The Hateful Eight

https://youtu.be/69UwVX6Riv8

I saw this as part of the Hateful 8 roadshow which is the only way to see it I think. I was in a superb restored old fashioned picture house...the AFI screen in Silver Spring...and the whole experience was magical...not a word one would usually use in association with a Tarantino movie. We received a programme and a little piece of 70MM film on entry which got things off too a great start.

They drew curtains across the screen then, as the overture began ( Ennio Morricone!!!) they slid back slowly to reveal the 70MM screen. They seemed to go back for an infinitely long time and it was revelatory to see a film in this format. The proportions were so right and the image so crystalline that it made we wonder why all films were not created in this way. So different from digital IMAX on which I saw Star Wars. And it was the proportions that we so right not just the size of the screen.

The setting , Wyoming, was the perfect one for this format although it is slightly ironical that much of the action took place on one interior set...but the scenes outside were stunning in their grandeur.

The story was bloody, clever, very funny and superbly well written ( God he can write well!) with a superb poetic prose rhythm that is utterly unique in film... and in much writing period.

It was a true epic clocking in at a little over three johns but there was not one superfluous word, one over-extended shot, one over-long sequence. Everything felt just right and I was totally spellbound by it. After the intermission ( yes we even had one of those...the only thing missing being girls selling ice creams and cigarettes in the aisles) there was a superb plot/ structural twist that was classic QT.

Performances were uniformly superb with many of his stable of actors doing their stuff in the way that only they can.

This was a superb way to spend New Years Eve. What a film!

Macbeth

Concussion