The Hateful Eight

Quentin Tarantino is fond of connecting his films with one another via little details and character names, like Reservoir Dogs’ Vic Vega and Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega, or the Big Kahuna Burger chain and Red Apple cigarettes that appear in many of his films. If you’re curious about how the director’s wintry western is connected to the TCU (Tarantino Cinematic Universe), then The Hateful Eight’s Tim Roth has your answer.

Pretty much everyone is looking forward to seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens this holiday season, but J.J. Abrams’ upcoming movie has at least one person very upset: Quentin Tarantino. The director of The Hateful Eight went off on an expletive-laded rant against Disney, which he claims is using extortion to block screenings of his movie all in the name of keeping the next Star Wars movie in as many theaters as possible.

Quentin Tarantino is the master of the comeback. Throughout his career, he’s rediscovered and revitalized the careers of one faded star after another; John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, David Carradine in Kill Bill. Tarantino’s latest, The Hateful Eight, is his boldest reclamation project yet, an attempt to rejuvenate not just a single actor’s fortunes, but an entire medium of storytelling.

There are just too many good movies. That’s my takeaway from this year’s annual exercise in critical masochism selecting the ten best films. My shortlist of 2015’s best movies is anything but short; running well over 30 outstanding entries. It feels like something I say every year, but it’s true; there are more great movies left off my list (like Clouds of Sils Maria and Experimenter and Brooklyn and Heaven Knows What and While We’re Young and about 20 others) than are actually on it. I actively agonized over the last couple slots for hours. (Yes, actual hours. I’m sorry, It Follows.)

Step right up and get your tickets to ‘The Hateful Eight’ 70mm roadshow!

Hmm, what could this be? The official Twitter account for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight is promising a big announcement for tomorrow, December 14, and we have a sneaking suspicion (okay, it seems pretty obvious) that the full list of theaters playing the 70mm Roadshow version of the film will be announced. If you’re dying to see Tarantino’s latest the way it was meant to be seen, you better get ready to do a lot of browser-refreshing tomorrow morning.

The Hateful Eight is a holiday season blessing to us all — well, to some of us, anyway. Quentin Tarantino’s latest film is hitting 100 theater screens specially-equipped with 70mm projectors on Christmas Day, while the rest of the nation will have to wait for the January wide release. But you won’t have to wait as long as you previously assumed because The Weinstein Company has moved the wide released up a whole seven days.

There are some similarities between The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained besides just being Quentin Tarantino movies. They’re both westerns set in the Civil War era with a black male lead. They both star Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins and Bruce Dern, among others. But in addition to those similarities, there was initially going to be one major connection: Django himself. Tarantino recently revealed that The Hateful Eight originally started as a Django Unchained sequel with Django taking the place of Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren.

Quentin Tarantino makes movies with lots of action and violence, but those moments are always the dessert after the meat and potatoes of his dialogue, which spills out of the characters’ mouths in long conversations and monologues. Tarantino’s films are talky, but the talk is so rich you don’t care (or flat-out love it), something that’s certainly true of The Hateful Eight, which opens this Christmas.

As someone who has seen The Hateful Eight 70mm roadshow, the 70mm roadshow is definitely how you want to see The Hateful Eight. From the gorgeous extra-wide, Ultra Panavision visuals to the six extra minutes of footage, the 70mm version is as “glorious” as the trailers would have you believe. So, why did it just become a lot harder for most moviegoers to see it this way?