Quentin Tarantino
The Hateful Eight

A few weeks away from the cinematic event of the century, the criminogenic and irrevocable Scorsese-like final act of The Irishman (which preceded a melancholic and faded Joker portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, the carnival-esque tragedy of nightmare Gotham, with its circus caravan of anguish, trepidation, and unease) and the controversial electromagnetic explosion of Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood, the last effort from Our Man and likely a luxurious failure, it is urgent to pay the rightful prestige to a work that managed to split both critics and audiences in half. A film conceived, written, and executed to perfection, the most ferocious and shocking western since the days of Sergio Leone and “Bloody Sam” Peckinpah, the original western by Quentin Tarantino, capable of skyrocketing bookmakers and ensnaring fools, of fraying nerves by spreading in the bustling anticipation of a guaranteed masterpiece, equal to Don Giovanni at the Vienna Opera or a lavish pièce with Scorsese or Allen on Broadway, about three hours of gruesome American madness, sandpaper novel of a still anarchic and wild land, in a dusty and dazzling era, where the price of life is decided in the claustrophobic darkness of a revolver’s drum or in the scraped gallery of an over-under Winchester.

From the impossible gestation of a stolen screenplay to the frantic anticipation of 70mm screenings, a time and atmosphere that accompany every work of the Inglorious Basterds director; particularly this film, which is certainly not the easiest to show to audiences. A mad and foggy feature film that embarrassed and annoyed America, all of it, as had rarely happened before, a mini-colossal in “hardboiled with rattles” format mixing genres on styles while remaining faithful to the line skillfully marked by the former enfant prodige of Knoxville, the golden boy plundered of Pulp, who perhaps has given us the most passionate and complex story that a tragic and mysterious era like ours was capable of metabolizing.

And so it was.

We had to swallow the frog. We didn’t know how much it would hurt us, we weren’t ready. No, we weren’t ready at all. And yet, we had to accept it, we were forced. Quentin Tarantino made us swallow that fetid morsel, pointing a gun between our eyes. Perhaps the same one that armed one of his characters in Minnie’s haberdashery. Meanwhile, the snow danced through the cracks and wooden panels of a store that no longer exists, never existed, materialized in our minds, imprisoning the hateful eight and each of us.

The Ultra Panavision 70mm technique is not only the definitive declaration of love from an eternal fiancé of the seventh art, it doesn’t solely serve as a precious instrumental artifice or a luxurious technological appendix. The 70mm is a filmic rite, the superhuman ritual of the relentless and flaming tracking shot, a surgical and transcendental execution of the zenith in the marble and tormented frames, a multicolored and boundless apex of interpretation, sublime and decadent scenic immortality. Carnal and disenchanted word, sweet and murderous depiction of life. A very rapid and abulic spiritual flame that curled fingers hide from the wind, in the night.

The Hateful Eight is light years away from the farcical Django Unchained. There is no rhetoric, absent too are the triumphant historical revisitations and the brilliance of the myth. Tarantino has let his oceanic skill flow and has done so by accepting and respecting the nebulous reality of the present. Racism (suffered and inflicted, exercised and endured), delinquency, and moral and political chaos dominate unchallenged in snowy Wyoming and throughout that young America, rebellious and battered, full and grinning. The dark land of a disorderly and unstoppable nation set as an ancestral backdrop for a fragment of humanity, obsessed and unappealable, greedy and furious, which has unleashed a total war with the rest of the world and can no longer stop.

The bloodiest, grimmest, and most lethal film by Quentin Tarantino.

Also the greatest?