By Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Translator: Issac
Proofreader: Onegin
Source: AV Club
Quentin Tarantino's Eight Wicked Men is a three-hour, snow-heavy Western, dramatic, difficult to shoot, and the director is not known for this type of film.
The Eight Wicked Men
Progresses slowly at the beginning, with little direct action, until the intermission, when the film erupts in the most despicable, horrific, and nihilistic violence of Tarantino's career, ending with a disturbing hope.
The film was shot on 70mm film, but most of the scenes were set in a room, a show of the writer-director's renegade commitment to The United States: a psychopathic scene of a group of abusive people who are relieved by the illusion.
The Eight Wicked Men say that the American ideal is just a lie, but in the end, when the smooth floor is stained with blood and brain plasma, and the badly injured imitate the ritual of justice, it looks like an ideal that could have been fulfilled, and one day it will be difficult for people to make their dreams come true because they are blinded by it. Who would have predicted that Quentin Tarantino, the director of "Falling Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction," would eventually become a political film director?
The Eight Wicked Adventures in the realm of Sam Pezinpa's previous work and the more politically important Italian macaroni Westerns, but it is also thanks to John Carpenter's The Strange Shape, which shares a common star, composer, and many similarities.
The claustrophobic setup—seven bad men and a wild woman trapped in a roadside hotel in Wyoming—brought out the ugliest group of people, and at first we saw slander and accusations, and then we saw blood mist and headshots.
But even for the sake of hilarity, this was still Tarantino's first film that might be called a play. With an orchestral score (still by Ennio Morricone), the eight wicked men plays can be used as a stage play, in which Tarantino, a multi-style artist, moves as close as possible to the classic tradition, showing the intertwined antagonisms and suspicions of the story through the most sober and complex movements. The long lens unbelievably delivers the sharpness of 70mm film while the focus jumps from foreground to rear at perfect timing.
Eight Wicked Men is Tarantino's third consecutive remake of the Western, and initially he wanted to use the film as a sequel to Django Rescued. Unlike Django Rescued and Shameless Bastards, it is not a historical fantasy film, although it also depicts the evils of the past, such as potential revenge.
Django Rescued
Although he was obsessed with making films out of film, the content of his references and the influences he received had political significance (black exploitation films, revisionist Westerns, Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave films, etc.); considering his efforts to imitate their calmness, perhaps he would inevitably develop a political conscience.
The film discusses law enforcement violence, and the only black man among the eight, the film devotes a great deal of space to showing what he sees as a threat. Tarantino still can't resist symbolic hints (in Eight Wicked Men, the characters are named after an underrated director, a B-movie star, and a small actor in John Ford), but these are no longer the main attractions. In the past, when an American director wanted to say something about basic values, they would go and make a Western, and Tarantino has been doing it lately.
Is There anything Tarantino has to say? Originally a suspenseful story that takes place in the living room, "Eight Wicked Men" was adapted to take place in a tavern, a few years after the American Civil War, called "Minnie's Men's Clothing Store", where a group of characters common in Westerns are waiting for the end of the blizzard.
When bounty hunters John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and Colonel Warren (Samuel Jackson) arrive at the menswear store, they immediately suspect that they have fallen into some trap, but do not know who is involved. Ruth had a semi-ironic nickname, "Hanger", because he always brought the bounty criminal back alive, and he had a savage personality, but always wore delicate glasses when reading.
In this film, he is considered a cornerstone of morality, although he is accustomed to playing around Daisy Dommerg (Jennifer Jason Lee), a murderer he is going to take to nearby Red Rock Town to make a fortune. Warren appeared on three frozen corpses, a veteran of the Union Army, who was said to possess a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln. He is a cruel man and the closest character to the protagonist in Eight Wicked Men.
Because The Eight Wicked Men are mostly made up of exaggerated rhetorical dialogue, it arranges characters in a complex network of counterpoints, each in some contrast to the others.
So Ruth the Hanger is reminiscent of the gritty hero of the late Westerns, who contrasts with three people: an Englishman who says he's a real hanger (twenty years later, Tim Rose and Tarantino join forces again), a stranger who looks like he's just got out of a singing cowboy movie (Michael Madsen's black hair dye doesn't work on 70mm film), and finally Warren, who hitchhiking and craves a bounty.
Aside from Ruth and the Coachman, everyone in The Eight Wicked has their own hidden secrets, unverifiable backstory, and reasons for hating other characters. At one point, the Englishman, Mowbray, proposed that they divide the room according to the people of the Civil Army to prevent the dispute from escalating. But by then, it was clear that the people gathered at Minnie's Menswear were all carrying the deepest malice, and the bad weather forced them to talk to themselves.
All this rhetoric and counterpoint talk might give the impression that "The Eight Wicked Men" is a three-hour debate, but if Tarantino had made a movie just to express political opinions, the movie wouldn't have been that long.
"Eight Wicked Men" is an artistic exercise of extending scenes, which has become part of his personal character since "Falling Dogs" – communication, which begins in an improvised way, becomes more tense and interesting, as it continues in unpredictable twists.
Whether it's the fifteen-minute dungeon game in Shameless Bastards or dinner at Candyland in Django Rescued, these recent classics are full of drama, either because they all have theatrical themes (e.g., the actors' stage performances) or because they use the dramatic way of appearing, entering, and props. (There is a skeleton in Django Rescued, the most famous prop in British drama.) ）
The way the Eight Wicked Men creates tension is as if pulling the plunger on the syringe backwards very slowly and then jerking it in again, putting itself into an extremely active state; as soon as the gun comes out, flashbacks, voiceovers (voiced by the director himself), and shifts in perspective also appear.
In every scene, there's a long foreshadowing, which is sometimes the funniest way — especially when the scene involves Demien Bizier's Bob of Mune, a comic-like character who can be compared to Brad Pitt's Aldo Ryan — but it's by no means the easiest.
That is to say: who would have thought that Tarantino's early hits sparked dozens of over-excited imitators, and that he would now make a film like this that would require a lot of patience? Because for Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), he needs patience —a hillbilly who always tells stories of failure endlessly, who says he's the new sheriff of Red Rock, but can't prove it —to independently go from a comic book character to a complex character.
At the heart of this long, well-thought-out film is the complex bounty hunter Warren— himself a wanted man — and the image of Lincoln — lincoln who died at the hands of John Wilkes Booth, whose death is told as if it were a biblical story.
For these eight men, they all had prejudices, bigotry, and a desire to shoot, but no matter which side they were on in the civil war, they all revered the upright Abel and believed in beings kinder than themselves. (Heck, even The Birth of a Nation idolized Lincoln.) ）
The film's ending is reminiscent of the mysterious ending of Pulp Fiction, where the ugly past and present of America, as portrayed in both films, have degenerated into crude instincts of violence and revenge. The rest of the characters gather to marvel at the idea of how beautiful America would be—one of the few truly moving scenes in Tarantino's highly stylized sequence.