Tarantino lays it on pretty thick with "Django Unchained"

Ah... the Antebellum South.  What a fairy-tale land, awash in mint juleps, and excellent manners.  What a grand time of ladies in hoop skirts, nattily-dressed gentlemen, and children who actually understood that they were meant to be seen and not heard.  What a more genteel world it must have been back then!  Even the indentured servants were happy with their lot in life (or so we were always told…).  If this is your notion of the Antebellum South, dear reader, then Quentin Tarantino spits great, big, fat loogies on it, and with Django Unchained, paints a two-hour and forty-five minute picture of him doing it.

Django Unchained is Tarantino’s Western, or his “Southern,” as he himself calls it, which is perhaps a more appropriate term.  It’s his homage to the Spaghetti Westerns he so loves, which suits me fine, as I’m rather fond of the few of them I’ve seen, too.  Borrowing his title character’s name from the 1966 Italian-made Western Django, Tarantino crafts a story of Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist/bounty hunter (played by the baddie from Inglourious Basterds, Christoph Waltz) who obtains a slave (Jamie Foxx) who can identify some certain wanted men Schultz is seeking.  Django has been separated from his wife as a result of their being sold to separate buyers, but Schultz offers Django a partnership of sorts – if Django helps him find his quarry, then he’ll grant Django his freedom and help him find his wife.  They eventually find her in the ownership of plantation owner Calvin Candie, played repulsively by Leonardo DiCaprio, and being supervised by Candie’s chief House slave Stephen, played almost-even-more repulsively by Samuel L. Jackson. 

As a general rule, those of us who are Tarantino fans like his work, and those of us who aren’t his fans don’t like his work.  I count myself among his fans, and I find that there’s usually not much to be gained by trying to convert a non-fan – either you is a fan or you ain’t.  First and foremost, I love his dialogue.  Sure, some folks grouse about the gratuitous profanity his characters spew, but I've never found it to be outside of the logic of whatever story he's telling. Tarantino has consistently created characters and situations full of interesting and/or hilarious conversation, and the number of pop culture reference-worthy quotes we all find familiar is proof of how good at it he is. 

Secondly, it’s hard to deny that Tarantino has a great eye.  He shows us yet again how wonderfully he can frame shots, with Schultz and Django traversing snowy mountains, muddy frontier towns and sprawling cotton plantations.  Some great locations in Wyoming and Northern California, and Louisiana substituting for Texas and Mississippi, help him compose images that we might expect to see in some Sergio Leone picture from years ago. 

The first two acts of the movie progress quickly through Django and Schultz’s forming their partnership and hunting the owners of Django’s wife.  It seems that Django is a “natural” with a gun, and takes to the bounty-hunting business like the proverbial fish to water.  He makes Schultz a great partner, as well as a good friend.  These two characters are alike in so many ways, yet so different in their societal place, that the way they interact and deal with the situations in which they find themselves is fun to watch. 

It’s the final third of the film, however, where the story starts to lose me.  Django has a final showdown with his wife’s owners and their lackeys, which any good Western would be remiss to not include, and of course, that showdown must be a shootout.   Everyone understands that violence exaggerated to ludicrous levels is a Tarantino trademark, and is most often used by him for comedic effect, but I don’t recall the splatter and spray from his earlier films being anything near what he utilizes here.  Sure, sure, I should probably expect a tad more crimson in a Western (Southern) shootout than I would from films like Jackie Brown, or even Inglourious Basterds, but geez, Louise!  Even the two Kill Bill chapters, which are basically revenge movies, don’t have the geysers of blood flowing like is flowing here.  I don’t mind gore one bit when it’s logical, but it seems to me that, for the first time in his career, Tarantino has shoveled it on to the point it’s a distraction from the story he’s trying to tell, and no good movie should ever take the audience out of a story’s flow. 

Tarantino has publicly said that he intended to tackle the horrible subject of slavery with this film because no one else has had the nerve or the right to do so, but I don’t think he recalls numerous other works (Spielberg’s The Color Purple, or Alex Haley’s books, to name just two) that have addressed the subject, and done so with a bit more level-headedness.  For example, I certainly hope his inclusion of “Mandingo fighting,” gladiator-like fights to the death between slaves, is merely an exercise in artistic license, as there is no historical evidence that any such practice ever took place.  Quint may have been born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but it seems his living in California since the age of two has purged him of any allegiance to the Land of the old Confederacy he might have had. 

Django Unchained is a pretty good film on the whole, but not Tarantino’s best.  As a fan of his work, I’m glad I saw it, but I hope the subject of his next movie is one about which he might be able to exercise a bit more artistic restraint.

At least "Premium Rush" gets the "rush" part right.

If you’ve ever wondered if there was a way to make a bicycle chase exciting onscreen (and Lord knows I have…), then your wondering should be put to an end after seeing Premium Rush, as this movie finds a way to make at least three of them pretty darn effective.  While browsing the iTunes store last night on the Apple TV looking for something/anything that I might have missed in the theater earlier this year, I stumbled across this little action-thriller from writer/director David Koepp, the screenwriter of such flicks as Carlito’s Way, Mission: Impossible and the first Spider-Man movie, among others.

It stars Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, who has been one of my favorite actors of the last several years, starting when I saw him in the little-seen Brick several years ago (sorry for being behind the curve, folks, but I never watched “Third Rock from the Sun”), and his more recent roles in this year’s Looper and The Dark Knight Rises has kept me following his work with great interest.  In this flick, he’s Wiley, a former bicycle trick-rider who, after graduating law school, found the prospect of life stuck at a desk so unattractive that he didn’t bother taking the Bar exam and continued his student job as a bicycle courier.  He tells us early on that his bike doesn’t have brakes or gears because hesitating and stopping is always more dangerous than just going all-out, a philosophy that makes him a good courier, but also makes hanging on to his fellow-courier girlfriend pretty difficult.

Desperate for some extra work late one afternoon, Wiley accepts an envelope from his girlfriend’s roommate and is assigned the task of delivering it halfway across New York to an address in Chinatown within three hours.  Wiley doesn’t know he’s holding the claim-check for several thousand bucks in the hands of Chinese mobsters, but crooked cop Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon) sure does, and has every intention of getting his hands on that moolah.  Almost immediately, he’s accosted by Monday, who demands the envelope, but of course, Wiley isn’t about to compromise a job by failing to deliver to the proper recipient (or get pushed around by some “douchebag”), so the chase begins. 

We jump about via flashbacks to different points of the 8-hour day, seeing how all of the characters come to be at the points we find them in Wiley’s adventure.  Koepp’s mix-and-mash chronology is very interesting and does a fairly-good job of fleshing out the characters and their motivations without dragging the narrative to a stop.  The camera stays low to the ground, in a sort of riders’-eye view, showing us Wiley looking several blocks ahead and mentally mapping out how to avoid the perils of opening cab doors and lane-changing delivery trucks.  It seems that all those honking horns we hear whenever we see a movie or a TV show set in New York are ALL meant for bicycle couriers.  These guys might all have a death wish, weaving in and out of insane traffic, dodging pedestrians or piggybacking on school buses and other municipal vehicles when they need an extra mile-per-hour or two, but that very daredevil quality might just be what makes them sorta useful.  They’re paid for speedy delivery, after all.

Some of the other characters might not be as developed as much as you might like (a poor put-upon bicycle traffic cop factors into the story early on, but is sort of dumped from the plot unceremoniously near the end, and without much fanfare), but Michael Shannon deserves some extra mention in that regard.  His portrayal of Detective Monday is yet another entry on his list of roles that make good use of that natural creepiness that always seems to be right behind his eyes.  Monday is so sociopathic that it’s almost comical, and his simmering/steaming/bubbling-over whenever Wiley escapes his grasp gives the movie the combination of smirk and tension that a good action movie just has to have.

Good action movies should take you for a ride, so to speak, and this one does.  Sure, it’s pretty much a “formula” movie, but it’s a well-made one, and would definitely make a great mid-weeknight Netflix or iTunes rental.

"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" - a case of Been-there-Done-That...

Awright! We get to go back to Middle Earth! Like pretty much all of my geek brethren, that was my initial reaction when Peter Jackson finally got his desire to film The Hobbit pushed through the nightmare of lawsuits between Warner Brothers and MGM over film rights, and then MGMs bankruptcy proceedings.  Yay!  Then came the news that the adaptation would actually be a pair of movies.  Okay, I guess with some stuff from Tolkein’s “Lord of the Rings” appendices and a little creative license, two average-length movies could come from the novel.  Then, we get word that this simple little adventure story would be stretched into THREE films, and three-hour “epics” at that!  Geez, Louise, how thinly can they possibly spread a pat of butter over so much bread???

Well, the finished product is finally here, so with a little bit of reservation, I went to see the first installment of this new trilogy yesterday.  For the sake of brevity, I’ll assume that you, dear reader, are among the hundreds of millions of folks who’ve seen the Lord of the Rings movies, and thus won’t waste your time elaborating on the “adventures” about which Bilbo told Frodo, and which are depicted in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (and the next two movies…).

The first third of the movie dawdles a bit, with a very-padded prologue leading off things showing older-Bilbo beginning to tell this tale to Frodo.  We see thirteen dwarves showing up in separate pairs at Bilbo’s doorstep, raiding his pantry and making asses of themselves, but at least they have the good manners to do the dishes afterwards (don’t bother with trying to keep up with the thirteen dwarves - I won’t say it’s impossible to do so, but it’s not entirely necessary, as Jackson does a pretty good job of having whatever dwarf is important in any given scene identified in the course of that scene).  The show finally does get on the road, so to speak, and while there are a couple of sequences in the second and third acts that go on a bit longer than I think necessary, the final two-thirds of the story on the whole moves along fairly well, thankfully. 

If you’ve read “The Hobbit,” then you’re aware that, unlike the trilogy of books that followed, it is primarily a children’s story, and as such, the movie that comes from it certainly has a different tone than those three monstrously-successful movies from a decade ago.  Maybe that explains how the three Lord of the Rings films had a… I started to say “majesty,” but perhaps that’s a bit over-the-top.  Then I thought “originality,” but that’s being a bit too harsh on the new film.  Whatever the term for which I’m searching, there’s some sort of sense of wonder lacking from The Hobbit that was present in the Lord of the Rings.  Perhaps it’s just something as simple as the settings and effects not being new to us anymore, or maybe it’s The Hobbit’s story being a little bit less about the End of the World and more about one short guy overcoming his agoraphobia.

I realize that this is sounding a bit negative, but that’s not actually my intent, as there are good things about the movie, starting with the cast.  Martin Freeman as Bilbo was a good choice.  He is his usual put-upon, underdog-self here, a personality type he always seems to play so well (see Love, Actually and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and I liked how Ian McKellen played Gandalf with a different slant than he did in the Lord of the Rings flicks, conveying the character at an earlier stage in his life.  The multitude of dwarves are actually quite funny, and there are even appearances by some folks who pop up in the Lord of the Rings, so we do get the sense that all of this is building to something, which seems a good thing. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is this first installment of this Hobbit trilogy left me with a little bit of a feeling of “been there, done that.”  I liked it okay, but unless it grows on me in the coming months after I see it again on home video a time or two, I’m not going to be in a very big hurry to get to the theater next December for the second one.    

A small, but essential, part of the life of "Lincoln"

If you go to see this movie expecting to see much of the Civil War, you’ll be sorely disappointed.  This movie isn’t about the Civil War.  It’s not even about Abraham Lincoln per se, as I’m fairly certain that Lincoln’s life consisted of more than just the first four months of 1865.  One could even make the case the title “Lincoln” is not entirely appropriate, and it instead might should have been named “Passage of the 13^th Amendment,” as this is primarily a film about the political process surrounding that event.  However, if you go to see it expecting to see one of the greatest film actors of our generation giving a tour-de-force performance, your money will be well-spent.

Daniel Day-Lewis amazes me once again, as he so disappears into Abraham Lincoln that I don’t even see the performer.  I was most impressed by his voice – I don’t recall him ever having that speaking voice in any of his roles before, and it’s very different from many of the gruff-voiced portrayals of Lincoln we’ve seen before.  His soft-spoken demeanor and gentle movements wonderfully communicate the kind soul we’ve all believed to inhabit Lincoln.

Steven Spielberg doesn’t show us Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, or his being murdered at Ford’s Theater.  We’ve seen all that before.  Spielberg shows us Lincoln speaking to a couple of soldiers waiting to board a train, to his secretaries in the middle of the night, to some telegraph operators waiting for his instructions to them, and to General Grant while seated together in rocking chairs on a front porch.  We see him lying on the floor before a fireplace with his youngest son.  We see him fight with his wife, and with his eldest son.  These are the things that humanize Lincoln to us, perhaps more so than any other president.

As we see the job-offering, the favor-promising and the outright bullying involved in his securing the necessary votes to pass the 13^th Amendment, one wonders just how we of this time in history can say that politics is dirtier than ever.  Looked to me like business as usual.  Well, with the possible exception of the bullying being done in much prettier language than our current president’s cronies and stooges used for cramming Obamacare down the country’s throat.  Whenever I see a well-made period-piece film of the 19^th Century, I leave the theater feeling that I missed out on the language of that time.  People were much more well-spoken in those days (or at least educated people were), so much so that even calling someone else the most vile and despicable names, it sounded so much more pleasant.

As usual, Spielberg and his usual cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, have crafted a beautiful film.  The sets and locations here are fantastic and completely convincing (I honestly don’t know how much computer-generated assistance there was in recreating this time and place, if any at all).  I foresee Oscar nominations for photography, set design and costumes without a doubt.  The rest of the notable cast, from Tommy Lee Jones and Sally Field to Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Jared Harris, are excellent as well.

Some folks I know describe the movie’s pace as slow, and while I can understand that sentiment, it seems to have a bit of a negative tone to it that I’m reluctant to agree with it.  “Deliberate” is a better adjective, as the process of politics is a deliberate one (hence parliamentary debate being called “deliberation”).  The movie’s pace was very absorbing, and I was certainly never bored.  Just pay attention, people – if you want a faster pace, rent a Bruce Willis movie.  While this movie may not be the definitive depiction of Abraham Lincoln’s life, it should certainly become the definitive depiction of this event in our nation’s history. 

"Skyfall." Best. Bond. Ever.

That's right, I'll say it again in case you misunderstood me - Best.  Bond.  Ever.  I could just quit writing right there, because it really doesn’t get any simpler than that.  Don’t get me wrong – Goldeneye was great.  I still love Thunderball and Goldfinger.  Even Live and Let Die was pretty good, but if we are to take the word “reboot” literally, then I have to consider the Daniel Craig era as a separate entity from the rest of the Bond series, and as such, Skyfall is simply the best of the bunch.  One of the greatest sensations I can hope to experience as a moviegoer is when a movie lives up to my high hopes for it.  This one most certainly does.

After an intense pursuit of a stolen hard drive that contains vital information through the streets of Istanbul, Bond is wounded during a desperate fight atop a moving train, flung to a river below and left for dead.  MI-6 continues on without him, but when the complex plot of a cyber-terrorist to discredit and disgrace “M” (Judi Dench) begins to take shape, he reappears from the dead, only to be told that he’s possibly too old and out-of-shape to continue serving.  Not that he or “M” would allow silly things like physical evaluations and psychological profiles to keep 007 out of action for long, so rules are bent and superiors are ignored, and Bond then jet-sets halfway across the globe in pursuit of those who seek to make use of the information on that stolen hard drive.

That information turns out to be the identities of every covert operative currently undercover in terrorist organizations all over the world, and it’s being used by some evil mastermind to wreak havoc on MI-6 in general, and on “M” in particular.  The villain turns out to be a former MI-6 operative named Silva (played by a wonderously-creepy Javier Bardem, who can do Creepy Bad Guy better than most, as proved by No Country for Old Men), whose plans turn out to be much more complex, and much more personal, than mere cyber-terrorism.  His first meeting with Bond must be the grandest entry of any Bond villain into a film, and his ensuing conversation with him must also rank as the strangest.

Of course, it’s amazing what an Oscar-winning director can do for a franchise-formula movie (pay close attention to that statement, Walt Disney company, when deciding who will helm the next Star Wars flick…).  I have wondered what sort of “action movie” Sam Mendes could make from the moment I heard of his hiring to direct this film.  I mean, let’s face it – American Beauty and Revolutionary Road were wonderful movies, but they don’t exactly make one think he could just as easily have made Die Hard or something like that.  That said, I’ve had a gut feeling all along that he’d pleasantly surprise us and would make Skyfall something special…  and he sure as Hell did.

Mendes has given us the most visually gripping Bond film I can remember.  As exotic settings have always been a staple of the Bond series, Mendes makes fantastic use of the nighttime settings of Shanghai and Macau, with a skyscraper’s glass and a city’s neon lights apparently being the new trees and foliage in which snipers ply their trade these days.  The gloom of Scotland, the light bulbs of the London underground, and the harsh sunlight of an abandoned island in the South China Sea are all important parts of Mendes’ lovely finished product.

I can’t rave enough about this script, either.  Skyfall is certainly the most character-invested film of the entire Bond series.  We see Bond have doubt about the world changing around him.  We see “M” face her mortality.  We see other, younger operatives suffer the consequences for actions demanded of them.  We see the people to whom they answer question their very necessity in the modern world and the wars we might fight.  We also, for the first time in the fifty-year history of the cinematic version of the character, see that Bond actually did exist before he was granted his Double-O status. Screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan apparently took advantage of the extra two years provided by MGM’s financial problems to hone this script to near-perfection, and given the sorta-flat previous film in this series (that would be Quantum of Solace, which actually began filming without a completed script), it’s easy to forgive being made to wait longer for this movie.

We’re even given the pleasure of being reintroduced to some of the characters and details we used to love about the series that went away after Casino Royale, in ways that are entirely appropriate to the new style and tone of the series.  There were just enough winks to Bond’s past to be appreciated, but none of them so over-the-top as to make one’s eyes roll at the cheesiness of doing so.  I am so tempted to give away some of these nuggets, but oh, how I don’t want to deprive you of the pleasure of learning these things for yourself (I will blab that it’s great to see that Bond made sure the Aston Martin he won from Demetrios in Casino Royale got shipped over from the Bahamas after that mission was completed, and that it has a few specs that harken back to other Bond movies…).

If you’ve avoided the movie’s Wikipedia entry so far (damn those European moviegoers who’ve had an extra two weeks to see it and spoil the surprises for us over here…), then you’re in for one heck of a time.  The pre-title action sequence alone is worth the price of admission, so consider getting a completely fantastic experience the rest of the way as a bonus.  In other words, Skyfall kicks ass.  Maybe I should’ve just left it at that.