User blog:Mikemacdee/So Much Hate for Hateful Eight?

I finally got around to watching The Hateful Eight after hearing so much negative feedback about the movie, and....really enjoyed the hell out of it. I watched it several days in a row, in fact, sometimes playing it in the background while I worked on other things.

It's odd that I was so taken with it. I'm not usually a Tarantino fan, though I appreciate his love of genre film and the literary way he tries to tell stories through cinema. But I'm a huge fan of westerns and good hardboiled mysteries, and it seems that's exactly what this movie is: a hardboiled mystery set in post-civil war times. I suppose "golden age mystery" would be more appropriate, but the actual mystery aspect takes a backseat to the characters involved and the situation they're in: the mystery is lurking in the background like a jaguar in the bushes, and when it finally leaps out, all hell breaks loose.

I get a kick out of the dialogue, too, which is doubly weird because Tarantino dialogue is usually too longwinded and self-indulgent for me (it's like that here as well, on a couple occasions, but most of it actually develops character and pertains to what's going on, if in a roundabout way).

So I'm surprised that so many people called this his worst film. I don't get why. But I think anyone who has seen the film and didn't like it should give it another viewing: my brother hated it intiially, but grew to like it a lot the second time through.

I liked it my first time through, and found it pretty inspiring. Am I the only one?