Tag: Billy Bob Thornton

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Begin Your Holiday Backlash With Bad Santa 2

At first Christmas movies were all smiles. Lots of snowy landscapes, reindeer, and brightly wrapped presents for good little boys and girls, that’s all you needed to make a holiday movie and rake in those White Christmas bucks. Then after about 50 years of that, the Christmas backlash movie began to appear. Maybe it’s the twisted legacy of A Christmas Story, which is a fabulously positive holiday movie, but includes acknowledgements that the Yuletide can be a stressful time for all involved. Another early example of a holiday backlash movie is Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, which is probably the best Thanksgiving themed film ever made.

Kathy Bates and Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa 2.

Terry Zwigoff’s 2004 Bad Santa is a standout holiday backlash movie because it dared to go full nilhilist. It revolved around Billy Bob Thornton’s scarily committed performance as Willie Stoke, a criminal deadbeat with a knack for safecracking and a taste for cheap booze and large women whose seasonal employment involves dressing up as Santa Claus. Nowadays, there are more holiday backlash movies (The Night Before and Office Christmas Party, for example) than actual holiday movies to backlash against, and if Bad Santa 2 is any indication, it might be time for a market correction.

As the English say, Bad Santa 2 does what it says on the tin. It’s pretty much just a straight remake of the original movie, a “let’s get the band back together” (except Zwigoff is out) done 10 years too late because nobody in Hollywood funds original ideas any more. That being said, it does, in fact, do what it says on the tin. Are you feeling grumpy about this impending season of darkness? Go watch Billy Bob Thornton and Kathy Bates—two extremely talented actors who don’t get to work as much as they should—lock horns as the worst mother and son pair since Caligula and Agrippina. Also back is Tony Cox as the treacherous elf Marcus, and Brett Kelly as Thurman Merman, the clueless little kid now grown up to a clueless young adult.

Brett Kelly and Billy Bob Thornton share deep dish pizza and a cig.

It may be difficult to impossible to shock us jaded filmgoers in this dark timeline, but Bad Santa 2’s writers Johnny Rosenthal and Shauna Cross gives it the old college try. About the time the novelty of seeing Santa Claus cuss at a midget starts wearing off, the film transitions into a low-impact heist comedy, and director Mark Waters executes both halves of the movie pretty well.

I always try to judge a movie first on what the filmmakers were apparently trying to achieve. On that level, the makers of Bad Santa 2 have clearly succeeded. But on the other hand, the thing they have succeeded at is making another Bad Santa movie. Maybe try to set the bar a bit higher next time.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Tina Fey in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Four years after the fall of Saigon, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now attempted to come to terms with the Vietnam War. Notice I did not say “make sense of,” because Coppola’s goal was to show that very little about Vietnam “made sense.”

As the era of post-9/11 war (hopefully) winds down, we find ourselves again needing to come to terms with insanity. There have been some excellent documentaries about the Bush wars, such as 2007’s No End in Sight, but the treatment of the Iraq war is limited to Clint Eastwood’s militaristic hagiography American Sniper. Afghanistan was the forgotten war, as far as Hollywood is concerned.

Tina Fey is the first to tackle the absurdity of yet another empire trying and failing to impose its will on Afghanistan. In Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, she portrays Kim Baker, a war correspondent based on the real-life Kim Barker, whose book The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan served as the jumping-off point for the script, penned by 30 Rock showrunner Robert Carlock. Fey’s Baker is chosen to cover the Afghanistan war, and she leaves her cushy desk job in New York for Kabul.

It’s undeniably fun to ride along with Fey as she dives into what the international press and military types call “The Kabubble.” Whiskey Tango Foxtrot taught me that the Afghanistan war was covered primarily by people with constant, grinding hangovers. The capital is a whirlwind of Champagne-sipping consulate parties, internet porn, and hookahs full of hashish in the media room. The Westerner’s desperate decadence is in sharp contrast to the lives of the locals.

Kim’s confidence is constantly being tested as she gets a ground-level tour of different international flavors of sexism, from the Westerners’ military bravado, to the lecherous Afghan government official played by Alfred Molina, to the conservative Muslim women who are the most fierce defenders of the religious patriarchy. Fey’s assured strength at the center of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a double-edged sword, and the episodes where she bears witness to the war’s surreal futility — including a take where a mostly silent Marine general (Billy Bob Thornton) digests the awkward answer to the mystery of why an American-dug village well keeps getting blown up — give way to a focus on her romanic misadventures with Iain and her struggle to advance her journalistic career while the war descends into a stalemate. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot feels like a missed opportunity to use humor to dig deeper into America’s twisted relationship with militarism; the great statement about the legacy of Bush’s bungled wars will have to wait for another day.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
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Fargo: Season 1

Fargo (Season One) (2014; dirs. Randall Einhorn, Adam Bernstein, Colin Bucksey, Matt Shakman, and Scott Winant)—Last year, HBO’s True Detective introduced millions of TV viewers to the pleasures of well-constructed, stand-alone crime serials and Matthew McConaughey’s drawling, freshman-year gibberish about What It All Means. So if you’re looking to kill some time between now and True Detective’s Season Two premiere this Sunday, might I suggest that you binge-watch FX’s ten-episode riff on one of the most overrated Coen brothers movies? Trust me, it will be worth your while.

I’m a film guy first and foremost, but it’s pretty much indisputable that Fargo the series is visually richer and more imaginative than Fargo the movie. For once, the tight, slick, mostly motionless close-ups that caulk most TV dramas conjure menace and mystery instead of underscoring their bland, plot-driven functionality and expediency. The episode directors can do flashy and tricky, too: there’s a two-minute massacre shot from the exterior of a building that simultaneously recalls Robert Bresson’s sound-over-image primacy and an extended joke in a Droopy Dog cartoon.

But executive producer and head writer Noah Hawley’s debt to recent, much better Coen brothers films like No Country For Old Men, True Grit, Burn After Reading and especially A Serious Man is apparent. Like those films, Hawley’s Fargo cultivates an atmosphere of spiritual exhaustion and existential resignation. The good people in his show also struggle mightily with perhaps the key question of human existence: in a world where crime, violence and general human venality are without measure, what’s the point of trying to fight it?

Although stubborn, resourceful Bemidji police deputy Molly Solverson (the miraculous Alison Tolman) is less concerned with this dilemma than bumbling Duluth police officer Gus Grimley (the seldom-better Colin Hanks), both of them bond over their numerous frightening run-ins with the snakes and predators at large in their respective necks of the woods. Solverson’s chief nemesis is the insurance salesman-turned-murderer Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman, wondrously furtive and unlikeable), while Grimley’s boogeyman is the sadistic, sardonic Anton Chigurgh clone Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton, wondrously terrifying and unstoppable). Realism is shown the door after the first episode, which makes the series’ fabulist elements go down easier and makes the opening-shot assertion that “THIS IS A TRUE STORY” funnier every time it appears.

Most importantly, Hawley’s storytelling and characterization actually dignifies the aw-shirr folks of the upper Midwest instead of setting them up for cheap, you-talk-funny laughs. His dialogue reveals both the heroic stoicism of the expression “Aw, geez” and the hidden poetry of monosyllabic dialogue. (Some examples: “Here it is. You’re screwed”; “I don’t want to die in this way”; “You know what wolves do. They hunt; “God told you not to park here?” ; “You live in the world. What do you think?”) How good is this show, then? So darn good I watched the whole thing straight through twice.

Grade: A