I saw this yesterday, sold out theater, 70mm, the whole deal.....I'll say I liked it more then 'Django', but that it left me feeling mostly the same as 'Django, mostly unimpressed, and left wondering when Tarantino's great characters that were more then just funny names and English accents, all quirk and no substance.....the writing is often not as sharp as it needed to be, waiting for some of the actors to deliver brilliant and cutting dialoge, and instead left with a few one liners and Walton Goggins, who makes almost anything sound funny. I don't care much for the new Tarantino, he's lost his ability to craft criminals, gangsters, killers who speak in profanity laced tirades, who contain traces of humanity, a humanity that an audience can believe. Travolta and Jackson in 'Pulp Fiction'....remember when Travolta stood in the bathroom mirror and talked himself out of sleeping with Uma Thurman, despite their obvious mutual attraction and the fact he is a shy, heroin using hitman, who doesn't connect with many women? I loved that moment because it's so relatable....it feels real, it's funny and it's honest....I don't see that in his films anymore. I see a lot of indulgent, self serving, superficialness, masquerading as something more.
This movie is almost all window dressing. It is beautiful though, the snow covered landscapes and howling blizzard make for a perfect setting....Some of the running gags I liked, (the door) though wasn't used enough, some I liked less....'Mexican Bob' felt like VERY cheap laughs.... I loved Kurt Russell's performance, but what was the point of the John Wayne impression, that he already did in 'Death Proof'? Nothing really, just another spectacle in a movie full of them, without much of a reason to care. The set up is pretty incredible, I love the idea of a murder mystery, in the vein of Agatha Christie, but there was no real mystery to unravel, no real tension generated by that storyline, I loved the score, the actors, but the movie as a whole is hollow, with a lot of messy references to racisim, police brutality that make it's hollowness even more uneasy to me. Walton Goggins and Jackson were the standouts...I think his lines weren't enough for his acting, but that aside, he was consistently hilarious, 'Who in the HEEEEL is Jody Domengure'?
The suspense is pretty minimal, the violence, aside from occasionally eliciting a small laugh, wasn't funny or compelling....The ending was a spectacle of morbid violence, that I wanted to appreciate more then I did....It just seems so lacking in anything real, cartoonish violence, cartoonish characters, cartoonish story......I was pretty uncomfortable also with many, if not all of the '******' lines, but much more so with the fact that ALL the black characters, besides Jackson, (who was castrated) were massacred. In a sequence that felt very forced, and very repitive, that was the Kill Bill' wedding scene all over again, except showing the inside. Why? Why did Zoe Bell and the other extra characters need to be slaughtered, in a pointless flashback, that extends the sagging running time?
I'll give myself an intermission, and finish this later.
at you telling him "very good" on some sensei shytOne of the funniest lines of the movie.
to see Roth doing that.
