Tarantino's bloody funny Western: The Hateful Eight
- Francesca Laura Cersosimo
- 8 feb 2016
- Tempo di lettura: 2 min
The Hateful Eight by Quentin Tarantino has it all. This modern Western is funny, dynamic, with a genius screenplay and technical choices that mark the difference between Tarantino and any other director.
The flavour of Western pervades the whole movie: the visual format (The Hateful Eight was shot in Ultra Panavision 70) and the wonderful, overwhelming soundtrack by Ennio Morricone enstablish a strong connection to this genre, which becomes Tarantino's playground.
In the director's very peculiar idea of a Western, various elements find a place, from ratial tentions to prototypes of Western characters (the bounty hunter, the sheriff, the outlaw, the cowboy...), the main characters of this story.
Above: Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kurt Russell pose for the camera
Kurt Russel as John Ruth and Samuel L. Jackson as Major Marquis Warren © 2015 - The Weinstein Company
During a terrible snow storm, John Ruth (Kurt Russel), a bounty hunter who is bringing outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the city of Red Rock, where she can get her fair trial and be hanged, meets Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a war veteran, together with other men who are forced to wait in a cabin for the storm to stop. They are all strangers and do not trust each other.
Bruce Dern, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell and Tim Roth © 2015 - The Weinstein Company
An extraordinary screenplay, able to combine elements of locked-room mystery to sperimentations, as in the middle of the movie a Narrator intervenes to shift our ground. The viewer is disoriented and this has the effect of creating moments of pressing suspence, also because we expect some kind of splattering violece in Tarantino's movies, therefore we know that something (bad) is going to happen, any moment.
This is very self-referential of him, but we love Tarantino just the way he is. The reason being, such auto-quotation creates moments where hirony and repetition take over and build funny scenes, like when characters entering the cabin have to nail the door to close it properly, with everyone inside yelling at them: "Nail it! You have to nail it!!!"
Still of Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bruce Dern © 2015 - The Weinstein Company
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth, Walton Goggins, Demián Bichir, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, James Parks
Year: 2015
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