The Hateful Eight

What a treat this movie was! I saw the 70mm Roadshow version complete with entr'acte and intermission. The Hateful Eight calls back to the ensemble storytelling of The Reservoir Dogs, but with all the grand scope of Django Unchained. I thought Oscar could have shared a little more love with this film. It clocked in at three hours but I wanted to stay and watch it all day.

The acting was great across the board, the dialog was delicious, the music was wonderful and the sound design really stood out for me! And seeing all those lovely snowy vistas projected on actual film was heavenly for a film geek!

It was such a delightful mix of those sweeping mountain views and then a small world play that takes place inside of Minnie's Haberdashery. I kept adapting it for the stage as I watched it, I couldn't help it! I'm a theatre geek, too! There was such a wonderful rhythm to the dialog. The characters each had a cadence. They called back to their own lines, but they called back to each others', too. The repetitions felt musical, in a way. It's not as if the lines were written in iambic pentameter, but now that I've thought about it, mixing Shakespeare with Quentin Tarantino I think is the best idea that maybe anyone has ever had.

If I had to pick something that I didn't love about the film it was the tone of some flashbacks that set up the location of Minnie's. Although that felt like its own kind of allusion to musical theatre, so maybe there's reasoning behind it.

It was a much more contained effort at storytelling than I have seen from Tarantino in a while and I really appreciated it! So much so that now I feel inspired to go add a few songs to my Shakespearean stage adaptation of The Hateful Eight!