The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight (2015) is a western that takes place almost entirely in one room and is built like a murder puzzle. After the Civil War. A blizzard traps eight people in a mountain lodge. One is a bounty hunter, one is a prisoner in chains, one says he is a sheriff, one says he is a hangman. None of them believes the others, and at least one is lying. Tarantino shot it in Ultra Panavision 70. The format had not been used since 1966 and the lenses had to be tracked down. The odd part is that it was designed for wide landscapes and he used it to photograph a room. The result is that there is nearly always more than one person in frame, and you can keep track of who is doing what. There were roadshow screenings with an overture and an intermission, another practice carried over from the sixties. Ennio Morricone wrote the score at eighty seven and won his only competitive Oscar for it. There was an accident on set. The guitar John Ruth smashes was a genuine Martin from the 1870s, on loan from the Martin museum. The plan was to cut and substitute a replica, but Kurt Russell was not told. Jennifer Jason Leigh's reaction on screen is real. Martin stopped loaning guitars to film productions afterwards. It runs 188 minutes. Good for: Tarantino, westerns, and single location thrillers. Less good for: the violence is extremely graphic, racial slurs and violence against a woman are constant, and it is very long.