The Hateful Eight: Insufficiently nasty

The Hateful Eight (2015) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for strong bloody violence, gore, profanity, graphic nudity and racist behavior
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.31.15

Quentin Tarantino’s best films are highlighted by deliciously snarky dialog, scene-stealing — and sometimes career-reviving — performances by delectable character actors, and twisty scripts that build tension to the screaming point.

Every time somebody enters Minnie's Haberdashery, those already inside — in this case,
John Ruth (Kurt Russell, left), Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and a wincing
Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) — have to yell for the door to be nailed shut, lest the
blizzard blow it open again.

The Hateful Eight gets two out of three.

Tarantino’s tough-talkin’ homage to classic Westerns — complete with an awesome new orchestral score from 87-year-old Ennio Morricone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), his first Western score in 40 years — simply doesn’t have enough story to justify its butt-numbing 182-minute length. The set-up is rich with potential, and it screams for the multiple back-story treatment that made Kill Bill so engaging ... but no; aside from two brief flashbacks, we and the cast are stuck in the same claustrophobic cabin for three interminable hours.

Granted, the actors do their best to hold our attention. Ultimately, though, the posturing and narrow-eyed ’tude can’t make up for a script that doesn’t kick into gear until after the intermission (roughly 100 minutes in).

Tarantino makes us wait much too long for the good stuff, and by then things are rather anticlimactic.

And yes, I’m fully aware that the “good stuff” is the enfant terrible filmmaker’s gleeful dollops of blood and gore. But even here, it feels like Tarantino is only half-trying; having teased us with a cabin laden with hammers, shovels, iron spikes and all sorts of other implements of potential mayhem, he settles for gunfire. Which, tasteless as it sounds, is quite disappointing.

As he did with Kill Bill, Tarantino divides this saga into chapters, starting with “Last Stage to Red Rock.” The setting is post-Civil War Wyoming, with a six-horse stagecoach doing its best to outrun an approaching blizzard. The driver is forced to halt after coming upon former Union soldier-turned-bounty hunter Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), perched in the middle of the road atop three of his sanctioned kills.

Warren’s horse has given out on him; he’s hoping for a lift to Red Rock. But that’s a problem; the stage has been chartered exclusively by fellow bounty hunter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), who is handcuffed to his prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and escorting her to a date with the hangman at Red Rock.

The wisely suspicious Ruth views any strangers as either a) somebody trying to steal his bounty; or b) somebody trying to rescue Daisy. But it turns out that Warren and Ruth know each other, if only vaguely; the requested ride is granted, if grudgingly.

Django Unchained: The West as it should have been?

Django Unchained (2012) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for relentless violence and gore, profanity, nudity and considerable ghastly behavior
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.28.12

Since Jews were given the vicarious opportunity to blow up Hitler and his high-ranking Nazi goons in 2009’s alternate-history Inglourious Basterds, we shouldn’t be surprised that cinematic bad boy Quentin Tarantino would grant African Americans similar cheap thrills, by scolding the pre-Civil War, slave-holding South in the same cheeky manner.

Django (Jamie Foxx, left) believes that he and his partner have successfully tricked
Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) into accepting their feigned roles as slave traders.
Alas, Candie isn't quite as dense as he seems, and his fury builds to fearsome
proportions when the ruse is exposed. As for what happens next ... well, let's just say
that it's vintage Tarantino.

If Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles made you wince, by milking broad comedy from racism, this one will freeze your blood.

But make no mistake: Although Django Unchained definitely scores points in the ongoing debate about American race relations, at its heart this film is gleefully exploitative trash: giddily violent, gratuitously blood-soaked and unapologetically self-indulgent.

And yet ... undoubtedly a guilty pleasure. You just can’t help admiring Tarantino’s chutzpah.

He remains a walking film encyclopedia, with a particular fondness for the campy, low-budget sleaze of the late 1960s and ’70s, which ranged from the Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, to the blaxploitation flicks that made minor-league stars of Fred Williamson, Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree, Tamara Dobson and others.

Tarantino evokes them all in Django Unchained, a revisionist western that takes its title from a 1966 Sergio Corbucci rip-off of Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars — which, in turn, ripped off Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo — and starred Franco Nero as a coffin-carrying pistolero who blows into a town-turned-battle zone by feuding Mexican bandits and (you gotta love it) KKK members.

No surprise, then, that Nero himself pops up in a small part here; Tarantino loves to honor his predecessors. He also gets a kick out of “rescuing” familiar film and TV B-actors, and so you’ll spot the likes of Don Johnson, Tom Wopat, Don Stroud, Bruce Dern, Lee Horsley and Michael Parks.

And you’ve gotta love the parts assigned other visiting day players: Russ Tamblyn pops up as Son of a Gunfighter — a nod to the title of his own 1966 Spanish oater — which allows Amber Tamblyn an eyeblink appearance as “Daughter of a Son of a Gunfighter.” And speaking of the KKK, Jonah Hill is cast as “Bag Head #2” in a sequence played for high comedy, which mercilessly depicts clan members as the dim-bulb morons they undoubtedly were.

But all this comes later. As was the case with Leone’s similarly sprawling 1966 epic, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Tarantino — both writer and director here — takes his time setting up this narrative. It’s two years prior to the opening shot of the Civil War, and the story begins as Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a traveling dentist of questionable repute, encounters a couple of horse-riding toughs leading a small line of chained slaves, one of them Django (Jamie Foxx).

Inglourious Basterds: Paths of Gloury

Inglourious Basterds (2009) • View trailer for Inglourious Basterds
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, brief sexuality and relentless violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.3.09
Buy DVD: Inglourious Basterds• Buy Blu-Ray: Inglourious Basterds (2-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

I don't often say this about films that already run well in excess of two hours, but Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds should have been longer.

Probably quite a bit longer.

This 152-minute crazy-quilt homage — echoing everything from The Dirty Dozen to Clint Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns — too frequently feels as if important stuff has been left out. Backstories and plot logic have been sacrificed for lengthy isolated scenes that are fascinating to watch, but really don't advance the story.

Donny Donowitz (ELi Roth, left) admires Aldo Raine's (Brad Pitt) handiwork,
after the latter carefully carves a swastika into a minor Nazi soldier's
forehead: a mark by which the young man will be recognized forever, should
he survive the war.

The always self-indulgent Tarantino has many strengths, starting with his enthusiastic affection for All Things Cinema, and the imaginative way he can construct a scene to be vibrantly fresh, while simultaneously a sly nod to some well-loved (and sometimes obscure) exploitation flick from days gone by.

Tarantino also is gangbusters with dialogue scenes, particularly in terms of the subtle power struggles that take place beneath the surface of even the most benign conversations. Although the climactic car chase was the best part of 2007's Death Proof, the lengthy session of filthy gal talk between Sydney Poitier and her BFFs was quite entertaining, and Kurt Russell's seductive come-hither wooing of Rose McGowan (poor, poor woman!) was deliciously unsettling.

Inglourious Basterds opens with an equally mesmerizing conversation between two characters: a prologue of sorts, set in 1941, that finds Nazi Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) on what seems a purely routine visit with a rugged French farmer who, while wary of his guest, doesn't appear too worried about him.

The chat — which takes awhile, but isn't the slightest bit dull — evolves through numerous moods, the apparent "lead" passing from Landa to the farmer, as we wonder just where the scene is heading. (This is Tarantino, after all; we can be excused for imagining that the farmer's three nymphette daughters are quietly slaughtering the trio of Nazi soldiers outside, as this parley takes place in the farmhouse.)

But then the penny drops: Control of the conversation swings irrevocably to Landa — we realize, perhaps belatedly, that he dominated the encounter all along — and the scene's true purpose emerges: the introduction of Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who narrowly escapes Landa and his minions, and survives to become a key player in what follows.