how the narrative eventually escalates into a full-on gore-fest by its end.  The movie mediates Tarantino’s classical influences with his exploitation irony, acting as bridge somewhere between Howard Hawk’s “Rio Bravo” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” The script's many discussions about race and civil war allegiances are fascinating and politically messy in way that other films usually try hard to avoid and they play out within the character arcs in unexpected ways. As you can expect from this filmmaker, the dialogue is well written as pros and contains thorny quotables, but it’s the stagey monologues and constant speechifying that gets in the way of the story, causing the film’s tension as a thriller to relax.

“The Hateful Eight” undeniably entertaining and its by far Tarantino’s darkest and meanest film to date. As a formally experimental piece of pop cinema it’s commendable, but it’s too overwritten and undisciplined to work as the crackling mystery it needs to be.

Grade: C+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016

Listen to more discussion about "The Hateful Eight" and the films of Tarantino on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.

Kingsman: The Secret Service review

               British action director Mathew Vaughn is obviously having scandalous fun with his new spy comedy “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” A bit of bait and switch, this alternative comic book adaptation takes what could have been a fairly hokey and overused premise and turns it into a hard-R love-letter to the spy movies of the '60s and '70s. Though modernized with fast edits and shocking violence, this movie makes plenty of references to early Bond flicks and the British television series “The Avengers”—not to be confused with the Marvel superhero property.

               Newcomer Taron Egerton plays our protagonist Garry ‘Eggsy’ Unwin, whose spy father was killed in duty, and in doing so had saved the life of his gentleman colleague Harry Hart (Colin Firth.) Jump twenty years later and Eggsy has become a delinquent London youth who’s constantly in and out of jail for petty theft as he tries to support his impoverished mother. Nevertheless, Hart sees the boy’s potential to be something more and convinces him to train in a lengthy series of extreme competitions to become part of secret Kingman organization.

              On the other side of the plot we follow the rise of mad tech developer named Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), who wants to take over the world with a free computer chip implant that psychically links people to their cell-phones. Of course this chip has other undisclosed functions and when the leaders of the free-world sell out their countries and work towards Valentine’s apocalyptic strategy, the new recruits of the Kingsmen are the only ones who can stop him.

              All of this sounds like typical action movie stuff and with the training sequences that take place in stealthy underground bunkers, a good chunk of it plays similarly to Vaughn’s successful “X-Men: First Class.” Where the movie diverts is in its subversive tone and blackly comic satire. Throughout we see limbs lopped off and heads explode with knowing post-modern dialogue, where the characters openly acknowledge the film’s obvious genre tropes.

            Collin Firth, Mark Strong and Michael Caine as the higher ranking members of the Kingsmen bring a lot of class and stately professionalism to the wacky film and never let it drift too far into referential camp.  Valentine as a supper villain is pitched somewhere between a lisping, TED-talking, Mark Zuckerberg and a swag-drenched Kanye West. Jackson fully explores this contradiction and carefully crafts a sense of false bravado that sells the eccentricity of his performance. The younger cast however, including Egerton as the main character, is a little less memorable—not distractingly bad per-se, but bland in a way that makes the older cast seem all the more scene-grabbing.

              With frank sexual humor and a huge body count, there’s nothing here that suggests Vaughn or his writers care at all about political correctness or being particularly likeable.  It moves along quite nicely and the action set-pieces and fight choreography are impressively blocked and satisfying, but there’s a sneering misanthropy within all of it that pushes the movie right up to the line of satirical acceptability.  It’s downright mean sometimes and there are some sequences that are meant to play like romping cartoonish action but might alienate some audiences with its insensitivity or general disregard for humanism.  That said, it’s this type of atypical risk-taking that distinguishes “Kingsman: The Secret Service” from the glut of other teenage ‘your-the-best’ narratives that have recently exploded on the silver screen. Vaughn’s ability to nail my jaw to the ground while also keeping me thoroughly entertained is ultimately what makes me cautiously recommend this picture to anyone with a healthy love for unhinged dark-comedy.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2015

Captain America: The Winter Soldier review

                  Captain America is a tricky Marvel character to sell to global movie market, despite his recognizable brand and the backing of a powerhouse film production conglomerate. These days people are a little jaded when it comes to national pride and a character that fights for truth, justice and the American way is an increasingly harder pill to swallow, especially when party divisions have dramatically split the country on the specific interpretation of what the “American Way” is even supposed to be. Even when conflict is injected into the character to please those on the homeland, the blatantly patriotic imagery of Cap-Am risks appearing like propaganda to those abroad.

                Though Disney/Marvel Studio’s first attempt to introduce this character in 2011 wasn’t an altogether failure, it really only managed to work as a placeholder for the anticipated Avengers movie being hyped at time.  Now, with the overwhelming success of “The Avengers” in 2012, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is afforded the benefit of doubt by those who may have been skeptical before. Surprisingly, in changing time-period, style, tone and directors, this movie cleverly takes advantage of its second chance and manages to exceed expectations by simultaneously defying and celebrating its genre-conventions.

                Having grown up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, only to be preserved in ice and unfrozen to become a superhero soldier, fighting alongside sci-fi anomalies like Bruce Banner’s Hulk and Tony Stark’s Iron-Man, Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans) is now suffering from state of mild temporal dysphoria, with only his work as a SHIELD super-spy to keep him focused and grounded. However, when his boss and mentor, SHIELD’s leader Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is targeted and hunted by his colleagues, Captain America is then forced to go rogue and figure out how high the governmental corruption infiltrates. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and military veteran Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) help Rodgers with his impossible mission, while keeping guard from a mysteriously lethal mercenary known as the Winter Soldier.

                It’s actually difficult to be prepared for just how exceptional this pop-corn thriller is. Not since Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” has a sequel so magnificently improved upon its predecessor in a way that actually fixes some of the problems of the previous film. Rather than the cartoony, gee-golly pulp aesthetic of Joe Johnston’s “Captain America: The First Avenger”, Joe and Anthony Russo’s steely, post-Bourn, politically-minded sequel resembles the kind of cool immediacy of Michael Mann’s “Heat”, as well as ‘70s paranoid dramas like “The French Connection" and "All the President's Men."  The tensely-blocked, handheld bursts of action-violence is impactful, the performances are confident--particularly Evans who'd previously appeared a little stiff within the do-gooder limitations of his characters--and unlike even the best films from Marvel’s amoeba-vers, this world feels lived-in and dangerous with a semi-realistic sense of scale and threat. 

                With that said, this is still a comic-book action movie aimed at a young teenage audience, and we're reminded of that whenever the plot makes an illogical leap or when there's an occasional tonal hiccup. This includes some high-concept sci-fi tech that feels out of place compared to the movie's more sober interpretation of the Marvel world, as well as, a sporadic line of Saturday-morning dialogue.  In the third act, as is the demand for any film that costs more than 100 million dollars, the movie eventually devolves into an extended effect-driven sequence, slowly drifting the whole thing away from the refreshing tactility and level-headed sophistication it had built up to that point.

                Flaws and nitpicks aside—though not excused—“Captain America-The Winter Soldier” is still an exciting and daring move forward for the superhero genre, and it at least hints towards a maturity that Marvel Studios hasn’t been as interested in exploring since the Iraq war metaphors of the first “Iron Man."  Here, themes of political unrest and social distrust regarding NSA monitoring and military drone technologies make this sequel not only satisfying as a genre picture, but timely and relevant as well.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2014