It’s fair to say that 2015 was a pretty good year for Greig Fraser. The cinematographer globetrotted to London, Jordan, Iceland, the Maldives, India, and his native Australia while lensing two movies. One of them (Lion) has Fraser in the Oscar conversation and the other (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) is a blockbuster prequel to his favorite childhood films. The two movies seemingly couldn’t be any more different. Rogue One is a space adventure with a $200 million budget and a small country’s GDP worth of merchandising revenue in which the final half is basically one intense battle sequence. […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 5, 2017Within the course of one week in late December 2015, the historic Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon made movie news twice. First, the non-profit theatre announced it would open The Hollywood Theatre @PDX, a new airport theatre which will highlight short films telling stories specific to Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Then, none other than Quentin Tarantino showed up after a screening of The Hateful Eight (in 70mm, of course!) and took part in an impromptu Q&A. Both instances were indicative of The Hollywood Theatre’s efforts to court cinephiles with innovative programming, community outreach, and 70mm projection. As film audiences increasingly opt to stay home and […]
by Paula Bernstein on Apr 21, 2016Throughout the history of cinema, from It’s a Wonderful Life and Doctor Zhivago to Fargo and The Ice Storm, filmmakers have relied on snow to create authentic settings and magical worlds. But in the age of climate change, capturing snow on film has become a serious challenge for filmmakers no longer able to count on the real thing, as was the case with last year’s The Hateful Eight and The Revenant. Of course, filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Alejandro Iñárritu have the financial resources to enable them to wait for snowfall, generate artificial snow, create CGI snow, or any combination […]
by Paula Bernstein on Apr 21, 2016When the 70mm roadshow version of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight rolled out in December, the experience was sold on the aesthetic superiority – the scope, the clarity, the subconscious effect of flickering frames of film. At a time when Screening Room may soon allow filmgoers to watch the latest wide releases on their couch, the roadshow offered an unreplicable spectacle. But for me the joy of road-tripping to Chicago to catch The Hateful Eight at the Music Box Theatre during its opening week had nothing to do with film gauge size or grain structure. The bliss came from something that is even more […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Apr 4, 2016Kevin B. Lee has been considering the candidates in the major Oscar categories. In this video essay, he breaks down the styles of the five candidates (The Hateful Eight, Sicario, The Revenant, Mad Max: Fury Road, Carol). The sound’s off as Lee narrates, but he also recommends watching the video silently to focus more on the cinematography. Pressed for time? You can read his essay here.
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 4, 2016As the first film to be shot in the Ultra Panavision 70 format since Khartoum in 1966, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight has deservedly garnered a lot of attention for its cinematography; shot in an extra-wide aspect ratio on a 65mm negative, it’s undeniably a spectacular showcase for director of photography Robert Richardson’s visual gifts. Subtler, but perhaps even more impressive, is the contribution of editor Fred Raskin, who assembles the 2.76:1 images like a maestro of space, timing, and movement. At over three hours in its Christmas Day “roadshow” edition, The Hateful Eight doesn’t have an extraneous frame – […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 28, 2015The following review contains spoilers. In Quentin Tarantino’s superbly balanced ensemble piece, The Hateful Eight, the passengers and drivers we meet at the start of the picture, dropped off at Minnie’s Haberdashy, a spacious Wyoming way station, by two different stagecoaches on different but overlapping missions, all have masked identities. Six years after the end of the Civil War, these are some of battle’s renegade residue, Confederate vets with few prospects who depend on bounty hunting to survive in a particularly testy postwar America. In the second coach there’s Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins, displaying the best of his high-energy talent), […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 24, 2015Few directors this side of Joseph Mankiewicz are as attentive to the clear, crisp presentation of dialogue as Quentin Tarantino, giving the always important role of production sound mixer even more weight on his sets. Since Jackie Brown in 1997, Tarantino has relied on Academy Award winner (for Titanic) Mark Ulano to capture his production sound. Tarantino’s latest, The Hateful Eight, represents some of Ulano’s finest work to date – which is saying something considering that he has over a hundred credits to his name, including The Master, Iron Man and Inglourious Basterds (for which he was nominated for another Oscar). […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 15, 2015