The Hateful Eight

THE HATEFUL EIGHT   **

Quentin Tarantino

2015

IDEA:  Wyoming shortly after the Civil War. Eight disparate individuals on the way to Red Rock are cooped up in a cabin stopover during a blizzard, suspicions growing as nobody seems to be quite who they say they are. 

BLURB:  Tarantino seems to be regressing. As his films have grown more grandiose in subject matter and theme, they have also become increasingly bloated and overwrought, not to mention juvenile and cruel. For a while, The Hateful Eight appears to be building toward something better as it carefully sets up its chamber piece scenario, corralling its diverse characters and generating tension from the distrust, animosity, and guarded motives they harbor. Ennio Morricone’s dread-inducing score pounds away with their every cautious forward movement, signaling that the film belongs as much to the horror genre as it does the western, and that a collective release of malice is surely yet to come. And come it does, resulting in queasily bountiful sprays of blood and bodies piling up. It’s sooner rather than later that the narrative and its intrigues fall apart, the reveal of the story’s true course as unimaginative and ultimately predictable as the bloodlust that seems more than ever to be the main goal. Tarantino has always enjoyed setting up overripe scenes and letting them unfurl before a burst of violent mayhem, but rarely has the aftermath felt so gruesome for gruesome’s sake, brutality so punishingly acrid that any trace of humanity has been all but extinguished from his sordid game. Although he positions his viper’s nest of racism and rancor as a microcosm of volatile post-Civil War America, and by extension of an enduringly fraught sociopolitical climate, any serious indictment of violence the movie may offer is quickly erased by how much glee the director derives from the cruelty he engineers. Cloaking his three-hour schlock under the pretense of contemporarily resonant historical drama isn’t only self-aggrandizing, but highly dubious.

The Good Dinosaur

THE GOOD DINOSAUR   ***

Peter Sohn

2015

IDEA:  Dinosaurs continue to roam the earth after the asteroid intended to extinguish them passes by. In this alternate reality, a young, estranged Apatosaurus named Arlo befriends an orphaned human boy.

BLURB:  It seems entirely paradoxical, but The Good Dinosaur may very well be Pixar’s most formulaic film to date as well as its most unusual. For a studio renowned for its inventiveness and expansive imagination, it is unusual, firstly, because it feels so formulaic. Discarding a bounty of unique storytelling possibilities inherent in its intriguing premise, the studio ends up with a derivative journey-back-home narrative centered on orphans, interspecies friendship, and familiar themes of family and overcoming fear. Most unusual, though, is not the fact of this slim and uninspired narrative but what is foregrounded in its stead. The Good Dinosaur represents perhaps the first time Pixar has shifted its primary focus from story or even character and placed it on purely perceptual principles, drawing our attention to the meticulous optics of texture, light, and movement. Mountains, water, rocks, dirt, foliage, and various animal flesh are rendered with jaw-dropping, hyperreal tactility, becoming the film’s true content. They are observed with a reverence for the natural world seldom seen in mainstream Western animation. Even rarer is the film’s violent physicality, its lifelike sense of the effects of environment on bodies and its bizarre, at times comical fascination with somatic trauma. Where so much CG animation feels plastic and weightless, Pixar’s film is remarkable for how much it invests in corporeality and tangible physical expression, a gift for conveying through image that extends to the beautifully wrought central relationship. On one hand, The Good Dinosaur is a disappointingly undercooked piece of storytelling. On the other, it has freed up the technologically and artistically superior studio to indulge in its most lyrical work yet.