The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight, 2015

Directed by Quentin Tarantino, 187 minutes

Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Tim Roth

Review by Katherine Scheetz

              With shots of vast, snow-covered Wyoming boonies and gunslinger style font, tribute to the mighty gods of Western film is paid in the opening credits. Whether you like his style or not, you respect Tarantino’s nod at his cinematic heritage.

             

         Bounty Hunter John Ruth (Russell) has hired out the last stagecoach to Red Rock transporting outlaw Daisy Domergue (Leigh) and outrunning a blizzard. After two cleverly written verbal shoot outs, he reluctantly ends up with strays, Major Warren (Jackson) and Sheriff Mannix (Goggins), en route to Minnie’s Haberdashery, their rest stop to wait out the snowstorm. In the post-Civil War upheaval there could not be a more gregarious coach ride.

              Upon arrival at the cabin we wait patiently for each character to nail the door closed behind themselves and then, once a gloved hand slips poison into the coffee, settle in for what promises to be the bloodiest game of Whodunnit? we’ve ever seen. Tarantino does not disappoint.

              With displayed scene titles and four walls keeping them in, the illusion of a stage play is only lacking in red-velvet curtains framing the screen.

              Jennifer Jason Leigh is not the standard female of an old western, and boy, do the men want her to know it. She looks positively Carrie-like by the end of the film, though not without putting up a fight. Her groadie, seductive swagger earns her more than a few broken bones as does her sharp tongue. Watching the lit-stick-of-dynamite ensemble circle her, chained in place, is a testament to Leigh’s command of Daisy.

              With his usual finesse, Tarantino overdoes all the stereotypes: southern, white supremacy racist in an office daddy bought him, black Civil War vet gone rogue out in the west, old school, southern general and stoic, soulful cowboy. Even the minor characters bleed with super-saturated, Manifest Destiny enthusiasm. It is Tarantino’s way and he does it so very well against Ennio Morricone’s orchestral nail-biter of a score.

              If you can stomach chunks of human in another person’s hair, then enjoy what Tarantino has offered up.              

                           

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The Revenant

The Revenant, 2015

Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 156 minutes

Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domnhall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck

Review by Katherine Scheetz

In The Revenant, Director Iñárritu takes us to the ass-end of the earth and with establishing shots that stop your heart, turns us into believers.

The film chronicles frontiersman Hugh Glass (DiCaprio), who is known for surviving a grizzly bear attack and then crawling 200 miles through the unforgiving Dakota territory back to Fort Kiowa after being abandoned and left for dead.

At the time of the bear incident Glass’ fur-trading possé includes pretty boy Captain Henry (Gleeson), a crass, scalped Fitzgerald (Hardy), the naïve, smooth-faced Bridger (Poulter) and Glass’ half-Pawnee son, Hawk (Goodluck). For those that don’t know Gleeson’s name yet: he’s the ginger in any film you’ve seen since Harry Potter ended and he is one to watch. Meanwhile Hardy spits out his dialogue opposite a cool-headed DiCaprio. It’s blatant the two of them needed one another on set.

Yes, the mauling is rattling to watch but the virtue of the film is in how Iñárritu shows everything that follows. Glass sucks marrow out of snow covered animal skeletons. He cauterizes his own neck wound with gunpowder and flint. He cracks open the steaming carcass of a horse to survive yet another blizzard. In this role, DiCaprio tests the limits on the resilience of the human spirit.

Iñárritu doesn’t stop there. He threads in a narrative of the crumbling nations of Arikara and Pawnee, which include Glass’s Pawnee wife and son, giving unfiltered exposure to the festering flesh of how the west was really won. Fever-induced dreams unfold Glass’ backstory and the origin of his respect for the natural world. That reverence, learned from his time with his wife, is reinforced in a tender encounter with a weather-worn Pawnee man.

Settling like a fresh fallen snow atop the layers of story is the cinematography executed by Emmanuel Lubezki. He and Iñárritu romance us with amber firelight against blue-white birch bark. Just the panning landscapes and the minimal, hair-raising score by Ryûichi Sakamoto would make an excellent documentary. But it’s all done in natural lighting, it’s all done with the mud and sweat from the days before still caked on. The Revenant is a benchmark and with the audience's blessing, may Hollywood produce many more.

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The Good Dinosaur

The Good Dinosaur, 2015

Directed by Peter Sohn, 93 minutes

Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Raymond Ochoa, Jack Bright

Review by Katherine Scheetz

              With phenomenon Inside Out (2015) grossing $90 million in her opening weekend, The Good Dinosaur (2015), at a mere $39 million on its Thanksgiving day release, is the starving artist, still-discovering-myself sibling at the holiday table in a family of engineers. Which is a shame, really, because there are elements of The Good Dinosaur that are genuinely a pleasure.

              Visually, it meets all the standards of an enigmatic Pixar piece: from pudding-like mud upon the silo and wind-swept fields freckled with longhorns, to the effervescent moment of fireflies bubbling up around Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) and Spot (Jack Bright, ). It is saturated with doe-eyed, pre-historic creatures and all their caricatured oddities. But it doesn’t exceed expectations, a grave that Disney-Pixar dug themselves into.

              In terms of atmosphere, composing brothers Mychael and Jeff Danna deliver a deliciously wholesome score, full prairie fiddles, piping Mexican standoff hums and deep horns evocative of rolling Midwest hills. Danna and Danna are, as usual, not afraid of taking non-traditional instruments and non-traditional sounds whether that be steel drums, Gregorian chants or Middle Eastern mandolin, in order to create the desired effect. If nothing else, this film is a lesson in how music informs the entire mood of a film. What makes the story relatable is the good-ole-American Manifest Destiny feel of the score. Without that, this is just an updated Land Before Time (1988).

             

The storytelling is cliché, to the point where we can’t stop ourselves from sighing when Dino-dad is washed away in the most Mufasa-like imitation that Disney should be suing itself. While the cast has done well with their voices, embodying each prairie-home-companion dinosaur personalities, the characters are simplistic, merely a representation of an archetype within the narrative.

              All these can be forgiven, as archetypes, caricatures and straightforward storytelling can be instructive and self-reflective. But the overabundance of morals leaves us bogged down with confusion. In between the mixed signals of advice from Poppa (Jeffrey Wright), lessons learned on the road and dream-induced flashbacks, the meanings of most of these messages gets lost. That being said, at the end of the film, one lesson does make it through the fog: when you are able to let go of judgment beautiful things can happen.

And I will say this: The longhorn droving T-Rex family nails it. Two words: bug harmonica.

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