Each Christmas, I try to get out and see a movie. When I floated the idea among my friends to see if anyone had anything in particular they wanted to see, one enthused that he really wanted to see The Hateful Eight. I still hadn't seen Django Unchained, so when I found it on Blu-ray for $9.96 at Walmart with $7.50 movie cash to see The Hateful Eight, it seemed like a no-brainer. Then, of course, the movie didn't even open anywhere in Louisville until two weeks after industry darling cities got its Christmas premiere. My friends went without me a week ago, and I decided this evening to take myself to see the damn thing.

The most obvious question about any movie with a three-hour run time is, "Does it really need to be as long as it is?" We've seen bloated run times become typical of even popcorn movies of late, a consequence of vanity in some cases, but I think the trend more generally reflects growing confidence in the willingness of audiences known for streaming whole seasons of a TV show at a time to remain seated for 2½+ hours.

What Quentin Tarantino set out to craft was ultimately a mystery film, and to that end I have to say that The Hateful Eight does justify its duration. This is a slow burn, but one that's never dull. We watch as "The Hangman" vets Major Warren, notwithstanding O.B. growing increasingly concerned about the approaching blizzard; then repeating the process with Chris Mannix; the tedium of stabling the horses and setting up lines in the snow. Though we haven't watched it be prepared, just hearing about the stew almost being ready underscores that in this story, everything takes its own time and can't be rushed.

Tarantino's status as a master of cinema may be contended on the basis of whether what he creates is high art, but he's unquestionably deft at the techniques of the medium. Structurally, this could be staged as a play, but only film allows this story to be told as it is here. At every turn, we're reminded that what we're seeing is a movie - this is a Western in which the White Stripes song "Apple Blossom" plays over one sequence; Tarantino himself breaks the fourth wall as narrator in Chapter Four; and, of course, there's the violence itself, which could never be enacted this way in any other medium.

It may seem peculiar at first blanch, but the first film I thought of as The Hateful Eight's kindred spirit was Ingmar Bergman's Persona. I'm sure that's partly because I had just brought it up in conversation shortly before I went to the theater, but much of what I've just said of this film can be said of that. From its opening montage, Persona is unmistakably a movie, Bergman tinkering with elements and techniques unique to the medium. Though its story is even more intimate and smaller in scale, seemingly perfect for stage theater, there are certain aspects of it that necessitated being made as a motion picture.

Perhaps what The Hateful Eight best showcases is Tarantino's sensibilities of how things play in a movie theater. A pal of mine remarked that Star Wars: The Force Awakens betrays J.J. Abrams's TV-scale small mindedness, and he's right. Though Tarantino's story consists entirely of about a dozen characters in mostly a single setting, this is the film of the two that truly must be seen in a theater to best be appreciated and understood for what it is.

The unraveling of threads and developments here require the kind of isolation that a movie auditorium creates. We're able to fall into the rhythm crafted by Tarantino, to catch its nuances. We may not quite know what the significance of a jelly bean on the floor will turn out to be, but we're sure to take notice of it in the theater, where there's nothing to pull away our attention during the moment that we're shown that jelly bean.

As for the story itself, I was invested from the outset, I was entertained - the chemistry between all the cast members is terrific - and I was entirely engaged by the suspense. And yet, there was a sense that something wasn't quite fully developed somehow. So much attention was given to the Civil War and racial politics that the film verged on the point of making thoughtful commentary, whether on the time of the setting or the time of the film's production and release, but never actually got there. It would be inaccurate to say that all the talk about race here is superficial, but it stops short of saying anything other than bigotry in the United States runs deep.

One upshot to having waited until now to see the film is that it counts toward my participation in this year's DVD Talk Oscar Challenge, as it's nominated for three awards. My quick take on those nominees:

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role - Jennifer Jason Leigh {"Daisy Domergue"}
This is a solid performance, morphing from darkly comedic to pure villainy. I didn't walk away from the theater feeling I'd just seen an Oscar-level standout performance, though.

Achievement in Cinematography - Robert Richardson
Most obviously, this was filmed in 70mm so there's that. Whether that's merely a gimmick is for others to debate. What I know is that this movie looks spectacular, from its remarkable exterior landscapes to the way that even what could have been a visually dull set remains engaging to the eye throughout. It's not easy to keep a story in a single setting interesting visually, much less for the bulk of three hours, but Richardson's dynamic camera work did the trick. I haven't seen any of the other nominees in this category, but I did feel I was seeing Oscar-caliber work while watching.

Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score) - Ennio Morricone
As a perfect score should, the music here enlivens the story, helps cement the aesthetics, and is just plain delightful. This isn't droning ambient noise; it's actual music, with melodies and performed by actual musicians instead (the Czech National Symphony Orchestra). As for its Oscar-ness, I can only say that I was ultimately disappointed by John Williams's Star Wars: The Force Awakens work, the only other nominee whose music I've heard, and between those two I would not hesitate to award Morricone.

The Hateful Eight entered my Flickchart at #352/1730

To answer this documentary's title, a line taken from Maya Angelou, what happened was volatility. Nina Simone lived with volatility in her marriage, she scratched and clawed out a place for herself in the volatile world of entertainment, she was in the leadership of the volatile civil rights movement, and she was plagued by the volatility of being bipolar without diagnosis or treatment until into her later years. What Happened, Miss Simone? documents all of this, simultaneously reverent for its subject but also as unflinchingly about the darkness surrounding Simone as was Simone herself.

A documentary can be organized any number of ways. Director Liz Garbus settled on a mostly chronological order, tracing Simone's life from starting to play piano at church revivals at age 4 to her twilight years, introducing in turn the aforementioned battles with volatility that defined her life and career. I generally refrain from engaging in "How It Should Have Been Made" critiquing, but I have to say I wish that Garbus had not withheld until the end discussion of Simone having gone for so long without being diagnosed or treated for being bipolar.

It may have been a late-in-life revelation for Simone, but for viewers of this documentary, knowing up front what was going on beneath the surface would have connected some important dots. For instance, the matter of why she remained involved with her abusive husband as long as she did can be partly better understood if one knows when that subject arises that Simone was carried along by her own uncontrolled emotional states.

Then there's the matter of her escalating militant views throughout the civil rights movement. The relationship between mental health and extremist views is a subject that merits an entirely separate discussion, but what's relevant here is the extent to which Simone's untreated mental health exacerbated the inherently distressful events and times that she didn't just live through, but helped to shape directly.

Rather than explore this, though, by saving the bipolar diagnosis until the end, Garbus has left us to wonder for ourselves about these things - or not, as I have to remember that not everyone processes what they see the same way I do, and aren't all as sensitive to matters of mental health as I am.

For some viewers, I suppose finding out that Simone was bipolar is no more illuminating than if her diagnosis had instead been physical in nature, like diabetes or HPV. "Oh, so she had to deal with that the rest of her days." Well, no; it isn't just that she had to live with it after being told she had it. She lived with it and was affected by it all along, and that's crucial to understanding why she made some of the choices she made and why she reacted to some things the way she did.

I fixate on this because being bipolar would not only have affected Simone for being what it is, but would also have affected how everything else in her life affected her. This dynamic is only alluded to as a mere footnote by What Happened, Miss Simone? I can accept that it need not have been the doc's central thesis, but it certainly merits more consideration than was given to it here.

There's little denying that Simone was a captivating, fascinating woman. The relationship between the civil rights movement and her art is explored fully, from how she shifted from classical to jazz to making "civil rights music" to how it came to consume her and what it cost her as a commercial entertainer when radio stations returned singles of "Mississippi Goddam" broken into two pieces.

My chief reason for streaming this today is that it's one of the nominees for Best Documentary Feature in the upcoming Academy Awards. This isn't the definitive bio of Simone by any means; in places, it feels as perfunctory as an episode of VH1 Behind the Music. But as an overview and an introduction, it's certainly interesting enough to prompt further exploration of the controversial legend.

As for its Oscar-worthiness, this is one of those nominees where I can appreciate enough about it that I can see it as an acceptable winner but I'm also not actively rooting for it. (Other such nominees this year include Jennifer Jason Leigh for Best Supporting Actress for The Hateful Eight and Star Wars: The Force Awakens for Visual Effects.)

What Happened, Miss Simone? entered my Flickchart at #1068/1731

I never noticed Carlo's line, "All you Corleones are murderers" as he's beating up Connie. It was also cool to see how far Rocco (The hitman) was able to climb up the ladder. Went from taking out Paulie to TWO crime bosses!