Quentin Tarantino only directed two movies during my time in prison. The second, “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”, was a smash hit that quickly made its way to basic cable during the pandemic. I remember the hotly anticipated debut well. I have since watched it outside of the confines of FX and realized they had only very lightly edited the film – FX was probably the most watched network in prison because of their light edits of R-rated movies.
I can completely understand Tarantino’s detractors. At the same time, I felt a great wave of emotion upon seeing certain sequences of the adventures of Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth. The utilitarian method of storytelling employed by most big budget productions had worn on me, and it was a thrill to see a movie where the filmmaker really cared about where the camera would go. I feel like I’m setting the bar very low, but it was a pleasure to be in the presence of a filmmaker who could sit the camera still, and let actors act, a filmmaker who appreciated spatial relationships between onscreen items and locations. They’re supposed to teach these things at film school.
It was always curious to me that “The Hateful Eight” never surfaced on basic cable, at least the more popular channels. I’ll never understand the rights issues afoot that allow some movies to play on multiple channels while other, theoretically popular fare would be unseen. I was in locations with a robust cable package, so I’m not certain I was missing anything. Unless “The Hateful Eight” popped up on Telemundo a lot?
Fortunately I was delighted that “The Hateful Eight” came exactly as advertised. This also felt like the best cast Tarantino’s had since “Pulp Fiction”. Ssome of his movies vaguely suffered due to the casting – not that they were poorly cast, but that there were endless colorful roles given to less than colorful actors. I recall “Inglourious Basterds” was developed and filmed fairly quickly, which meant the cast would feature the likes of Eli Roth, Michael Bacall, BJ Novak and Paul Rust instead of the Expendables-like lineup of action stars initially rumored. So there was a great deal of excitement when each member of this troupe (happily outnumbering eight) came upon the screen.
I suppose I cheated a bit by watching Netflix’s extended miniseries version of the epic. This runs a full three and a half hours, broken into four parts – the roadshow version of the film (which toured with an intermission) ran three hours and seven minutes, so there’s quite a bit added in to this experience. As much fun as this is, there’s certainly a bleak undertone to the film overall. This is one of those whodunits where the participants figure if solving a mystery and punishing the evil is the last thing they do (with a little revenge on the side), so be it.
The setting is 1877, and the film starts with a stagecoach populated by some of the greatest facial hair in movie history, on the faces of legends Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell. On a very basic level, I’m not sure why dozens of movies don’t start with such excellence. I could recount all the dynamics at play here, but essentially, Russell’s got a live bounty (national treasure Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Jackson’s got dead ones, and they need somewhere to sleep.
They arrive at a snowy cabin in the Wyoming wilderness, where the cast begins to spill in, each with their own backstory and shady motivations (or alibis). I’m not entirely sure why Tarantino called this “The Hateful Eight” since more than eight of these men are terrible. The title, and later the movie, certainly recalled a grindhouse classic, “The Cutthroats Nine”, a nasty piece of work about escaped convicts chained to each other. The surprise here is that more faces start to populate this relatively small, compact, isolated location, so by the time it feels as if you’ve reached the depths of their inhumanity, there’s always another rung for their cruelty.
Not surprisingly, the confines of prison are similar! Who knew? I knew, that was rhetorical and I’m not sure why I asked! There were a number of transitional places I occupied during my sentence where they utilized cells, two men to a room (and sometimes three, with that third guy on a mattress on a floor – this is illegal, by the way). But in the first of two federal institutions, most of us were housed in twelve man rooms, redesigned Air Force barracks with bunks and small lockers for everyone. There’s some sort of rule that every inmate is entitled to six feet of personal space, but I’m not sure how true that is – you could look it up, but it’s probably just one of several rules they don’t actually follow.
My second institution was a repurposed seminary. The open-air dorm rooms in which we lived, on a floor of maybe a hundred inmates, housed six, and I think it was converted from a three man arrangement. The extra room is made for the three other inmates due to bunk beds. There is no extra room on the ground. Unless you’re a very well-off person, imagine your bedroom shared by you and another person. That person also probably has questionable hygiene, they might be a gang member, they might snore, they might have a swastika tattoo on their face. And this person will be your roommate. Should there be a COVID shutdown, he will be your roommate ALL DAY. It is no longer a surprise to me that a movie like “The Hateful Eight” would end in a bloodbath.
Love this movie! Saw it when it opened, watched the Netflix miniseries and seen it twice in theaters since. Definitely liked it better than Django Unchained