I’ve been following the critical response to The Hateful Eight very closely, and I’ve managed to bite my tongue about my thoughts on the film until after the movie played in its roadhouse edition and then opened wide to the general theater audience. I also kept my review from this blog until after it had run through the holidays in a special two-week edition of The Contributor. I saw the movie about a week before it opened in Nashville. Here’s how I saw it…

The saga of the stranded murderers, marauders, bounty hunters and soldiers in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight is only slightly more blood-soaked than the saga of the film’s announcement and sudden cancellation in 2014: In November, 2013 Tarantino revealed that he was writing a new Western that would not be a sequel to Django Unchained. In January of 2014 the The Hateful Eight title was announced along with plans to begin filming in the summer, but by the end of that month Tarantino’s outrage over a script leak had him shelving the project and threatening to turn it into a novel. However, by late winter of 2014 rumors that the film was back on track began to spread, and by that spring Tarantino was hosting public script readings with a live cast.

Now that the film has finally arrived one can still imagine a world where The Hateful Eight never got made: It would be a shame for audiences to miss the gorgeous light captured by my favorite contemporary cinematographer, Robert Richardson or the excellent ensemble acting or the laugh-out-loud dialog that fills this most talkative of the director’s talkative films. That said, The Hateful Eight, like Django Unchained, won’t stand with Tarantino’s best, and audiences reminded about the ruckus over the leaked script will scratch their heads wondering why the director was so precious with what amounts to a gory, Western comedy that also plays with the tropes of a parlor mystery.

Like some of the director’s other films, Hateful’ is told in separate chapters that split the film into two distinct sections. In the first half a bounty hunter and his prisoner are in a stagecoach racing a blizzard to shelter – they rescue another bounty hunter and a sheriff along the way. The group arrives at Minnie’s Haberdashery to find the spaced already hosting an English hangman, a cowboy, a Confederate General and a Mexican caretaker left in charge while the proprietors – Minnie and Sweet Dave – are visiting Minnie’s mom. After tempers flare in close confines and the first body falls, it’s revealed that the coffee’s been poisoned. The second half of the film takes on the feel of an Agatha Christie whodunit with more beards and blood and blue language than Christie ever conceived of.

Hateful’s structure mostly recalls Tarantino’s first feature, Reservoir Dogs. That film also used a non-linear script which found a cast of bad guys meeting in a warehouse after a diamond heist gone wrong. Hateful relies on the same one-setting formula, substituting Minnie’s catch-all frontier outpost for the warehouse. The movie also recalls Jackie Brown with its near-constant dialog, and even From Dusk Till Dawn with its halfway-point genre-shifting.

A Tarantino dream cast brings his cantankerous characters to livid life: Kurt Russell’s bounty hunter John “The Hangman” Ruth is full of movie star swagger with just a hint of a John Wayne accent – he’s the closest thing Hateful has to a protagonist. Samuel L. Jackson is predictably outstanding as Major Marquis Warren – a Union soldier who’s also become a bounty hunter in the years just after the Civil War. Bruce Dern brings gray-haired gravitas to his portrayal of Confederate General Sanford Smithers, but Walton Goggins steals the show as Chris Mannix, a Southern renegade and the new Sheriff of Red Rock – the travelers’ elusive destination. The costumes and the detailed sets equal the performances, and the movie is already creeping onto year-end best-of polls and awards nominations lists.

But, The Hateful Eight is ultimately a disappointment. At his best, Tarantino can raise schlocky genre fare to the level of visceral high art: Seeing Tim Roth soaked in blood in Reservoir Dogs was sad and sickening. When Michael Madsen carved-off a cop’s ear in that same film it was genuinely shocking. When the long conversation in the basement bar in Inglourious Basterds finally erupts in a blood bath, the tension is wound-up to a virtuosic crescendo of breathtaking violence. But here, as in Django’, blood mostly sprays for laughs. Tarantino’s given us some of the strongest heroines in contemporary cinema, but he reduces Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue character to a punching bag. Jackson’s hyperbolic monolog about a vengeful sexual assault is simply ridiculous, and by the time the barrels start to blaze in the movie’s second half I wanted to care more than I did or at least feel a little surprised. But, I didn’t care and I wasn’t surprised, and most audiences won’t be either.

Today we celebrate the long strange life of actor, writer and director Buck Henry whose contributions to Saturday Night Live and scripting of The Graduate were crucial contributions to the countercultural voice that paved the way for the best of today’s contemporary comedy. Buck is 85 on December 9. Here he is discussing his twisted, gnarly, celebrated writing…

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since George Carlin won a posthumous Grammy for the album version of his last HBO Comedy Special, It’s Bad for Ya. I wasn’t able to confirm these facts, but I’m almost positive that George was the first comedian to do an HBO Comedy Special and that his count at a dozen plus two holds the record for most shows of the kind.

Carlin was prolific. He was also intensely focused while simultaneously being intellectually facile and emotionally intense. Carlin’s mastery of language is unsurpassed in comedy and it’s that quality that puts him at the top of the funny guy list for me.

Carlin’s last special aired a little over a year before the comedian’s death and one could forgive a man in his ’70′s for missing a step or two. Here’s the thing — George didn’t miss any steps in his last special.

It’s Bad for Ya ranks with the best of Carlin’s live specials, plus it won that Grammy. Here, George describes American life as “…a whole lot of bullshit that needs to be detected and avoided.” These, then, are George’s last words on american bullshit…

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In our ongoing examination of avant garde artists, here is yet another example of what happens when a sharp-edged talent takes a stab at the mainstream. Here’s a hint — it’s a bloodbath.

In 1977 Richard Pryor got his own television show on NBC. On paper, the decision made sense — Pryor was already on his way to becoming a legendary stand-up comedian, he’d written for a number of television shows and was the first black host in the inaugural season of Saturday Night Live.

By the 1980′s television shows became the gold ring of the stand-up circuit so Pryor’s early transition from the stage to the small screen was both a milestone and a cautionary tale. Here’s the Wiki…

The Richard Pryor Show premiered on NBC in 1977, but was canceled after only four episodes. Television audiences did not respond to the show’s controversial subject matter, and Pryor was unwilling to alter his material for network censors. During the short-lived series, he portrayed the first African-American President of the United States, spoofed the Star Wars cantina, took on gun violence, and in another skit, used costumes and visual distortion to appear nude.

Pryor was ready to quit before production even began because of network intervention, indifference, and incompetence during the development stage. He was eventually wooed back, agreeing to do four episodes of the show instead of the ten originally required by his contract. The four episodes were produced, and they aired in consecutive weeks, but the network interference that almost canceled the show before it began returned when the first episode’s introductory bit was cut just before air. The bit began with a close-up of Pryor’s face as he explained that he was not going to have to give anything up in order to bring his brand of comedy to network television. Then the camera pulled back to show an apparently nude Pryor with his genitals removed (Pryor wore a full-length body stocking, so no nudity was shown).

Pryor only filmed four episodes of the show, and there were controversies beyond the first episode’s title-card scene. A skit in which Pryor appeared as a machine gun-toting rocker who kills all of his white fans also caused a stir. The second episode also featured a controversial skit that showed a woman in a park describing what her first lesbian experience was like. Probably one of the most shocking and revealing skits of the show came during the last episode. The skit featured a roast (similar to ones by the Friars Club or hosted by Dean Martin). The show’s cast roasted Pryor, who sat with his head down laughing mildly while regulars on the show either had kind remarks or very scornful ones.

The roast format seems especially contemporary to us today given our current culture’s penchant for taking everybody else’s old, good ideas and repeating them. The lineup here features hilarious skewrerings by cast members and writers including Robin Williams, Paul Mooney, Tim Reid, John Witherspoon, Sandra Bernhard, Vic Dunlop, Edie McClurg and Marsha Warfield, but the best part of the night is listening to Richard laugh.

Here is The Roast of Richard Pryor

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When comedian Mitch Hedberg died from a heroin and cocaine overdose in 2005, it cut short the career of one of the most interesting stand-up comedians since Bill Hicks. Hedberg combined contemporary stoner observations with the brevity and timing of an old school one-liner comic to hilarious effect, and his star was on the rise: He appeared on Late Night with David Letterman ten times as well as on That ’70′s Show. He released two CD’s and signed a half a million dollar sitcom deal with Fox, but then it all ended in a hotel room in New Jersey.

What’s not as well known is that Hedberg wrote, directed, produced and starred in a 1999 comedy feature called Los Enchiladas. The flick premiered at Sundance, but has never been distributed. IMDB has the skinny…

About a half dozen slacker dudes dwell at their jobs at Los Enchiladas, the local Mexican sit-down joint. The 2 folks in “management” are both into their own authority and fill their days creating wild & stupid rules for the working folk. By mid-film, however, the manager has fled the cops after beating the crap out of a competing restaurant’s dancing gyro… and the “Chef” has jumped ship to join a beatnik poet’s groups which specializes in exotic menu-writing. This leaves the minimum-wage crowd to run the place as they see fit…. and they see a lot of debauchery, booze, and free steak in their future.

This no-budget fast food spoof is genuinely hilarious and a must-see for fans of Hedberg. It’s outrageously quotable — my personal favorite is “The venison burrito is a slut.” Hedberg plays a drifter who’s written a book called The Drifter’s Handbook which “…tells you how to get around. How to get from town to town.” Keep your ears open for snippets of Hedberg’s live show in the dialog, and keep your eyes peeled for performances by Hedberg’s comedian pals including Dave Atell, Todd Berry, Felicia Michaels and Marc Maron.

A work print of the film hit the torrents in 2011 and now, of course, it’s on YouTube…

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20 years ago, comedian Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer and the greatest comic of his generation disappeared forever. Hicks was working on a new CD when he experienced the first symptoms of the disease that would take his life. That project found Hicks mixing his stand-up with his own musical recordings to create a concept record he described as “my Dark Side of the Moon.” The posthumous release tells the story of the great earthquake that will shear California from the West Coast, creating a new Utopia in Arizona Bay.

In honor of the man and his raging, relentless art here is Arizona Bay in its entirety…

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