In Which We Sincerely Believe We Do Not Belong

Self-Mining

by ELEANOR MORROW

Tin Star
creator Rowand Joffe
Sky

In Tin Star, Jim Worth (Tim Roth) is a London police officer who relocates to a mining town in British Columbia with his wife Angela (Genevieve O'Reilly), his daughter Anna (Abigail Lawrie) and his son Peter (Rupert Turnbull). At the conclusion of the show's tumultuous first episode, an assassin approaches the family at a sinister Calgary gas station. He fires a bullet at Jim's head from a distance of seven feet. Instinctively, Jim ducks, and the shell explodes his five year old son's head. Fragments of the boy's skull impact on his mother's cranium, and she enters in a coma.

Jim is a recovering alcoholic, and it is not one night later that he finds himself in a bar. Tin Star creator Rowand Joffe gives us a hearty close-up of the heavenly whiskey that Sheriff Worth desires more than anything in his turgid little life. Everything in his world is categorically easier to abandon than alcohol – which is not to say he is not going to fail his family. Just that it will be hard.

Jim's enemies do not really have sufficient reason to want him or his son dead. They are representatives of the oil concern which has infilfrated the town. The idea that oil companies would have to resort to murder to get their way when they can simply purchase everything in sight is somewhat implausible, but who cares? Tin Star is more a pure revenge fantasy, meant to bring Jekyll's story into a Western forum. It has to be a fantasy – I mean, I can't rationally believe in a rural Canadian town where everyone in it is a different type of asshole.

Christina Hendricks plays Elizabeth Bradshaw, a representative of that oil company. Hendricks grew up in the Pacific Northwest, although you would not really know it. I think her father was British, which makes sense with her coloring. She looks absolutely tiny in this, having eradicated any of the voluptuousness which might lend a sympathetic tint to this merciless. character. She is not so much a villain as an embodiment of a lack of personal morality.

Jim's daughter Anna is drawn to alcohol, and one of the most affecting scenes in the show's opening episodes has her chugging down the various components of a motel mini-bar. "I want to be an archaeologist," she tells her father, and this fortune-telling strikes us as wildly off-base. Jim himself has nothing in the way of hobbies or passions – that was what drinking was for. His job enables him to practice the only skill he has – the distribution of violence, and to mete it out for somewhat rational reasons.

He is completely disconnected from modernity. It is what happens to those of us who, as we get older, neglect to manifest a regular discernment of what makes society itself. Such people often change their surroundings, since doing so gives them a reasonable excuse for feeling lost. There is no such get-out-of-jail free card when we are surrounded with those we know, and those who know us. It is better to be in the wilderness, where you can sincerely believe you do not belong. You will be right.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which The Hateful Eight Reminds Me Of My Horse

The Lincoln Letter

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Hateful Eight
dir. Quentin Tarantino
167 minutes

Inspiration had to run out at some point. Quentin Tarantino made the most fun motion pictures around for the past two decades. Now he has stopped caring completely. His use of the n-word becomes rather tiring at some point during The Hateful Eight, so that the movie becomes something truly hateful rather than joyful. The fact that this is yet another historical treatment of the slur by Tarantino makes all his modern films, filled to the brim with the sobriquet, kind of embarrassing in retrospect.

Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) could have been an inspiring hero — a Civil War veteran reduced to submitting the corpses of wanted people to make his living as a Wyoming resident. The concept of such a character as a detective is the only compelling part of the turgid three hours encompassed in The Hateful Eight.

The film disappointingly takes place at one location: Minnie's Haberdashery, a waystation for travelers passing through to the town of Red Rock. There is no much to this setting; it is basically one large room in a wooden building. Tarantino has taken such effort with his locations in the past — we think of the fantastic Japanese palace in Kill Bill, or the diner in Pulp Fiction or the mall in Jackie Brown. The $60+ million spent on The Hateful Eight must have all gone to the cast and crew. Here is just a room, and we barely ever leave its confines.

The actors in it are his usual regulars, most of whom are pretty familiar with the extensive sentences that are part and parcel to Tarantino's oeuvre. Tim Roth appears to be doing an impression of Christoph Waltz, Michael Madsen mumbles through scene after scene, and Kurt Russell intones every line as if it might be his last.

The new performers are all serviceable but get very little play. Jennifer Jason Leigh mostly just sits and grumbles the entire movie, while Channing Tatum seems badly underwritten and out of place here. Rising Mexican star Demian Bichir has his face covered the entire time, and Keith Jefferson barely gets three lines.

Walton Goggins is the major new addition. He is the new sheriff of Red Rock who joins the caravan of Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell on the way escorting fugitive Daisy Domergue (Leigh) to town. Goggins has not been hurting for work this past year, but I begin to miss the hardened subtlety he displayed on The Shield. He is just as broad and wide open as the performances of his fellow passengers, and in The Hateful Eight it feels like shouting to be heard most of the time.

This can be wacky Tarantino-like fun, but in The Hateful Eight none of the conversation, most of which is about the Civil War, ever goes anywhere. The plot mostly concerns the identity of gang members who are trying to prevent the timely death of Ms. Leigh. Answers are not very surprising and what mystery there is in the film's plot is extremely dull to watch unfold. It feels like Tarantino wrote this all out in a morning and decided to see if he could put so much style around it that we would not notice there is no substance.

The film feels especially thin because this would have been exactly the moment to do something dramatic and important with Jackson's character. Instead we have a budget version of the black man's Civil War story. In one scene Major Warren describes making a confederate soldier suck him off in the snow. The whole thing is played for laughs, but it is not really all that funny, and we feel bad for even chuckling. That's the best Tarantino can do? Gay jokes?

Westerns were numerous because they don't require much in the way of sets or costumes. The Revenant looks like it costs three times as much as The Hateful Eight, and that matters because it was worth it to not feel we were on a theatrical set. Tarantino loves cinema, but maybe he needs to realize that what was good enough sixty years ago is dull today. I know he already made an important and exciting film about slavery, Django Unchained, but this could have been the same thing, only in the Reconstruction. Instead it just needs reconstructing.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

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