Jake Gittes

If Mara wins both SAG and BAFTA I guess this is hers. If Leigh takes the BAFTA things will remain interesting until the very end. I'm pulling for Leigh for sure.

Is this where the backlash to McConaughey starts, or has it already? I still haven't seen Dallas Buyers Club and don't particularly care to, but the guy was mesmerizing in Killer Joe and especially True Detective. Any actor would be proud to have those performances in their resume.

No problem. BTW the more I'm thinking about the plot the more wonky and first-drafty it seems. Like, how did neither Ruth nor Warren, both experienced bounty hunters, recognize three members of an apparently notorious and dangerous gang, all with serious bounties on their heads? And why didn't "Oswaldo" and "Joe Gage" (and Jody) simply shoot Ruth the minute he stepped into the haberdashery, chained to Daisy, distracted by the door and not yet accompanied by Warren or Mannix? It really works better as a statement about America than it does as a story; too bad it's not equally strong as both.

Tarantino has made several great films where violence is fairly restrained - there's basically no gore in Jackie Brown, nothing except Elle's eye getting ripped out in Kill Bill Vol. 2, we don't see Shosanna's family get shot in the opening of Basterds, etc. I think he always knows what he's doing with violence and how explicit he needs it to be, and in TH8 it serves the same purpose as, say, Tim Roth writhing around screaming in a pool of blood or the cop getting slashed and almost burned in Reservoir Dogs - the audience needs to see the characters viscerally experience it, get exhausted and shell-shocked by it and not know how to escape it. YMMV, obviously, but even though I have several problems with the movie, I think the carnage was the logical conclusion to the prolonged tension - these people are trapped in the hell of their own making, and this is what they're gonna get in the end. I maybe could've done without Bob's exploding head but the rest all came off as natural.

I hate to be guy who says "that's the point", but, that's the point. It shouldn't be fun or cool, it should be ugly and hellish and awful.

My supporting actress picks for now are Vikander, Stewart, Lou de Laage (Breathe), Lucy Owen (The Mend) and Deirdre O'Connell (Gabriel).

I'm putting her in supporting for sure. From memory she has way less screentime than either of the guys, and it's not the kind of brief performance that dominates the movie so much that it feels like a lead role.

It was weird as hell though - both times there were a few dozen people that ran out of the auditorium when the card appeared, then the movie resumed immediately afterwards. Don't see why they needed to have it at all. I liked that they kept the overture though.

Yeah, they managed to dig out a single 70mm projector out of somewhere. One showing per day (now two) in a 1500-seat auditorium.

Well, we did have an "Intermission" card appear but the movie resumed in about 40 seconds (with the "15 minutes ago" narration and everything). It was 70mm, our distributor just doesn't give a fuck.

I saw it twice in 70mm and have been turning it over in my head for the past couple of days. First of all, I felt the loss of Sally Menke here even more than in Django and really thought it was just way too goddamn long; I already had that feeling during the first scene, where we see Warren approach the stagecoach, talk to O.B., hear he needs to talk to Ruth, say "OK, I will talk to him", talk to him, take out his guns, walk over to the stone, lay the guns on it, walk back, argue with Ruth some more... and then again every time people were introducing and reintroducing themselves to other people and repeating things the audience already knew. I never felt the tension building up as precisely and beautifully as it did, say, in the opening scene or the bar scene in Basterds, and on the second viewing I was actively yawning during much of Chapter 3 especially. Meanwhile, important things got somewhat glossed over: there's little depth or sense of long history to Jody and Daisy's relationship because it's so incredibly brief, and at least half of the main characters never really get fleshed out; the only ones that do are Mannix, Warren and Daisy, which is a low number for a Tarantino film. (Reservoir Dogs had more character work in half the screentime). Ruth comes off especially weird because he just ends up being useless, which is darkly humorous but all of his screentime mostly goes nowhere in the end. Also: did anyone else feel that QT basically spoiled a couple of kickass surprises here? Even though I saw the film in 70mm, we had no intermission, and not only did the voiceover feel sloppy and out of place, but WHY tell the audience that someone's poisoned the coffee? It still works because we don't know what kind of poison it is and how long it will take, but for me it would have worked even better if Ruth and O.B. just started spitting out their insides with zero warning and the audience realized what happened by themselves. Same thing with Jody shooting Warren: why have the camera going under the floorboards when you can have the more sudden shock of him getting shot out of nowhere and with no warning? All that probably makes it sound like I didn't really like the movie, but I did - even when Tarantino is being somewhat sloppy he's still better than 90% of other people at their best. It's still a compelling story and a compelling statement (I took it as less of one about race, though that's obviously in there, and more as a vision of America as a country built on lies; and it's people lying and being lied to that ultimately leads to everyone's death, with the last survivors only finding peace when they decide that the pretty lie of the Lincoln letter is one still worth believing in. It's a wonder how moving the ending manages to be). The dialogue has plenty of gems, the cinematography/70mm is jaw-dropping (my favorite shot, perversely, being the one where Warren is leading Smithers' naked son over a bridge), the score legitimately kicks ass and is not just Morricone slumming it, and all the actors shine like they always do under QT's direction. Overall I'll take it over Django and Death Proof, but I think the rest of his filmography is better.

Might as well do another one, "Best Action Sequence Not in Mad Max: Fury Road"

Sidse Babett Knudsen Nina Hoss Charlize Theron Josephine Japy (Breathe) Sarah Snook (Predestination) Haven't seen Carol and 45 Years though and it's gonna be hard as hell to choose which of those 5 should go.

Yeah, Ava fooled you just like she did Gleeson.

For supporting I've got Isaac, Hoult, Rylance, Del Toro and Richard Jenkins (Bone Tomahawk)

My Best Actors so far are Bateman, Jason Segel, Rory Culkin (Gabriel), Stephen Plunkett (The Mend) and Joshua Burge (Buzzard). Pretty sure none of them will make the cut in the end.

As an old wise man once said in a different movie, deserve's got nothing to do with it. Neither does the need to have him framed for Isaac's murder. She didn't need him anymore, so she left him, and he really should have known better.

What's bad about the ending?

Wish I could join the unabashed Phoenix love but man did I find the story contrived as hell. It's powerful on a metaphorical level, but not on a literal one, with the exception of the ending which sent me into full-body shivers even though I could plainly see that the entire narrative was constructed specifically for it.

Orange, Jackie Brown, Max Cherry, Django and King Schultz all mostly qualify as heroes, I think.

I'm voting for S. Craig Zahler for sure.

I'm gonna be traveling 30 hours on a train to see this in 70mm in Moscow. Of course I'll be doing other shit there but I wouldn't go if it weren't for this. What the hell, right?

Pretty sure Tarantino claimed that he wrote Roth's part for him, it may be similar to how Waltz would have played it but at no point was he actually supposed to play it.

Enjoyed the first third but everything after it got weaker and weaker, except maybe for the big Jobs vs Woz scene in the climax. It comes across like three shortened full-length biopics in one, or three episodes of a TV drama taken from season 1, season 4 and season 7 and stitched together using callbacks. The Jobs vs Sculley in Act 2 is such a loud and furious argument and all I could think of was "why am I supposed to give a shit again?". Katherine Waterston's two big scenes are essentially the same. The revelation of Jobs' father just comes and goes with zero build-up. And yeah, the ending is just bad.