The Hateful Eight / The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

 Although my last post was all about how I don't watch a lot of movies, as I mentioned, I have been making an effort to watch more lately. One well-regarded filmmaker whose work I have seen a fair bit of is Quentin Tarantino. I'd seen most of his movies except for Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, and up until recently, The Hateful Eight. I had had a craving an old western movie for some reason. I had happened to see a tribute someone had made on YouTube when Ennio Morricone passed away, and the name sounded familiar but I could not remember who it was until I clicked on the video. When I found out that he composed for The Hateful Eight, I knew that that was what I was going to watch, especially because it was easily available on Netflix.

I thoroughly enjoyed the film. I thought it kept me on my toes for almost the complete film, and although Tarantino is most often praised for his dialogue, I actually think his character writing is the strongest element by far in this film. Although I didn't find all eight of the main characters compelling—Michael Madsen and Channing Tatum's characters are only so-so, and I don't care for Tim Roth's character at all—I do think that everyone else was pretty great. I couldn't help but analyze this film in mainly a historic and a political lens. Post-Civil War America, especially in the unsettled West, makes for a very compelling setting in both of these aspects. The level of respect for many things, race and gender most prominently, is entirely dependent on each individual character, not automatically assumed to be one specific way for every single character in the time period, like some less well-written period pieces. It allows each character to truly be their own, rather than just a fancied-up stereotype. Oh, and Ennio Morricone's music was absolutely incredible, right from the start. I was legitimately impressed by how strong the score was.

After finishing the film, I still had a bit of a taste left for a bit more western stuff. I had previously watched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and decided that I wanted to revisit that and see how I felt about it compared to The Hateful Eight. And while it was still very enjoyable and certainly not poorly made in any given aspect, I did find that I was less passionate about it than Hateful Eight by a pretty decent margin. I like the anthology style, so that's definitely something I liked about it. However, watching the first chapter immediately made me realize what made Tarantino's movie so strong—the character-building, like I mentioned before. In comparison to Hateful Eight's characters, most of them just lack depth and really do feel more like the stereotypes I mentioned earlier.

The fifth story, "The Gal Who Got Rattled" was my favorite precisely because it was really good at building up stakes. Actually, all of them were good at building up some sort of stakes, but this and "All Gold Canyon" were the only stories where they made me really care about the stakes. The characters in those two were likable and compelling, and "All Gold Canyon" gets extra points for barely using any dialogue, and for being a bizarre sort of feel-good story, in its own dark way.

Watching both films helped me appreciate each director's strengths and weaknesses and I'd like to do side-by-side viewings of other similar films in the future to this same effect.