I would think this is a common thing, but I find nowadays that one of the most sobering reality checks of my advancing age (I’m 46) arrives in the form of coming to terms with the deaths of music artists who had a meaningful impact in my younger years. This pattern has been repeating all too frequently lately. It’s been an absolutely brutal stretch of months for losing hugely significant figures from the world of music.
It started back in early December with the overdose death of Scott Weiland, formerly of Stone Temple Pilots. Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister followed a few weeks later and then came the earthshaking loss of David Bowie on January 8th. Next was Eagle Glenn Frey, Beatles producer George Martin, and country legend Merle Haggard (who interestingly was born and died on April 6th). I’m not a fan in the least of those last three, but there’s no denying their important musical legacies. And now we’re down one more with the shocking death of Prince.
I’d classify my level of Prince fandom as somewhere past the point of “casual” and a fair distance from “devout”. Admittedly, the vast majority of his musical output the past decade failed to inspire many repeat listens from me. I chalk that up to his reputation for being extremely prolific (Wikipedia lists just shy of 40 studio albums that he released since 1978), but with a wildly uneven quality to his work. The last release of his that I truly connected with was 2004’s Musicology. That tour was the one and now only time I saw Prince live, but oh my did it leave a deep and lasting impression on me.
I’ve seen well over a hundred concerts in my life and U2 and Bruce Springsteen are by far my two favourite music artists. Although Bono and The Boss are two of the best contemporary live performers we’ve ever seen (in my humble opinion and many others), I can say without hesitation that the single greatest person I’ve ever witnessed on a concert stage was Prince. Hands down. I’d known about his abundant talent for years, of course. The legend-building stories of his musical virtuosity were established early on, as he played nearly every instrument on his first five albums. I’d also seen enough live footage of him over the years playing a host of different instruments to know that he was a one-of-a-kind talent. Still, nothing prepared me for seeing all of it on display in person.
Feeling just a tad superior to my sister as I enjoyed a great floor seat in July 2004 at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre while she was relegated to seats up in the stands, Prince completely floored me with his musical talent and showmanship. At various points during the concert, in addition to his frequent guitar playing, he played piano, drums, and bass. And we’re not talking a “Jack of all trades, master of none” kind of multi-instrumentalism, either. The guy played those three latter instruments damn well. His virtuosic guitar skills weren’t a huge surprise, yet it added another level to my appreciation for those skills seeing them from such a close vantage point. Add in some badass dance moves, a surprisingly playful sense of humour (something Prince diehards would be quite familiar with), and a near-flawless vocal performance and you can see why I was bowled over. And for good measure, the sound was some of the best I’d ever heard at a major venue. That really surprised me, considering I’d seen Van Halen at the same venue just two weeks earlier and that show had some of the worst sound I’d ever heard at a big venue. Good live sound engineers are very underrated members of a touring act’s road crew.
I’d have loved to experience Prince in concert again, but his ticket prices skyrocketed on subsequent tours, as I ranted about here in 2011. Even as recently as a month ago, I checked out the ticket prices for one of the intimate Toronto shows he announced a couple of days ago before they were played, which would turn out to be some of his final performances. Alas, they were priced far beyond my means, plus their high exclusivity would have made getting tickets a longshot anyway.
While I frequently didn’t connect with a lot of Prince’s music, I always respected his musical integrity that predominantly saw him do things on his own terms, which included taking plenty of musical risks. During his 2007 Super Bowl halftime show, I remember wondering why the hell a guy with a catalog as deep as his was doing a cover of the Foo Fighters “Best Of Me” on such a high profile platform with such a limited amount of performance time. Talk about an out-of-left-field song choice. Prince made it work, though, and that performance is now one the Super Bowl’s most acclaimed halftime shows.
As much as I’m now crushed for only having had one experience of seeing Prince’s next-level kind of talent in person, I also consider myself fortunate for having had the opportunity.
Released theatrically on September 18th; now available on DVD/Blu-ray and video-on-demand
Black Mass is definitive proof of how difficult it is to make not just a great film, but even a good film.
The framework is certainly in place for Black Mass to be a standout movie. Compelling source material? It’s based on the 2000 book Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob about James “Whitey” Bulger. Bulger was an FBI informant whilst simultaneously rising to the upper level of Boston’s organized crime ranks via brutal methods. Then, before he could be arrested on racketeering charges, he fled and was on the run for 16 years as one of the FBI’s ten most wanted fugitives, before being captured in 2011. So make that a boldfaced check. How about a talented and committed lead actor? Check number two, as Johnny Depp signs on, did plenty of homework on his subject, and transforms his face and hair to more closely resemble the notorious gangster. Strong supporting cast? Kevin Bacon, Benedict Cumberbatch, Corey Stoll, Adam Scott, Julianne Nicholson, Peter Saarsgard, Joel Edgerton, and Jesse Plemons make that a resounding check number three. While all of these ingredients are abundantly fertile ground on which to build a great film, director Scott Cooper and his screenwriters still can’t save Black Mass from being a limp, forgettable mess.
Depp’s portrayal carries a decent amount of the imposing and unsettling quality that the thuggish Bulger displayed. Much of that comes from the confident swagger he instills into the character. The visual mimicry also plays a large role, as Depp dons a dead tooth, prosthetics, and an intricately constructed hairpiece to replicate Bulger’s facial features and baldness. Then there’s those blue contact lenses. Depp’s eyes in Black Mass are extremely distracting. The lenses seem bizarrely unhuman when shown in close-up shots, almost zombie-like. That contributes to the lack of investment I had with his version of Bulger. The actor just never disappears into the role and I was consistently hyper-aware that it was a made-up Depp I was watching.
The large collection of fine supporting actors barely register any performances that won’t quickly fade from your memory. Edgerton’s corrupt FBI agent character who has childhood ties to Bulger should resonate much deeper, but doesn’t. The same goes for Cumberbatch’s character, who’s Bulger’s brother and an extremely powerful Massachusetts politician. You couldn’t ask for a better recipe to explore a complex family dynamic, but the characters’ scenes together simply don’t generate any interest. And just wondering — can Adam Scott ever not play a character that’s a total dick?
To be fair, Depp and his ensemble are completely let down by a bungled script that dilutes a fascinating true-crime story into an uninspired, wasted opportunity. On a massive scale. Everything about Black Mass feels lazily ripped off from other crime dramas.
How a character as intriguing and complicated as Whitey Bulger emerges from a film about his life feeling thinly drawn and dull speaks to a serious failing in that film’s creative process. My first thought as Black Mass' credits rolled was that it disappointingly paralleled an organized crime drama I wrote about in 2012, The Iceman. That movie also miserably failed at telling the real-life story of mob hitman Richard Kuklinski. For the best cinematic telling of Bulger’s story, give a wide berth of Black Mass and watch Joe Berlinger’s engrossing Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger documentary, which I reviewed here.
Rating: D
Released on January 29th
For an artist that’s built his reputation extensively on his band’s high-energy shows, Danko Jones has made fans wait an agonizingly long time for an official release that properly captures the Danko Jones live music experience visually. The 2012 DVD release Bring On The Mountain offered an excellent visual history of the band that included career-spanning live clips, but their quality varied and didn’t convey the true nature of a Danko Jones show. Now 20 years after forming, Toronto’s Jones, co-founding bassist John ‘JC’ Calabrese, and newest drummer Rich Knox (the latest in a long line of great players that Jones has had behind the kit) finally release Live At Wacken on Blu-ray and DVD, packaged with a companion CD. For the purpose of this review, I’ll be focussing on the Blu-ray content since the CD contains the same audio.
Live At Wacken documents Jones’ August 2015 set at Germany’s Wacken Open Air festival, the world’s largest metal festival. Wacken regularly sells out its tens of thousands of tickets a year in advance before the band lineups are even announced. Jones is clearly amped to be playing for the third time at the festival, with numerous appreciative acknowledgements to his participating bands and the sizeable crowd. The minimal stage production befits the no-frills style of Jones’ music, which is a hybrid of punk, metal, hard rock, and a touch of the blues. The concert is well-shot and the sound is excellent, but audiophiles may be miffed at the lack of surround sound options — there’s surprisingly just a lone “Stereo” option here, aside from the “Stereo” option paired with Jones’ commentary track on the extras.
The trio efficiently burns through 18 songs in just 70 minutes, with a slight emphasis on tracks from that year’s earlier Fire Music album (the cowbell-heavy “Do You Wanna Rock” works especially well). The rest of the setlist is comprised of a nice scattering of some of the band’s strongest material and welcome obscurities, including “Sugar Chocolate” (the first track on Jones’ debut EP release), Born A Lion bonus track “The Rules”, and more recent nugget “Sugar High”. Heavier songs like “The Twisting Knife”, “Invisible”, “Gonna Be A Fight Tonight”, “Had Enough”, and perennial set closer “Bring On The Mountain (Become The Mountain)” cement the band’s qualifications to be playing on the festival’s True Metal Stage. “Bring On The Mountain” never fails to disappoint — I do miss the days, though, where Jones would beat himself up during its performances (he had to stop in 2006 after detaching a retina from one too many self-slaps to the face). The one weak spot in their setlist is the boringly repetitive “Legs” (that word is repeated about 50 times during the song), although it always gets a good laugh when the singer redundantly explains at its conclusion that “It’s a song about women’s legs”. The set’s slim running time raises a couple of questions, such as why this package omitted the one other song played that day (“Active Volcanoes”) and why some of Jones’ always entertaining between-song banter was edited out, as he reveals on the Blu-ray’s commentary track.
Blu-ray extras: a 50 minute featurette of Jones’ spoken word performance from 2012’s Wacken festival proved to be a real chore to get through. The studiously dressed Jones, a KISS fanatic, presents a mock conspiracy theory that original KISS drummer Peter Criss died in 1978 and the band has since been covering it up and paying homage to Criss with subtle tributes in their album cover art and via backward messages on their recordings. The audience in the tented structure offer occasional laughs at Jones’ bizarre premise, but mostly they just look confused. Things get even weirder (which I didn’t think was possible) when the tongue-in-cheek presentation concludes with a loopy video featuring a cheeseball rendition of “Beth” by Jones in KISS makeup and costume. It’s all highly surreal, but not enough to really be entertaining. Other extras include a solid 20 minute post-show interview, plus a fascinating full-length show commentary from Jones. The unique commentary delivers great insight into topics such as what it’s like commanding a stage in front of an estimated crowd of 40,000 to 70,000 people, setlist choices, and the creative process behind certain songs. One of the most illuminating anecdotes revealed something I’d wondered about for years and never heard an explanation for — why all of Jones’ drummers use radically stripped-down kits without any rack toms, which is a real rarity in heavy music. The answer? It’s just a band signature that's consistent with Jones’ “simplicity ethos”.
Rating: B
Related Mediaboy Musings posts: my January 2013 review of Danko Jones' Rock And Roll Is Black And Blue album
Released on January 22nd
Megadeth has always tackled dark subject matter in
their songs, so a loosely structured concept album about a bleak dystopian
future isn’t quite the creative leap that it might be for other bands.
Hell, their very name is taken from a politician’s made-up word to describe
nuclear annihilation (minus an “a”...for that metal touch). On new album
Dystopia, Megadeth frontman/singer/guitarist Dave Mustaine delivers pretty
much start-to-finish lyrical doom and gloom — “Fatal Illusion”, “Death From
Within”, “Bullet To The Brain”, “Conquer Or Die”, “Lying In State”, and “Last
Dying Wish” are just a few of the sunny titles conjured up for the group’s 15th
studio album. That apocalyptic outlook was no doubt informed by Mustaine’s extremely
cynical view of politicians (including crackpot birther beliefs and accusations that President Obama was behind the 2012 Colorado movie theatre mass shooting), as well as the
particularly difficult 2014 that Megadeth experienced. That year saw Mustaine’s
Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother-in-law go missing for weeks before being found
dead, bassist Dave Ellefson’s brother passing away, a highly public dispute
with an Australian concert promoter that lead to cancelled shows, drummer Shawn
Drover and guitarist Chris Broderick quitting the band within hours of each
other, and more cancelled shows due to complications from Mustaine’s
previous back surgery.
The revolving door of Megadeth musicians finds Lamb Of
God drummer Chris Adler and guitar whiz Kiko Loureiro (from Brazilian band Angra)
as the newest members of the group. Who knows how long they’ll be able to
weather Mustaine’s legendarily volatile personality. For now, however, they
prove to be a great addition to the mix, based on Dystopia’s highly impressive results.
Loureiro and Mustaine work very efficiently off each other trading shredding guitar
leads, as does the Ellefson/Adler rhythm section. Burners like “Lying In State”,
“The Threat Is Real”, and “Fatal Illusion” (featuring a fantastically nimble
solo bass line from Ellefson) are Megadeth at their thrashiest best. The title
track, “Death From Within”, “Bullet To The Brain”, and “Post American World”
dial down the tempos (which tend to change more than a few times in many of
Dystopia’s songs) without sacrificing much heaviness. “Look Who’s Talking” and “Last
Dying Wish” provide a brief respite from Mustaine’s love-it-or-hate-it singing
voice with equally sneering spoken lyrics à la So Far, So Good...So What!’s “In
My Darkest Hour” and Countdown To Extinction’s “Sweating Bullets”. The
ambitious six minute “Poisonous Shadows” instills a symphonic element that was
no doubt inspired by Mustaine’s 2014 collaboration with the San Diego Symphony and
also features a guitar intro that appears to be a reworking of Countdown To
Extinction’s “Foreclosure Of A Dream” intro. Instrumental “Conquer Or Die”
gives Loureiro an opportunity to show off his profound classical guitar
skills before the rest of the band comes in, although Dystopia wouldn’t have
been weakened if the track had been omitted. An inspired cover of hardcore punk band Fear’s “Foreign
Policy” closes the album and serves as a bit of callback to Mustaine’s one-off side project MD.45, which he did with Fear frontman Lee Ving back in 1996.
The best line I’ve read about Dystopia was from a
Boston Globe writer who came up with the clever “riffing is their
business...and business is good” (a reference to Megadeth’s debut album title
for the uninitiated). Is it ever. Their latest release is loaded with great headbanging
riffs and an intensity that was sorely missing from their last release, 2013’s
disappointing Super Collider. Unlike that album, Dystopia completely jettisons aspirations
of radio play and amps up the aggressiveness and anger that suits MegaDave and
his cohorts exceedingly well this time around. The weakest component is the inconsistent narrative consisting of themes like
solidarity among the downtrodden, failed states, authoritarian rule, American
jingoism, and xenophobic paranoia (that inconsistency is further
exemplified by a song like “Death From Within”, which is about Greek mythology’s
Trojan War). Dystopia shines in spite of its thematic deficiencies,
representing one of Megadeth’s best efforts since their 80s peak.
Rating: A-
Related Mediaboy Musings posts: my January 2010 review of Megadeth’s Endgame album and my February 2012 review of their Th1rt3en album
Released today
Full-length studio album number 11 from thrash metal pioneers Anthrax proves that the resurgency displayed on their last full-length album, 2011’s Worship Music (which I reviewed here), definitely wasn’t a fluke. For All Kings packs its hour-long running time with one monster song after another, picking up right where its predecessor left off in terms of top drawer material from beginning to end. Critics (and there were plenty when the album got leaked a couple of months early) might opine that this latest collection of songs is merely just “more of the same” from Anthrax, an argument I actually can’t disagree with on one level. True, the band barely deviate from the sound of their last album, but why mess with a winning formula? Especially when the results in both cases are this superb.
Pulling double duty as Anthrax’s new lead guitarist, while also retaining membership in his longtime band Shadows Fall, is Joe Donais. He comfortably slides into his role alongside Anthrax founder Scott Ian (guitar), longtime members Frank Bello (bass) and Charlie Benante (drums), and their “classic era” vocalist, Joey Belladonna. The musicianship on For All Kings, as expected, is tight and formidable, particularly on the epic “Blood Eagle Wings”, mood-swinging opener “You Gotta Believe”, the pummeling “Suzerain”, and punk-fuelled album closer “Zero Tolerance”. It’s not all breakneck speed thrashers, however, as the band modulates things nicely with less frenetically-paced songs like “Monster At The End”, “Defend/Avenge”, and the surprisingly accessible “Breathing Lightning”. Pissed off lyrics that focus on Anthrax topical staples like social injustice run throughout the album. The evocative You’re just a bag of blood and I’m holding the nail (from “You Gotta Believe”) and the religious extremism-condemning lyrics from “Evil Twin” (inspired by 2015’s Charlie Hebdo attack) stand out amongst the album’s overall strong lyrics.
The overwhelmingly negative reaction to the album by metal fans on a couple of the online forums that I perused shortly after the album leaked completely baffles me. A common refrain was that “Breathing Lightning” was too commercial. While that track may be more melodic than most of Anthrax’s material, it’s still plenty heavy, leading me to believe that the folks spouting that criticism are the same close-minded people who think “Enter Sandman” is lightweight.
With Worship Music and now For All Kings, Anthrax have completely defied the music industry standard by releasing the two best albums in their discography three-and-a-half decades into their career. If ever an album was befitting of the well-worn “all killer, no filler” label, then For All Kings is it. Belladonna, who returned to Anthrax in 2010, and the rest of the group are clearly firing on all cylinders creatively at this point in their lengthy career, despite a surprising story from 2014 that places their future together in question. Belladonna said in the interview that he’d never really found his place in the band and that he’s “only allowed so much friendship” from the other members. My options for buying new music from metal bands are painfully slim these days (very few newer bands resonate with me), so here’s hoping the long-time acts like Anthrax keep rolling on.
Rating: A
Released on January 8th
It was eerily like the perpetually forward-thinking David Bowie had it all planned. ★ (pronounced “Blackstar”), his 25th studio album released on his 69th birthday, had to be viewed in a completely different light when he died from cancer just two days later. His stunning loss and Blackstar’s universally glowing reviews translated into the icon’s best chart success since the 80s, making it his first ever number one album in America. It topped the UK album charts for three weeks straight before being dethroned…by one of his own compilation albums. Bowie also tied Elvis Presley’s record for the most simultaneous entries in the UK top 100 albums chart with 12 (Presley also set that record right after he died). Following Bowie’s death, he also shattered Vevo’s previous one-day high-mark for a music artist’s streamed video views with 51 million views from his catalog on January 11th. Adele previously held the record with 36 million views in one day after dropping her “Hello” video in October.
Blackstar finds Bowie steering himself back to more of the experimentation he’s built his entire career upon after the relatively “traditional” tone of his previous release, 2013’s unexpected The Next Day (which I reviewed here). Bowie set aside his regular stable of world-class musicians and turned to a New York-based jazz quartet lead by saxophonist Donny McCaslin to back him on his final album. That pairing inspired much speculation about this being a “Bowie jazz album”, which isn’t quite accurate...much to my relief.
Strong jazz elements do run throughout Blackstar, mostly via the front-and-centre placement of McCaslin’s saxophone, which plays a strong supporting role on “Dollar Days”, “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore”, and “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)”. The two latter tracks originally appeared on the “Sue” single that was released in 2014 for Bowie’s Nothing Has Changed compilation album. They both benefit from Blackstar’s reworked versions — “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore” softens the original’s drum sound to much greater effect and the frenzied “Sue” re-employs the original version’s drum ‘n’ bass-style percussion, while wisely significantly dialing down its overly grand horns and shaving almost three minutes off of the original’s drawn-out running time. Speaking of lengthy running times, the title track runs just a hair shy of ten minutes, but it’s essentially two very different-sounding songs joined together, eventually winding its way back to the musical thread established during the song’s first half. The ominous “Lazarus” (made even more haunting by its brilliant accompanying video) keeps a measured pace and the song’s spare musical arrangement effectively accentuates the intermittent distorted notes from guitarist Ben Monder. “Girl Loves Me” was my least favourite Blackstar track (partly because of the gibberish lyrics sung in Nadsat, an invented language from A Clockwork Orange), although Bowie does adopt an interesting singing style where he raises his pitch at the end of most of his vocal lines. After somewhat of a mid-album letdown, Blackstar goes out on a high note with superb album closers “Dollar Days” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away” (featuring a standout guitar solo from Monder).
Blackstar certainly isn’t the most cohesive album, but it’s for damn sure always interesting, right down to the visually compelling CD jacket and liner notes featuring shiny black text on a black background. It’s yet another bold and challenging Bowie release that rewards patient listeners. Lyrically, Blackstar is a fairly dark album full of bleak themes, with numerous references to death that are obviously painful to hear now (including Look up here, I’m in heaven from “Lazarus”, a refrain of I’m dying to from “Dollar Days” that sounds eerily like I’m dying too, and merely the title of “I Can’t Give Everything Away”). Bowie bows out on a respectably high note worthy of his legacy, somehow pulling off the bizarrely unique and beautiful feat of incorporating his death into his final piece of art.
Rating: B+
Released theatrically on December 31st
It's a testament to Quentin Tarantino's unpredictable creative choices that I managed to stick with The Hateful Eight for the duration of its almost three hour running time, despite the major issues I had with it. The movie's title comes from both the fact it's Tarantino's eighth directorial feature (he also wrote the screenplay), as well as the number of principal cast, consisting of Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Walton Goggins, and Demián Bechir.
Even more so than The Big Short (which I recently reviewed here), the aptly titled Hateful Eight gives you absolutely no one to root for amongst the motley crew of thieves, liars, and killers who occupy this murder mystery Western. That shouldn't necessarily be a deal-breaker in terms of whether or not a movie can be enjoyed, but it certainly ups the challenge level for viewers. When you add in inconsistent character development, some baffling acting choices, overly gratuitous violence, and a flagrant number of utterances of the n-word, well, the only thing that kept me from bailing out early was a perverse curiosity to see where the unpredictable Tarantino ultimately landed this bloated, slow-cooking mess.
The majority of the film, which is set in Wyoming in the decade following the end of the Civil War, unfolds over the course of a day within a drafty roadhouse named Minnie's Haberdashery, where the converging characters are forced to wait out a nasty snowstorm. Russell's character (John Ruth) is a bounty hunter of great repute, with his latest captured fugitive (Leigh's Daisy Domergue character) shackled to his wrist and destined for the local town of Red Rock for a likely date with the hangman, who just happens to also be at Minnie's (Roth's Oswaldo Mobray character). Also present are Dern's former Southern General character (Sanford Smithers), Goggins' incumbent Red Rock Sheriff character (Chris Mannix), and Madsen's and Bechir's characters, who both have relatively small roles. Jackson's character (Marquis Warren) does most of the film's heavy lifting. He's a former Union officer who's also now in the bounty hunting business and Warren becomes the focal point of the proceedings, partly because of his threatening smarts, but mostly because of the colour of his skin.
The obviously incendiary subject of race less than a decade after the abolition of slavery fuels the tensions between Warren and nearly everyone else in the establishment, permeating the film's narrative to an overbearing degree. I don't expect Tarantino to sugarcoat matters and not reflect the ugliness of the era, but I also don't need to hear the n-word used as ridiculously excessively as it's used throughout this film - roughly 65 times and occasionally numerous times in just one sentence (note: I never censor my writing on this blog, but I find "ni--er" to be the most loathsome word in the English language, so "n-word" will suffice for me). I was surprised to read that it was actually used far more in Tarantino's last film, the slavery-themed Django Unchained - well over 100 times (both counts come from online articles written by folks who are tallying these kinds of things so I very thankfully don't have to). Again, I obviously expect to hear the word in a film set in the slavery era, but Tarantino's overuse of it throughout his filmography and in these two films, in particular, is downright bizarre, distracting, and deeply off-putting.
The Hateful Eight consistently offers up plenty of head scratching moments meant to throw the viewer off-balance, a staple of Tarantino's work that mostly misses here more than it hits. Roth's character exaggerates his Britishness to the hilt, Tarantino regular Zoe Bell shows up briefly and appears to be (over)acting in a completely different movie, Russell's character essentially seems to be doing a bad John Wayne impression and at one point erupts in a fit of rage for no good reason, and Dern's character confusingly does a complete 180 in terms of how he treats Jackson's character. Other curiosities include a woefully miscast big-name actor who shows up in The Hateful Eight's final act, plus Tarantino providing his own narration at seemingly random moments. Then there's the self-indulgent exterior scene towards the film's end of a horse and buggy and its occupants travelling through the countryside, which drags on interminably.
There is some clever writing, compelling intrigue, and some fine acting performances nestled within The Hateful Eight's framework, it's just not nearly enough to overcome the overwhelmingly odious atmosphere of a film that tiredly pummels the viewer with its desire to shock. Even the unmemorable score feels like a wasted opportunity, considering Tarantino enlisted Spaghetti Western legend Ennio Morricone to compose his first Western score in over three decades. My experience could have been worse, though - I could have had to endure the film's even longer "Roadshow version". That version played in limited release in the extinct Ultra Panavision 70mm format, which few people other than Tarantino probably care much about.
Rating: C-
