The Hateful Eight

#StokerScore 3/10

Movies are a personal choice. Professional critics have generally been educated as to the different techniques and the lighting and the script-doctoring and usually know what a best boy and a key grip do on a movie. But for those of us without film-related degrees we are driven by what we enjoy. Those movies may change over the years or become more refined but the originals? the ones we saw throughout our formative years? They never stop influencing us.

"Go on, I dare you to say again that Excalibur is better....."

We're about to head into awards season and already movies are shuffling and jockey-ing for position and, in many cases, have a team of people whose sole job it is to get the awards committee to recognise the movie they've been paid to promote. Certain film directors are always shoe-ins for recognition and it's widely understood that if you make a movie that contains specific themes then it's also more likely to be in contention. 

"We've got you, me, and Michael Mann. The Oscar is in the bag."

Laughingly, and in contrast, you hear of movies being voted worst ever and Golden Raspberries being handed out but what does that really mean? If a movie produces 'x' in terms of ticket receipts, this may be due as much to the number of cinema screens that it is available to be seen in and the marketing machine behind the movie to promote it as it is to if it's a good or bad movie. But trust me when I say I have seen bad movies too.

"the name's Cage, depatment of  bee movies"

So it is that I don't like all movies and I don't think that makes me a bad person. I also have reasons for liking and disliking the movies that I do. I like some horror movies, I like selected comedies, I like many action movies and a lot of sci-fi movies. I'm generally not a fan of dystopian future movies but I can think of some that I enjoy, and what some people call classics I have sometimes called bullshit. I like feel-good movies but conversely I also like black comedies and noir cinema. I'm certainly difficult to pidgeon-hole and friends are constantly surprised, amazed and appalled, in seemingly equal numbers, by my choices.

I suspect, to bring it back to my original point, that this is becuase of our individual conditioning. It's that conditioning that means I love westerns. I rank Pale Rider, Open Range, and Once Upon a Time In The West, ahead of Dances With Wolves, Unforgiven and A Man Called Horse. and because my Dad was a fan I was exposed to more westerns than any other genre as a kid growing up. 

Quentin Tarantino isn't a film school graduate, he's basically just a guy who loves movies, has worked around movies and had a number of peers who exposed him to movies. A mixture of good luck and a singular vision led to Harvey Keitel investing in the production of Reservoir Dogs and once that was followed up by Pulp Fiction it appeared that a new voice in film had been discovered. 

But just how singular that vision is has been open to debate ever since parallels between Reservoir Dogs and a number of other properties were noticed. Maybe I'm being unkind but his reliance on the word 'homage' has really started to lose its value in favour of just rehashing old movies and polishing them for a new generation.

Lots of people like Tarantino movies and forgive him his idiosyncrasies because they are recogniseable by the casts he puts together, the way the timeline jumps around and the clever dialogue. The Hateful Eight very clearly has the first, The cast is a solid mix of Tarantino regulars plus the inclusion of some new faces. The second area it employs sparsely but it's the third where I had problems as it also has a running time that drags unbelievably. I've never walked out of a movie but this one tried my patience. What is potentially a simple set-up and execution in the style of an Agatha Christie drawing room mystery is drawn out to the extent that I was just plain bored. I wanted to enjoy it, hoping that it was going to back to his lean, early movie best rather than my perception of the bloated excesses of his recent films. Maybe an M. Night/Tarantino collaborative piss up might produce more meaningful results for both of them...