Tarantino for the day

The BBC has an article by Owen Gleiberman about Tarantino's latest:

Quentin Tarantino is no stranger to controversy, but his new film, The Hateful Eight, is dividing critics as well as audiences in surprisingly severe ways. I’m not alone in thinking that it’s Tarantino’s worst film, a sluggish, unimaginative dud, brimming with venom, but not much cleverness. The characters could almost be some foul-mouthed, high-kitsch version of The Wild Bunch: they spend three hours lobbing overly obvious verbal bombs at each other, and then they haul out actual weapons and begin blasting away.
There are echoes of sequences in far greater Tarantino films, like, say, the stupendously tricky and tense barroom confrontation in Inglourious Basterds. Yet a great many people seem to love The Hateful Eight, and the jarring discrepancy of opinion may finally be explained by how one relates to the film’s naughty, hyperbolic version of television aesthetics. Tarantino shot the movie in 70mm, but it’s a perverse vehicle indeed for that eye-popping technology, because The Hateful Eight is basically the longest, most lavishly preposterous Gunsmoke episode ever made. For many viewers, though, especially those who think that television is superior to movies, that may now count as a recommendation.
Let’s be clear: I have no objection, in principle, to a one-set Western talkathon. Visually confined dramas that consist of little more than verbal duels can be thrilling, from 12 Angry Men to My Dinner with Andre. But in The Hateful Eight, the talk doesn’t tingle; it’s leaden and often deadening. Tarantino’s outrageously loquacious dialog has often been the signature of his genius, but in The Hateful Eight the banter sounds like it was written by a dyspeptic country lawyer paid by the word. Everyone insists on explaining, over and over, what’s going on, even when almost nothing is.
The film is set in the wintry wilds of Wyoming just after the Civil War, and the first character we meet is a bounty hunter named John Ruth, played by Kurt Russell with a bluster so overstated that we keep waiting to see what’s beneath it. (Answer: nothing.) As a blizzard gathers force, Ruth rides in the back of a stagecoach handcuffed to his latest prey, a monosyllabic murderer played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who doesn’t have much to do besides leer, grunt, and get smashed in the face. (Around the third time this happens, it begins to seem as if the movie is getting off on it.) Russell appears to be doing a parody of John Wayne, and that’s fairly secondhand satire to encounter in a Tarantino film, but what’s most annoying about the True Grit japery is that the actor comes off as if he's desperate to do something, anything, to enliven all the blunt-witted expository dialogue he has to deliver. Russell seems to be acting like Wayne in order to keep himself awake.
Along the way, Ruth picks up two stragglers in the snow. Samuel L. Jackson, with the courtliest of inflections (he’s the one actor in the film who understates), plays Major Marquis Warren, a former officer in the Union Army who became so notorious for killing Confederate soldiers that he had a reward on his head; the film suggests that, as a black man, he had an added inspiration for all that killing, which is what made him so good at it. And then there is the fine actor Walton Goggins, who plays Mannix, a drawling varmint with dirty teeth and a sly yokel’s way of making himself sound much dumber than he really is. (He gets a lot of lines like: “Well, cut off my legs and call me shorty!”) You begin wishing pretty quickly for these people to start putting each other out of their misery.
Then the group arrives at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a gigantic way-station and supply-store cabin where they plan to stay until the blizzard subsides. Once inside Minnie’s, we meet the oddball travelers who are holed up there. And what a mangy, joyless crew of beady-eyed losers they are! Tim Roth seems to be doing a cut-rate Christoph Waltz impression, Michael Madsen is lost behind his long hair, Demián Bichir shows no personality as a token Mexican named Bob, and Bruce Dern, as a racist former Confederate officer, is all cookie-cutter crustiness and vitriol. You begin wishing pretty quickly for these people to start putting each other out of their misery.
I love nearly every Quentin Tarantino film but, in The Hateful Eight, his characters have no curlicues, no intrigue or subtext. They’re just wooden players in a one-note frontier version of And Then There Were None, though this one has exactly one plot twist. There are touches of Quentin’s trademark spryness. When a pot of coffee turns out to be poisoned, the baroque way the characters kick the bucket is a startling rebuke to every poisoning scene in Hollywood history. And the Jackson character’s “Lincoln letter”, a treasure, supposedly from Honest Abe himself, that he carries around like a talisman, is borderline hilarious in its plaintive sincerity. The film’s money shot is Jackson’s big speech to Dern about the way he punished Dern’s son after the War and, while it’s utterly incongruous (it sounds like something out of a ‘70s blaxploitation prison picture) you watch it in a state of delirious shock.
Yet why is almost everything else in The Hateful Eight ploddingly obvious? The film even reveals that twist ahead of time (the Russell character figures it out), and, by the last act, there’s nothing left for Tarantino to do but escalate the gore, as if that could somehow lend his movie substance. Splattered in blood, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy looks like Carrie at the prom, though that only makes you realize how thin a character she is by comparison.
The Hateful Eight makes a big deal out of being ‘The Eighth Film by Quentin Tarantino’ (though has he forgotten how to count? Or did he leave out Grindhouse or bracket Kill Bill, Vol 1 and Vol 2 as a single work?). That’s not a lot of movies, considering that he’s been at this for two dozen years, but the film The Hateful Eight made me think of most is the first film by Quentin Tarantino: Reservoir Dogs. It has half the running time but ten times the storytelling verve. It, too, has elements of being a one-set pressure cooker, but the violence and duplicity emerge with an organic horror and exhilaration. Most of all, the characters in Reservoir Dogs, Tim Roth in his wounded agony, Harvey Keitel in his rabid loyalty, even Michael Madsen in his ear-slashing madness, never seem less than real. They don’t come off as mere concoctions. It may be time for Tarantino to do a cinematic cleansing and get back to that kind of unpredictable purity.

Rico says, regardless, he can hardly wait... (And what's in your wallet, or is that holster?)