You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Hateful 8
Quentin Tarantino once again reminds me that he is Self Indulgent.
He writes a film, directs a film, produces a film the way he wants it, despite what is right or wrong.
If it is long, he doesn’t care. If it is boring at times, he doesn’t care.
It’s as if he is creating the movie, not for the viewing public who has to sit on their empty wallets forever, but for himself and his Hollywood buddies.
He makes a movie, someone calls it genius, and then we reward this spoiled cinematic child.
Why?
His vision is wildly diverse, perverse and at times, slow and predictable.
The Hateful 8 brings 8 desperate souls together in a Wyoming cabin.
Individually, each character is bacterium in a petri dish rotting in a Chinese restaurant dumpster.
Collectively, the characters are botulism warmed up over a sterno flame in a homeless shelter.
But since there are no characters to identify with, you are left to try and like someone for the better part of 3 meandering hours.
The movie slowly and tirelessly grinds into motion with shots so long you can literally see the film emulsion dry before your eyes on his much ballyhooed 70 mm directorial campaign.
The story opens with a 5 minute shot of a sign.
By the end of this scene, my brain is frostbitten and my bladder filling with dissatisfaction.
5 minutes! 5 grinding, nauseatingly boring minutes, I am forced to stare at a single shot filled with wind and snow.
I sit there, my face irradiated by white as the camera begins the slowest pull out in the history of cinema.
The camera starts on a close up of a cross in a snowy hillside and it literally takes forever and a day to pull back revealing a snowy trail and a stage-coach.
Most film makers would spend 10 seconds on this scene and move the story forward.
Quentin Tarantino has an air of presumptuousness that allows him to do what he wants to do cinematically.
He is the child who takes his ball home and leaves you in the street wondering why you even like this kid.
Let me say this: I like the film. When it finally decides to unfurl, it is interesting and I am engaged. I like the concept. I love the acting and performances. I just can’t help that this so-called cinematic messiah couldn’t tell his story in 2 hours instead of three.
Tarantino has created an interesting story. It’s a good story, but not a work of genius. There are flaws that he cannot fix without the use of a narrator voice over that seemingly comes out of nowhere like a poke in the eye. 2 hours into the movie and suddenly a scene needs to be explained by a narrator voice that we have never heard before?
That’s not genius. That’s a janitor unclogging a toilet that’s stopped up.
My 1st thought? Who the hell is that?
Who is the story-teller?
Couldn’t a master mind film maker have told his story fluidly without a 70mm band-aid to make me understand what just happened?
My problem with the Hateful 8 is simple.
Tarantino is self-indulgent. He produces movies that are long and unwind at a painstakingly boring pace.
If Tarantino is a race, it is between snails, not stallions.
He writes scenes that are unnecessary. He writes scenes that could be 80% of what they are.
There’s a saying in life. Less is more.
Tarantino has never met this quote.
He lives his life by the credo that nothing exceeds like excess.
If Samuel L Jackson’s soliloquy is good at a page; then won’t it be twice as good at two pages? How bout 10 pages?
Who doesn’t love a 10 page, 10 minute marathon monologue?
Jackson is brilliant. He can deliver the goods like few actors. He seems to be the perfect mechanism for Tarantino’s racially skewed manifesto of insanity.
But at what point is too much too much?
Tarantino films are like Thanksgiving gluttony where you should push away from the table after one helping. Instead you go back for seconds and thirds and then pile on the apple pie and the whip cream and pumpkin pie and ice cream and then try to wash it all down with a thick crème de menthe coffee on top of it all.
Your esophagus flap is broken, as a gastric Armageddon of dyspeptic bile tries to shoot back up your throat like a Texas oil gusher.
It’s too much and too long and too gratuitous.
Self Indulgent, I say.
Tarantino has moments of brilliance that are simply toppled over by his own excess.
He can be a beautiful flower blossoming in a glint of sunshine and then suddenly he crushes that flower with the fall of a 10,000 year old redwood tree.
Two organisms of beauty are suddenly bludgeoned to death for no apparent reason.
So much dialogue being spoken incessantly brings possibly interesting scenes to a screeching halt.
Where an actor’s look will communicate a thousand words, Tarantino writes those thousand words.
Scenes that could be 30 seconds are 5 minutes long.
Seeing a Tarantino movie in the theater is painful.
Instead of following the story line, I sit there wondering when or should I get up and empty my ever-expanding bladder.
The story’s subplot? Bring a catheter.
I wonder if the urine I discharge is more important than the self-indulgent, effusive prolixity I am being subjected to at slow motion infinitum.
I hear People grumble as they get up and move past me in the darkened theaters, my knees touching theirs, as they groggily search for the banister illuminated only by the self-indulgent 70mm film that I am supposed to be enamoured with.
SELF INDULGENT!
A Tarantino film is like a Grateful Dead jam session. Everyone is playing whatever they want for as long as they want sort of in sync with the other members of the band, sort of not giving a damn about anyone else on stage.
And then suddenly, at the end, for no apparent reason, it comes together.
He is the party guest who eats all the chocolate in the bowl because he wants to. He knows he shouldn’t but he does. You know he shouldn’t, but you let him.
It’s rude. It’s unacceptable. It’s socially incorrect and simply just tiring.
But he is the spoiled brat who gets his way because he can.
He is the child who throws a 100 million dollar temper tantrum and we simply watch and wait and then tell him “That’s a good boy. Now go and clean up your room.”
I am a but a single voice in a sea of voices. The movie has many many outstanding reviews.
I’m glad I saw this film. I like the characters and enjoyed the story once we finally reached the 2nd plot point and the story began to move at a pace that was fitting of this so called genius.
I recommend you go to the movie.
Make sure you empty your bladder twice. Make sure you aren’t offended by the N word spoken by every character hundreds of times.
Make sure you understand that 3 hours will feel like 3 hours to your brain and your ass.
As my friend said upon returning from a much-needed potty break.
“What did I miss?”
I looked at her and smiled.
“Nothing. You didn’t miss anything.”
Life’sCrazy™