Review of The Hateful Eight (2015)

It almost seems daft, really, given that Quentin Tarantino has effectively made a career out of mining his own idiosyncrasies for profit, to level the criticism of "too odd" at his latest effort and eighth film, the bounty-revenge-Western-thriller-sorta-whodunit-but-more-whowilldowhat "The Hateful Eight". And odd is the wrong word anyway. Maybe... Idiosyncratic? Oh dear.

To point; this film, which runs to three hours long, has been shot in a long-retired 70MM format, has a new score from maestro Ennio Morricone, and has a cast billing that reads like a who's-who of Tarantino's greatest hits (Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Madsen, Philip Roth, Bruce Dern and more). It's maybe Tarantino's most 'mounted' film in terms of the prestige and craft that has been utilised to bring it to the screen, and the truly odd thing is how slight and insular the story it's telling is. If I were the kind of critic prone to making trite references to Shakespeare, I'd say something about this film being much ado.

A harsh blizzard is threatening the mountains and valleys of Wyoming. Kurt Russell's John "The Hangman" Ruth has captured Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and is bringing her in to collect the $10,000 bounty on her head and also to watch her hang, since that's his thing (he claims it's because he likes to keep hangmen in business, but since he says this to a hangman he's just met we assume this could be out of politeness, and also the film makes a point of making us distrust what characters say. I suspect it's another idiosyncrasy and also a device to keep Leigh alive).

On the way to the town of Red Rock, where Ruth can collect his bounty, they are stopped by Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) who manages to talk his way onto the coach through charm and the fact that the two have met before. Then they're stopped by Chris Mannix (Walter Goggins), a racist gang-member who claims to be the new Sheriff in Red Rock; Ruth doesn't believe him, but can't risk it, since Mannix would die in the snow and leaving him out there would constitute murder otherwise. There's also the coach driver, O.B Jackson (James Parks), but he seems fairly calm and non-violent, almost friendly.

This takes about half an hour. They arrive at "Minnie's Haberdashery" to shack up for the night, where they meet Oswaldo Mobray, aforementioned hangman (Tim Roth), Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), and Bob (Demián Bichir). All the characters embody types; Mobray is British, sardonic, overly polite. Gage is grouchy, distrusting and monosyllabic; Smithers is a racist veteran who doesn't leave his chair; Bob is also distrustful, but at the same time tries to be neutral. Minnie and her husband are nowhere to be seen.

As the film goes on it's pretty clear people are playing people and everyone is not quite who they seem. Of course, it's not long before blood starts to be shed; and in true Tarantino fashion, it pours. The most obvious structural reference point is, fittingly, "Reservoir Dogs"; this basically has the same structure as that film but with a half-hour prologue, and the gunfight at the end lasts for over an hour this time, and with a lengthy flashback for good measure.

The fact that it is so long and the length in service of so little is the first and most pressing of the film's issues, but far from its only one. For a start, there's the treatment of Leigh's character. There's an easy defence of the violence perpetuated towards her in that she is a murdering outlaw who has stepped into a man's world. But too often she's hit in the face (in brutal, thwacking, look-away-now crunches) and it feels like the punchline to a joke. Of course violence is often a joke in Tarantino-land (think of Marv from Pulp Fiction), but this feels a little too exaggerated and dwelt-upon for it to actually be funny. It feels like Tarantino is too often making a point of the fact that it's her being treated so cruelly, and this I found troublesome (I also felt the same way about Tarantino's persistent use of the n-word, which feels like he drops it in just so he can; why?)

This is also, to me, the film where Tarantino's vaudeville brand of comedy falls flattest. There's one protracted sequence involving a letter Warren has from Abraham Lincoln that probably runs to ten-plus minutes that grows steadily more risible by the second (although the payoff, where Warren explains the true origins of the letter, is maybe the only time the film gets at something more than just what's onscreen). But so much is made of the exaggerated delivery of words and the humour is so crude that it failed to take off; the levity it could have bought to the film felt heavy in itself.

Also... Once more, it's redundant to say that a Tarantino film goes too far, since he makes his films not so much in spite of but because of those kinds of criticisms, but there is one midway sequence involving a scene of cruelty that would get another less renowned film-maker into trouble. And there is so much of that violence for violence's sake attitude to the film that it becomes wearying. Django Unchained at least had the main character's established desire for revenge, and Inglorious Basterds seemed to be making a genuine statement (or as much as Tarantino can) about Jewish attitudes towards the cruelties enacted towards them in World War 2.

Here... People distrust each other, and then they die. We can never tell who's telling the truth to who, and they occasionally explode. The usual narrative tricks are played, including a voiceover halfway through which was as subtle as a brick through a window. There's no real sense of paranoia, or tension, just the ceaseless knowledge that at some point we're going to be expected to enjoy some death.

Maybe it sounds like I've expected things from a Tarantino film that he was just never going to deliver; too uneven, too violent, too unsubtle, too ultimately meaningless. The point is what's onscreen, he'd (probably) say. But there is no escaping the fact that this story is not worth the effort that has gone into the telling of it. It ultimately comes across as an Agatha Christie novel, if Agatha Christie had a penchant for ruining her twists halfway through and also a fetish for watching people get soaked in other people's brains.

It was too well-made for me to hate it with every fibre of its being (the score and cinematography saw to that), but inside this is by far Tarantino's most morally bankrupt work, and underneath the pretty artifice there is a putrid rotting corpse, at which Tarantino seems to want us to point and laugh.

Forgive me for looking away this time.

Review of Pudsey the Dog: The Movie (2014)

Pudsey the dog, for those who are unaware (such as me, for example), is a Border Collie, Bichon Frise, Chinese Crested powderpuff cross, as Wikipedia helpfully informs me. Certainly he's small, has a white coat, is kinda cute, and he won the TV show Britain's Got Talent because, I gather, he can get on his hind legs and turn around.

I say "I gather" because rather unhelpfully I have never watched Britain's Got Talent, and this display of craftsmanship is the only notable thing Pudsey does in the film, unless having a CGI jaw eerily tacked on so as to divulge in the audience the droll witticisms of David Walliams, who voices Pudsey, counts as a talent, which I don't think it does, since Pudsey and not Walliams won the show. Anyway, this is an admission of guilt; I am perhaps the least qualified person to review this film, knowing nothing about anything that helped spawned it, and not even being aware of Pudsey as a cultural phenomenon until I watched the trailer. If it makes you feel any better, from the title I expected this film to be about that yellow charity mascot. I watched this film because, simply, it was a hot summer's day and me and a friend ducked into the nearest available film. Mistress Fate, or The Gods, or perhaps some other deity dictated that it was going to be "Pudsey the Dog: The Movie" (as opposed to "Pudsey: The Movie", or even "Pudsey the Movie: The Dog").

I'm digressing here, I know, so let me cut straight to the cold hard facts; this is an abominable movie. It feels rushed, stale and derivative, the script hangs by a thread, the characters are barely formed, and some of the acting from the children is atrocious (I don't blame them; I imagine director Nick Moore's attention was on other things during filming, such as getting Pudsey to stay still when necessary, and hence the kids were overlooked).

There is no plot, merely a collection of scenes seemingly constructed around the lovable antics of Pudsey. Well, I say lovable, because I got the impression that was how he was meant to be taken, but in all honesty I couldn't find much to love about him. Indeed, after the opening scene where he trashes a film set and runs away (perhaps a metaphor for the making of this film...?), I found no real reason to root for Pudsey- to do so would be tantamount to endorsing wanton chaos and destruction.

As voiced by Walliams, the range of his interests runs from sausages to making loaded barbs, and uttering pointless observations regarding the current circumstances ("I tried to warn you!") despite the fact that nobody, literally not a single person in the entire world, can understand him, for he is burdened with the existence of a canine.

Oh, but how cruel I am being. This is a kids' film, after all, although I'm going to whisper to you the fact that none of the children in my screen laughed once. What I will say, instead, was that I approached this film in a mood of jollity and found it absolutely hilarious. Not because of any particular funny lines (Paul Rose's screenplay is the equivalent of a sneeze), or comic setups, but because the film is weird. Plain strange. Near-Lynchian, in places, in fact, and there's even some misguided subtext regarding eldest daughter Molly (Izzy Meikle-Small) of the family that Pudsey ends up with. Upon having moved to a farm and seeing a farmhand she's interested in, her first words are "that's a big cucumber".

Hm.

A later moment comes when Molly tries her hand at milking the cows, with the farmhand's guidance, and a rather unlikely spurt of white milk lands right in her eye, to which she yells "that's gross!"

A hidden treatise on the pitfalls of early sexual maturity, or lazy physical comedy? I leave that entirely up to you to decide.

There's even some approximation of fun to be had with John Session's dastardly Mr Thorne, who plans to bulldoze down the house he literally just sold to the family (headed by Jess Hyne's matriarch Gail), and build a fancy shopping centre, or something, on top of it- that old pitfall. It's nearly worth the vacuous waste of 87 minutes just to hear him utter the line "you scared away my Faustus!", referring to his cat, who runs away after Pudsey terrifies him into submission and leaves her a broken cat.

(Sure, it was meant to be lighthearted comedic play on the old feud between cats and dogs, but I saw what you were doing Pudsey, you cad.)

Other noteworthy moments of bafflement come when Pudsey hallucinates a bunch of sausages dancing in a forest in a sequence reiminscent of Walerian Borowczyk's "The Beast", and the moment the film tactfully implies that the children's father died ("Do you even know how to fix a tyre?"- "Dad did.")

What am I doing? I cannot, and am not, recommending this film, because it's terrible. Sure, I laughed, but I entered it in a good mood and read things into it that likely no other audience member will. I found it strange, baffling and misguided in equal measure.

Don't watch it. But if you enjoyed reading this review, then you have some sense of the kind of fun I had with the film; that comes with the disclaimer that you now have no need to watch the film. Go and watch Boyhood, or literally anything else that has ever been made, instead.