Recommendation Index: ★★★★ ☆
There is no doubt that "Mad Max 4" is the first hi movie of the year for fans, so what about the second hi?
We think it was "Eight Wicked Men" that was selected as one of the top ten films of the year for Universal Screen 2015 Complete Film.
On the surface, "Eight Wicked Men" seems to be a repetition of quentin Tarantino in his fifties. From kung fu films to car chase films to World War II films, Kun Pi after the new millennium has been wandering around spontaneously. But after the success of "Liberated Django", Kun Pi once again stepped into the river of Westerns, which makes people wonder, is Kun Pi really exhausted, qian donkey skills are poor?
We can tell you that the answer is not so!
Yes, Kun Pi is now making more and more disciplined films; yes, the previously exposed sense of form is becoming less and less common in his recent films. But we also see the maturity and transformation of Kun Pi from "The Eight Wicked Men".
Whether in "Kill Bill", "King Kong is not bad" or "Django", Kun Pi's most important emphasis is on the fun of the characters and the sensual pleasure brought by the revenge plot, but the characters in "Eight Wicked Men" are no longer bad and cute, but they are full of anger, and the violence in "Eight Wicked Men" has begun to become abominable.
Kun Pi made these changes because now he seems to really want to say something seriously, and the mutual hatred of different races in "The Eight Wicked Men" refers to the pervasive contemporary United States, and in such an environment, the dream of equality symbolized by President Lincoln is so unattainable.
Synopsis
A year shortly after the end of the Civil War, Wyoming. John Ruth (Cote Russell), known as the "Hanger," is riding in a stagecoach on a snowy road, accompanied by Daisy Domogu (Jennifer Jason Lee), an outlaw fanatic who has taken him to the Redstone Execution Ground, Former North Army Major Marquis Warren (Samuel Jackson), who claims to be a bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a former South Army deserter who claims to be the new sheriff of Redstone. As the blizzard approaches, the trio stops at their usual coaching inn, only to find that the owner, Minnie, is not present, and instead is Bob (Demian Bizier), a "Mexican" who claims to be watching for Minnie, Osvaldo Mobray, the "little man" who claims to be the new executioner in Red rock, the mysterious cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and the former Confederate general Stanford Smyser (Bruce Dunn). The suspicious Ruth, believing that there must be Domogu's accomplices, took everyone's guns out of caution; however, a cup of poisoned coffee eventually ignited the atmosphere of violence at Minnie's Inn, and everyone had to rely on brute force and ingenuity to clarify the truth of the situation.
Story: 8 points
By and large, Eight Wicked Men has an indoor suspense drama framework, driven by the protagonist's speculative quest for potential murderers, who is John Ruth in the first half of the film and Major Warren and Sheriff Manix in the second half. As usual, Quentin still uses dialogue to have the characters test each other and look for clues. The repeated confrontations have made "Eight Wicked Men" continue to be in a high-energy state, it is like the bar scene of "Shameless Bastards" and the contract signing battle of "Django Liberated" has been cut to three hours, and fans who like this kind of Quentin-style scene will surely be hooked.
The fly in the ointment of the story is that Quentin leaked the mystery too early, so that the flashback of the fourth chapter of the film slowed down the pace of the film, and the long-winded bargain in the fifth chapter lost its sense of suspense. As for the map cannon between the characters in the second and third chapters of the film, it is regarded by some viewers as a drag, but it seems to us to be quite exciting, first of all, it plays an extremely important role in the character construction of these eight characters, and the things the characters talk about themselves — whether the Southerners' resistance to government power in the Civil War was justified, and how blacks rebelled against the unequal racial order through lies— are indeed interesting. The "Lincoln's Letter" in Major Warren's hand is Quentin's miraculous stroke, and it appears three times throughout the film, each time referring to a new meaning.
Performance: 9 points
As a group show, each member of the Eight Wicked Men (in fact, there are nine evil people in the film) performed well. One of the most brilliant is Quentin's old partner Samuel Jackson, who plays Major Warren like a combination of The Killer Jules in Pulp Fiction and Stephen the Old Black Slave in "The Liberated Django". The character has a clear mind and a strong aura, and uses his own reasoning to drive the plot forward; however, under the tough appearance, he still has to use elaborate lies to please the Caucasians in order to protect himself.
This complexity and ambiguity are vividly interpreted by Jackson.
The biggest sacrifice for the film was the actress Jennifer Jason Lee, who played the outlaw maniac. In the film, she is beaten, vomited blood, shot, and suffocated, which can be described as a lot of suffering. But she is also indeed a character who will stop at nothing to survive and makes people hate the root of her teeth, and her evil spirit and fierceness are enough to occupy an important position in the pantheon of Quentin's character.
The most surprising actor is Walton Goggins, who plays Redstone Sheriff, a guy who, although he has not much film work, is well versed in his lines, vividly interprets a superficially slippery and innerly tough Southern bun, and does not fall behind in the play with Samuel Jackson. Quentin's remaining old partners, Michael Madsen, Tim Rose, and Bruce Dunn, dutifully accomplished their respective tasks.
Images: 8 points
Quentin teamed up again with his cinematographer partner Robert Richardson to shoot "The Eight Wicked Men" on 70mm film. For a film based on indoor scenes, such a format is slightly overkill, but the few magnificent snowy location shots in the film are enough to be worth the ticket price. The ultra-wide scale of 2.76:1 also allows the camera to see all the characters in the inn, and the clues to solve the mystery of the plot are hidden in the details of the picture that are easy to be overlooked.
Music: 8 points
"Eight Wicked Men" was Quentin's first deep collaboration with The Greatest Soundtrack artist in film history, Enio Morricone, but the results were not as stunning as everyone thought, and it seemed that such a collaboration made both of them a little tied.
Quentin has always liked to embellish his retro movie scenes with unexpected but reasonable old film soundtracks, mixing the confrontation between Uma Thurman and Liu Yuling in "Kill Bill" with the soundtrack of the Western "Death On Horseback", and using the music of the Italian lead-yellow horror film "Flower Destroyer" to match the appearances of several girls in "King Kong Is Not Bad", all of which are Quentin's divine strokes, and these two soundtracks are from Morricone's hand. Morricone himself was dissatisfied with Quentin's use of music, believing it to be a "dismemberment" of his work and claiming that he would never work with Quentin again.
However, perhaps out of respect for Quentin's talent, Master Mo retracted the foreword and created his first set of Western soundtracks in thirty years for Eight Wicked Men. But his creation was ultimately a bit too formal, failing to spark with Quentin as he had done with Leone forty or fifty years earlier. Interestingly, some of the best soundtracks in The Eight Wicked Men are still "stolen" by Quentin: the film opens with a carriage driving through the clear snowy fields, accompanied by lyrical music composed by Morricone for The Exorcist II, and the ending song of the film is Roy Orbison's "There Won't Be Many Coming Home", whose natural voice is also an important part of David Lynch's film Blue Velvet.
At the same time, the music also provides a blindfold function for an important plot twist in "Eight Wicked Men", which those who have seen the movie will not forget.
TIPS
1. If you like "Eight Wicked Men", you should also watch movies and TV series:
A. The Virginian and The Cowboys of Bernanza in the 1960s
Quentin himself confessed to the impact of these two Western tv series on The Eight Wicked: "In these two sets of episodes, you won't see whether the characters in the show are good guys or bad guys until the end of each episode. So I thought, why don't I write a similar story, let these indistinguishable characters sit together and fight each other? It is worth noting that Bruce Dunn, a veteran actor who played the General of the Confederate Army in "Eight Wicked Men", has acted in both sets of TV series.
B. Carpenter horror film "Strange Shape"
Cold environments, claustrophobic spaces, untrustworthy companions, and the outrageous defender of order played by Kurt Russell... Yes, all of the above qualities of "Eight Wicked Men" are found in John Carpenter's classic "Strange Shape", and Quentin even used several Morricone soundtracks that Were abandoned by Carpenter in his own films. These two parts take place in past and future films, and if you can do a double-film series, it will definitely be an interesting experience.
2. The Eight Wicked Men are in the past and the present
Samuel Jackson: 1989/2015
Jennifer Jason Lee: 1985/2015
Tim Ross: 1984/2015
Bruce Dunn: 1976/2015
Quentin Tarantino: 1991/2015
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The full content of "Eight Wicked Men" can be found in the first issue of "Global Screen" in 2016 and the "2015 Complete Movie" in the hot sale
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