The Hateful Eight, Beasts of No Nation

The creative stasis of Quentin Tarantino is confirmed in the intermittently entertaining The Hateful Eight. My wife thinks he is lost without an Uma, a bitch goddess to build his film around. The Hateful Eight is Tarantino's third straight revenge film based on racial animus and its dramatic core is bloated and redundant. Reality and logic are out the window as Tarantino's racial obsessions are turned (Mad magazine style) into scenes he'd like to see. Fair enough, I think any filmmaker ought to work his or her obsessions out onto 70MM celluloid. But when Quentin's ultimate revenge fantasy is Samuel L. Jackson forcing a racist Southerner to orally satisfy him than I think Tarantino has taken the concept of Mailer's "White Negro" too much to heart.

There is no romantic element as in Django Unchained, just the hateful eights knocking each other off And Then There Were None style. The dialogue contains the usual extended riffs, maybe too extended, but Tarantino remains a gifted director of actors. He utilizes Michael Madsen better than anyone besides Ridley Scott in Thelma and Louise. The closeups of Madsen are the most loving in the film. Tim Roth handles his role with aplomb. Critical opinion on Jennifer Jason Leigh was divided as ever, but I feel her performance is the most memorable one in the film. Like her or not, she is a gutsy performer who seems gung ho to meet every disgusting challenge Tarantino throws her way. Nearly toothless, with blood and chunks of brain matter in her hair, Leigh is without vanity or inhibition. Tarantino does not succeed with all of his players. Walton Goggins is too cartoon like, Kurt Russell is too charming to be a badass, and Samuel L. Jackson's badass routine seems rote this time. Nevertheless, my concept of what constitutes badassdom could be called into question since I am a dadass. 

Ultimately, The Hateful Eight is a horror movie dressed in western garb. Tarantino telegraphs this by opening the film with a shot of a crucifix that seems to belong in Transylvania and not Colorado. The film belongs to that subgenre Joe Bob Briggs classified as "spam in a cabin". Briggs was reviewing The Evil Dead when he coined that phrase, but Tarantino lacks the visual brio Sam Raimi employs in such projects, needed to charge grand guignol flicks to life. Tarantino wants this film to be both a grindhouse entertainment and a racial parable. A whiny cracker and a black superstud are the only ones left standing at film's end: red and blue America remain after the carnage of America's history. A new hope for the future or locked in perpetual struggle? Tarantino does not enlighten us. Compare this to The Assassin, which confronts the moral dilemmas of a revenge narrative, and it looks like Tarantino is treading water here.

Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation

Cary Joji Fukunaga's Beasts of No Nation is a prestige picture that earned my respect, if not my enthusiasm. A mélange of Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies, the film gives us a compelling portrait of good and evil in modern day Africa, but fails to bring its characters to life. Idris Elba is a good fit for the "Kurtz" role, but Fukunaga is unable to bring out his manic intensity as he did with Matthew McConaughey in True Detective. A few moments stand out, particularly a dolly through the trenches reminiscent of Paths of Glory that conveys the squalor of warfare. While the film is competently made and has a moral seriousness that The Hateful Eight lacks, it failed to move me. (3/15/16)