Tarantino's new movie

We went to see Quintin Tarantino's latest, The Hateful Eight the other day. I had high hopes, given how much I liked Django Unchained. If you remember, in that one Tarantino put slavery smack dab in the middle of a cowboy western, where the biggest horror of the movie was slavery itself. (Hello-Texas was a slave state, but how often has that come up in westerns?) What's more, Tarantino carefully refused to apply his characteristic clown-act violence filter to slavery and earned my eternal respect. The Hateful Eight is not quite that cool, but still is a hell of a movie. Set just a few years after the Civil War, not in Texas, but rather in Wyoming or Montana or someplace cold and snowy, it stars Samuel L Jackson. Like Django, it's a hell of a ride, and all about race relations in America. 

It opened in select theaters in 70mm, a format that came and went in the 60s. Now it's in wide release in the more common digital format as well. We went to the 70mm version at the Pacific Place. I was flabbergasted when the ticket price, even with senior rate applied, was almost $15. The box office guy said, "Well, there's a $4 surcharge for the new format." I almost laughed myself off my feet, since 70mm is an atavistic format, hardly new. Once the flick started, I looked carefully to see what I predicted would happen. The screen was, of course, the same size as always. 70mm, which was twice as wide as the more standard 35mm wide-screen film format, had an aspect ratio that was relatively wide compared to the height. Projecting this 70mm film onto a standard modern screen meant they had to letterbox it, sort of like watching a regular "widescreen" movie which wasn't formatted to fit your old square TV. So really the 70mm thing was just hype, and an excuse to up-charge. I can sort of understand when theaters charge extra for 3D. They take 50¢ glasses, charge you $4 for them. OK, I know it's a rip-off, but sometimes I'm willing to pay the extra for the hope of flash-bang effects. But to charge $4 for a letter-boxed 70mm format is something akin to charging extra if the movie was shot in black and white, instead of color.  And the entire second half of the flick was shot indoors, where there was no chance of any sort of panorama anyway, unless you count two guys standing on opposite sides of the screen firing away at each other.

Format carping aside, I really liked The Hateful Eight. The Seattle Times only gave it a 2 star rating. Of course they only gave Django Unchained one star (and that film went on to win an Academy Award!). The Times clearly doesn't get Quinton Tarantino's views on race in America. I'd venture to say that if Hateful had been done by a black director, it would have garnered a better review. Hateful 8 is an excellent movie, Django was truly ground-breaking.

Randy Rowland