Recent Articles
Showing posts with label Kurt Russell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kurt Russell. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
- 0 Comments
The Hateful Eight is a stubborn, difficult and unwieldy beast. It's three hours long. It mostly takes place in a single room. It's composed of wilfully long conversations between unlikeable men. Scenes are studded with uncomfortably casual violence against women. The word "nigger" peppers most scenes. Even the 70mm celluloid itself sounds like a pain in the arse - weighing in at a hefty 250lb and a couple of kilometers long.
But, make no bones about it, this movie is fucking grrrrrrreat.
The setup is so straightforward that it could be ripped from any cheapo thriller. Bounty hunter John "the Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell) is bringing in murderer Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Her trip to the gallows is delayed by a blizzard, stranding the characters in an isolated roadhouse, Minnie's Haberdashery.
The single room building traps a genuinely hateful crew of scum, liars and and sadists in close proximity. Each comes stacked with ulterior motives, dark secrets and murderous intent - and each is armed to the teeth. By the time the credits roll the wooden planks of Minnie's will run red with blood, brain matter, liquefied internal organs and puke.
This is easily Tarantino's most nihilistic work to date; a forensic investigation into American history and folklore that concludes with a diagnosis of incurable systematic rot. With its skeletal narrative and broad archetypes, the film begs us to view it as parable. with Minnie's Haberdashery a miniature United States of America. Now, this isn't a remotely subtle metaphor - Tarantino goes so far as to have his characters divide the room I Love Lucy-style between Union North and Confederate South: "The fireplace will be Georgia and the bar is Philadelphia."
Within this snowglobe are men that who've stepped straight out of the American subconscious. Swaddled in thick animal skins and glaring out from under impressive facial hair, they jockey each other for dominance as they playact a warped ideal of justice.
The omnipresent threat of violence acts as a catalyst for the most volatile fractures in the American psyche: endemic racism, capital punishment, fear and hatred of women, historical divisions and gun control. Tarantino rubs salt into these wounds, laying out his portrait of an society with its foundations sunk deep in blood.
That Tarantino would eventually go full political isn't such a big surprise. Both Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained explored the idea of liberation through revolutionary violence, the films a fantasy of granting victimised minorities ultimate power over those that tormented them. His support of the Black Lives Matter movement and subsequent public feud with the police union (who ominously promise a nasty "surprise" for Tarantino) underlines his recent commitment to overt political statements.
Yet where Django and Basterds find catharsis through violence, The Hateful Eight finds only ugliness. Perhaps the noblest man in the room is Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a Union war hero turned bounty hunter. Tarantino's dialogue is a perfect match for Jackson's precise cadence, so every line from his mouth is a joy to hear. Yet, his big triumphant moment is a sadistically delivered, extremely graphic description of him raping a man, and much of his desire later in the film is to "kill that bitch".
It creates an awkward disconnect between expectations and reality. We want Major Warren to fill out the shoes of the hero, to be a shining light in this mire of bigotry and racism. Yet he quickly proves almost as despicable as everyone else; for example, he doesn't so much as push back against racism as divert it for his own ends.
By the final scenes we're witnessing a calculated and ritualistic murder. The female victim looks like some totemic death goddess: framed to give her demonic wings, entirely covered in blood, gnashing jagged teeth and festooned with the limbs of her enemies. The black freedom fighter and virulent racist cop are pressed together in an homoerotic lynching, their faces contorted in orgasmic bliss. It's one hell of a weird image: decades of racial hatred forgotten in the name of unity against women.
Just as we think we've plumbed the depths, we're presented with an unexpected ray of light. Major Warren has been carrying around a letter from Abraham Lincoln, used as a prop to disarm white Unionists he encounters. As they bleed out, the men reverently recite it, finding consolation in his sage words. Complicating this is that both men know the letter is fake. As we close out to a Roy Orbison track, Tarantino leaves us to ponder whether a comforting lie is preferable to the truth: just because you know something doesn't exist doesn't mean you can't find inspiration in it. In this, perhaps, we see what he's trying to accomplish with his films.
The Hateful Eight is a complex and mature piece of writing - a riposte to those who accuse Tarantino of being all style and no substance. It almost goes without saying that it's downright beautiful too, from the wide landscapes (beautiful in 70mm) to the careful editing, outstanding Ennio Morricone score and lovingly curated gore effects.
That Tarantino has carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wants proves that this is not the worst of all possible worlds. A stunning achievement.
★★★★★
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
- 0 Comments
Allow me to sell you on a movie: Kurt Russell plays a hard-bitten old West Sheriff who must battle a tribe of mutant cannibal troglodytes to save his townsfolk. The title? Bone Tomahawk. Try saying that out loud, enunciate every lovely syllable, it's fun. BONE TOMAHAWK. With this set-up, lead actor and kickass title, writer/director S. Craig Zahler is sitting in front of an open goal and just needs to tap it in.
And he fluffs it.
Given that the main plot device is a tribe of hitherto unknown mutated cannibal cavemen, you might expect the film to be a zippy, Sam Raimi-esque horror. But aside from maybe 15 minutes of the climax, this is just a subpar Western that happens to feature mutant cannibals a bit.
Essentially a riff on The Searchers, the plot follows Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell) as he tries to rescue damsel in distress Samantha (Lili Simmons) from the cannibal tribe. He's joined in this by; his deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), an older man who compulsively chatters; John Brooder (Matthew Fox), whose family were killed by Native Americans and has sworn vengeance on them; and Samantha's husband Arthur O'Dwyer (Patrick Fox), who's desperate to get his wife back, yet struggling with a broken leg.
This motley bunch set out to rescue the wife, trekking across the wilderness to where they believe the troglodytes have made their lair. And boy do they trek. The film is more than two hours long and the vast majority of that time is spent watching Russell and co miserably trek from campsite to campsite while one character moans about his dodgy leg. Eventually (finally) we get to the cannibal lair where things pick up a bit with some satisfyingly gory action, but it's too little too late.
Bone Tomahawk's most obvious flaw is that none of the characters are particularly interesting nor exceptionally played. Drawn straight from the Big Book of Western Stereotypes, they speak in dialogue so rote it feels as if you've heard it all before. Disappointingly, Kurt Russell pretty much sleepwalks through his bog-standard Sheriff role, though no-one else particularly excels. Best of a bad bunch is Richard Jenkins' deputy, who at least has a modicum of personality.
The nadir is Lili Simmons' Samantha. Leaving aside the fact that her character is a seriously dull damsel in distress, Simmons simply isn't plausible as a resident of the Old West. There's a casting factor known as 'period face'; whether someone, at a glance, looks like they could fit into a time period. Matthew Fox has it, Sean Young (in a brief role) has it and an impressively beardy Kurt Russell has it in spades. Simmons simply doesn't, though she's not helped by a weird decision to give her lustrously gorgeous blonde hair after being locked in a cage by cavemen for a week.
Even ignoring all that, the basic plot conceit is seriously dodgy. A fair maiden kidnapped by savage natives is a plot that you can't really play straight in 2015, something compounded by a focus on Samantha being threatened with rape: "Just imagine what they're doing to her! Right this second!" the characters breathlessly exclaim.
To some extent, the film appears to realise that it's in murky waters, inserting a scene early on where an unnamed Native American character assures us that though the villains may look like Indians, scalp their victims and generally fulfil the exact plot device of Indians in unreconstructed Westerns, don't be fooled - they're definitely not Indians.
On the long road trip there's a couple of tantalising hints of a late plot twist when our heroes shoot some defenceless Mexicans that approach them in the night and generally act in a cavalier manner about their past bloodshed. "Ah-ha!" you think. "Maybe they're the real monsters, not the cannibal savages!" Sadly even this mild complexity is beyond Bone Tomahawk - you can be assured that the cannibal savages are indeed the real monsters.
Sadly this is a wasted opportunity all round; squandering a decently pulpy horror set-up, Kurt Russell and a decent supporting cast and wasting a kickass title. Being both dull and offensive is a lethal combination. Bone Tomahawk is one to avoid.
★
Bone Tomahawk is released 11 December 2015.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
