Device Notes

Precisely two hours into this four-hour historical drama, we see an exchange between two children at school.  One of them is Xiao Si'r, the film’s main character and a member of a gang of delinquent teens.  The other is Ming, a girl who used to be in a relationship with Honey, the leader of Si'r's gang.   Honey is absent for most of the film, having skipped town and gone into hiding after killing a member of a rival gang.  Honey and S'ir's gang is for children of families who immigrated to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War.  The rival gang is for children of native Taiwanese.    As Si'r and Ming talk, the camera remains at a distance from them, but we can hear their voices as if they were close.  In the background, we can hear the school’s marching band practicing.  It’s loud enough that it would certainly drown out Si'r and Ming’s voices if they weren’t amplified for us.  Ming recounts to Si'r how alone she felt duri...

The script for  The Hateful Eight  is the first mystery Quentin Tarantino has written, according to him, and the traditional methods of building mystery narratives differ from those he normally employs when writing.  Perhaps this is why  The Hateful Eight 's mystery is, to say the least, idiosyncratic: even as the evidence mounts, the truth only comes out when everything spirals out of the characters' control.  But this is for the best.  The anti-mystery of  The Hateful Eight  throws other elements of the film into perspective. Tarantino said the film would not work as a play, and he's right.  At least, it does things that could not be imitated on stage.  After all the key players have organized in Minnie's Haberdashery, we get a brief moment that singles out small elements of their surroundings, elements we soon realize are meant to be clues.  When the significance of these clues is finally revealed, it's not because any of t...