Tag: Quentin Tarantino

Categories
From My Seat Sports

The NBA’s Supermen

Quentin Tarantino likes Superman. A lot. There’s a scene in his 2004 film, Kill Bill, Vol. 2, in which Bill (played by David Carradine) explains to Beatrix (Uma Thurman) the singular trait that makes Superman superior to all other costumed heroes. As Bill tells it, Batman wakes up every morning as Bruce Wayne. Spider-Man eats his breakfast as Peter Parker. Only Superman starts his day as the hero he truly is, forced to “costume” himself as a mere mortal, one of us all-too-frail humans, Clark Kent.

Kawhi Leonard in his new Superman outfit.

It occurred to me earlier this month that Tarantino must love the NBA. That’s because the greatest basketball league on the planet has become a collection of supermen, players who shape the costumes, er, uniforms they wear far more than the teams — represented by those uniforms — shape them. Kawhi Leonard may have won the 2019 NBA championship without the Toronto Raptors (and their jersey on his back). There is no way the Raptors win the 2019 NBA championship without Leonard. Kawhi Leonard, in NBA terms, is a superman. And NBA championships are the reserve, almost exclusively, of basketball supermen.

Think about the NFL and its resident dynasty. Aside from Tom Brady (granted, a Thor in shoulder pads), those who don the helmet of the New England Patriots are interchangeable, yet the franchise has won three Super Bowls this decade after winning three the previous. They are Batman, and it doesn’t matter who’s wearing the utility belt. And baseball? Name three players who played for all three San Francisco Giant championship teams this decade. (Madison Bumgarner and Buster Posey are gimmes.) That franchise was a slick-fielding, pitching-strong Spider-Man. Check out Into the Spider-Verse if you think it matters who is wearing the web-shooters.

There was a time when NBA players became stars by making their team — one team, mind you — a dynasty. Think Bill Russell with the Boston Celtics, Magic Johnson with the Los Angeles Lakers, or Michael Jordan with the Chicago Bulls (twice). Those days predate flip phones, for crying out loud. In today’s NBA, the superstars — supermen – decide where (and for whom) they’d like to win a championship. LeBron James couldn’t get it done in Cleveland, so he took off for Miami (two titles). Kevin Durant won an MVP in Oklahoma City that he sweetly dedicated to his mother. But Mom couldn’t help win a championship, so off to Oakland flew Durant, where he won two titles with Steph Curry and the Warriors. Cast off by San Antonio, despite credentials as a Finals MVP, Leonard won the same hardware in what would prove to be his only season in a Raptors uniform. You see, Kawhi Leonard wakes up as Kawhi Leonard … every day.

At the end of each season, 15 players earn All-NBA recognition (five first-team, five second-team, and five third-team). No fewer than six of those players in 2019 changed teams earlier this month. Leonard is now an L.A. Clipper, along with former Thunder forward Paul George. Durant has taken his torn Achilles tendon to Brooklyn, where he’ll join Kyrie Irving, making the Nets early (very early) favorites to win the Eastern Conference title in 2021. Kemba Walker departed Charlotte to replace Irving in Boston. And talk about Superman: Russell Westbrook — a man who has averaged a triple-double for three straight seasons — has joined forces with 2018 MVP James Harden in Houston. We might as well add new Laker Anthony Davis — not All-NBA this year, but three times a first-teamer — to this collection of supermen changing the color of their capes.

Is this Superman effect good for the NBA? That’s in the eye of the beholder. An informal poll of my Twitter pals suggested a Grizzlies championship with a one-and-gone superstar (like Leonard in Toronto) is significantly preferable to a team of merely very good teammates leading a lengthy run of playoff appearances without a title. Basketball has become a player’s league to the point that the jerseys they wear are merely incidental. Don’t be offended if you see Clipper jerseys in FedExForum when L.A.’s “other team” visits next winter. No, those are Kawhi Leonard jerseys. 

Perhaps Ja Morant will become an NBA superman. Maybe Jaren Jackson Jr. can leap a building in a single bound. When or if they bring a championship to Memphis, the color of their jersey will matter to those of us who call the Grizzlies our team. They alone know what it’s like to wake up every day as Ja Morant and Triple-J. Until they bring that parade to Beale Street, though, consider them Clark Kents, blending — however uncomfortably — among the rest of professional basketball’s mortal talents.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Hateful Eight

In 1977, an ad touted the Heroes album with: “There’s Old Wave, there’s New Wave, and there’s David Bowie”. Like the Thin White Duke, Quentin Tarantino has become a genre unto himself. There are thrillers, there are mysteries, and there are Tarantino movies.

The buzz going into The Hateful Eight was characteristically bizarre: a Western shot on 70MM film in the age of digital. For the cinephile, anything that starts with the Cinerama logo raises expectations of wide-open vistas, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the opening overture, The Hateful Eight seems like it’s going to deliver on that promise with a series of shots of a stagecoach plowing through Montana’s snowy vastness. But then the stage is stopped by a lone black figure: Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a former Union calvary major-turned-bounty hunter, sitting atop a pile of dead bodies. The horseless man asks the coach’s charter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) for a ride so he can escape the coming blizzard. Ruth is reluctant to help, because he is transporting his own bounty to Red Rocks, a woman named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and she’s extremely valuable. But Warren is very convincing, and since they once had dinner together in Chattanooga long ago, Ruth agrees. Then, the action shifts to a long conversation inside the stagecoach, and we’ve seen the last of the beautiful western landscapes. After picking up another hitchhiker, racist sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the stage arrives at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a frontier tavern where the inhabitants hope to hunker down to avoid the snow. Needless to say, things go spectacularly wrong.

Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson

From there, The Hateful Eight resembles Reservoir Dogs more than How the West Was Won. The motley crew trapped in the blizzard slowly circle each other spouting stupendously flowery dialogue as they look for an opening for murder. If there’s one thing QT is good at, it’s writing a menacing speech leading up to mayhem, and his language machine is cranking double time. Jackson and Russell provide ideal vessels for the profane wordsmith, but from Tim Roth to Bruce Dern to Michael Madsen, there really are no weak links here. Lies are told, identities shift, Pynchonesque names are checked, and poison surreptitiously administered. Tarantino uses the fantastically expensive and obsolete camera technology not to open up spaces, but to present the whole of the interior of Minnie’s as a single stage set where he can move his crack actors around like a theater director.

SLJ. ’Nuff said.

There are a hundred reasons why a three-hour widescreen epic that devolves into an Agatha Christie play shouldn’t work, and yet, at least after the first viewing, The Hateful Eight comes off as more satisfying than Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained. It’s the critic’s job to explain this stuff, but Tarantino creates alchemy that defies easy description. Sometimes things just work.

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

TV Review: Game of Thrones

Early in “The Watchers on the Wall,” the ninth episode of Game of Thrones’ fourth season on HBO, Night’s Watchman and round mound of rebound Samwell Tarly (John Bradley) accidentally blurts out the show’s central message: “We’re all gonna die a lot sooner than I planned.” More than anything else that body-count rubbernecking keeps people invested in David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Over and over again, we’re reminded that no matter how important they seem, no character is ever safe. This kind of cast fragility and character expendability is fairly common in huge, multi-volume fantasy epics, but it’s rare in big-budget, serialized television. Yet lots of folks — especially folks like me, who don’t plan on reading the five enormous novels that have provided most of the story so far — can’t get enough of it.

Although I tend to watch more movies than TV shows, what has intrigued me ever since Quentin Tarantino guest-directed an episode of ER in 1995 are the ways in which filmmakers adapt their technique and their sensibility to the small screen. It’s tough to do, but when it works, it works really well.

Ironically, director Neil Marshall’s handling of the battle between the Night’s Watchman and the Wildling hordes in “The Watchers on the Wall” reaffirms his status as an overlooked action-film auteur. Marshall’s specialty has been constricted, close-quarter combat; I’ve long admired his claustrophobic 2005 horror film The Descent, and I liked his apocalyptic action epic Doomsday — one of the few movies that properly deployed steely wonder woman Rhona Mitra. Plus, Marshall’s helmed the coveted ninth episode of a Game of Thrones season before; he directed season two’s justly celebrated “Blackwater,” which gave Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), aka “The Imp,” the briefest taste of glory.

Like “Blackwater,” the stripped-down, torch-lit “Wall” is as craftily structured as those Game of Thrones episodes that juggle multiple locations and subplots. “Wall” spends 15 minutes on idle chatter and worried stares before a cannibal Kevin
Greene-type mutters, “It’s time.” After 30 solid minutes of expanding and escalating carnage that includes a funky long take that reminds everyone of the bad blood between Watchman Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and his flaming redhead Wildling ex-lover Ygritte (Rose Leslie), it finishes with five minutes of necessary breath-catching.

A multilevel assault staged with Marshall’s economy and visual verve is effective enough, but it’s more tense in Game of Thrones-land because the principals involved, like Snow, Tarly, and Gilly (Hannah Murray), are just the sort of bland goody-two-shoes most likely to catch an arrow in the neck. And, as the fight rages on, the risks increase as each side busts out its heavy artillery. The first arrow shot by a Wildling giant shatters a wooden lookout post on the Wall; the second one recalls a good gag from the Warner Brothers cartoon “Bully for Bugs.” Not to be outdone, Tarly, in one of the episode’s few optimistic moments, remembers a secret weapon of the Night’s Watchman: an enormous white direwolf in a wooden pen.

Yet, despite all the heroism and boldness on display here, “Blackwater” is probably the stronger episode of the two. The most remarkable aspect of “The Watchers on the Wall” might be its refusal to acknowledge the potentially grim fate of another major character, unseen for the entire episode: I’m all for the sight of archers hanging off the side of two vertical miles of ice, but the producers aren’t going to kill off the Imp, are they?

Game of Thrones

HBO

Season 4 Finale, Sunday, June 15th, 8 p.m.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Conversion

In January 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Audience Award for best feature at the Sundance Film Festival, kicking off the modern Indie film movement.

To audiences, “Indie” usually means quirky, low-budget, character-driven fare that is more like the auteurist films of the 1970s than contemporary Hollywood’s designed-by-committee product. But “Indie” originally referred to films financed outside the major studios by outfits like New Line Cinema, which produced Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). By 1990, The Coen Brothers had crossed over into the mainstream with Miller’s Crossing, a film that brought together the meticulous plotting, brainy dialog, and stunning visual compositions that would garner them acclaim for the next 25 years.

As the 1990s dawned, a whole crop of directors stood up with a mission to make good movies on their own terms — and that meant raising money by any means necessary. Robert Rodriguez financed his $7,000 debut feature El Mariachi by selling his body for medical testing. It went on to win the 1993 Audience Award at Sundance, and his book Rebel Without A Crew inspired a generation of filmmakers.

Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker threw out the screenwriting rulebook that had dominated American film since George Lucas name-checked Joseph Campbell, focusing instead on dozens of strange characters floating around Austin. The structure has echoed through Indie film ever since, not only in Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993) but also the “hyperlink” movies of the early 2000s such as Soderbergh’s Traffic and even more conventionally scripted films such as Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut, Clerks.

Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most influential director of the last 25 years. His breakthrough hit, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, was the first film completely financed by producer Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. But even then, the definitions of what was an “Indie” movie were fluid, as the formerly independent Miramax had become a subsidiary of Disney.

Indie fervor was spreading as local film scenes sprang up around the country. In Memphis, Mike McCarthy’s pioneering run of drive-in exploitation-inspired weirdness started in 1994 with Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis, followed the next year by the semi-autobiographical Teenage Tupelo. With 1997’s The Sore Losers, McCarthy integrated Memphis’ burgeoning underground music scene with his even-more-underground film aesthetic.

In 1995, the European Dogme 95 Collective, led by Lars von Trier, issued its “Vows of Chastity” and defined a new naturalist cinema: no props, no post-production sound, and no lighting. Scripts were minimal, demanding improvisation by the actors. Dogme #1 was Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998.

Meanwhile, in America, weirdness was reaching its peak with Soderbergh’s surrealist romp Schizopolis. Today, the film enjoys a cult audience, but in 1997, it almost ended Soderbergh’s career and led to a turning point in Indie film. The same year, Tarantino directed Jackie Brown and then withdrew from filmmaking for six years. Soderbergh’s next feature veered away from experiment: 1998’s Out Of Sight was, like Jackie Brown, a tightly plotted adaptation of an Elmore Leonard crime novel. Before Tarantino returned to the director’s chair, Soderbergh would hit with Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and make George Clooney and Brad Pitt the biggest stars in the world with a very un-Indie remake of the Rat Pack vehicle Ocean’s 11.

Technology rescued Indie film. In the late ’90s, personal computers were on their way to being ubiquitous, and digital video cameras had improved in picture quality as they simplified operation. The 1999 experimental horror The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, showed what was possible with digital, simultaneously inventing the found footage genre and becoming the most profitable Indie movie in history, grossing $248 million worldwide on a shooting budget of $25,000.

The festival circuit continued to grow. The Indie Memphis Film Festival was founded in 1998, showcasing works such as the gonzo comedies of Memphis cable access TV legend John Pickle. In 2000, it found its biggest hit: Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, a gritty, digital story of the Memphis streets, won awards both here and at the Hollywood Film Festival.

In 2005, Memphis directors dominated the Sundance Film Festival, with Ira Sach’s impressionistic character piece Forty Shades Of Blue winning the Grand Jury Prize, and Brewer’s Hustle & Flow winning the Audience Award, which would ultimately lead to the unforgettable spectacle of Three Six Mafia beating out Dolly Parton for the Best Original Song Oscar.

Brewer rode the crest of a digital wave that breathed new life into Indie film. In Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson co-founded the MeDiA Co-Op, gathering dozens of actors and would-be filmmakers together under the newly democratized Indie film banner. Originally a devotee of Dogme 95, Fox quickly grew beyond its limitations, and by the time of 2008’s OMG/HaHaHa, his stories of down-and-out kids in Memphis owed more to Italian neorealism like Rome, Open City than to von Trier.

Elsewhere, the digital revolution was producing American auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, whose 2002 Funny Ha Ha would be retroactively dubbed the first “mumblecore” movie. The awkward label was coined to describe the wave of realist, DIY digital films such as Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth that hit SXSW in 2005. Memphis MeDiA Co-Op alum Kentucker Audley produced three features, beginning with 2007’s mumblecore Team Picture.

Not everyone was on board the digital train. Two of the best Indie films of the 21st century were shot on film: Shane Carruth’s $7,000 Sundance winner Primer (2004) and Rian Johnson’s high school noir Brick (2005). But as digital video evolved into HD, Indie films shot on actual film have become increasingly rare.

DVDs — the way most Indies made money — started to give way to digital distribution via the Internet. Web series, such as Memphis indie collective Corduroy Wednesday’s sci fi comedy The Conversion, began to spring up on YouTube.

With actress and director Greta Gerwig’s star-making turn in 2013’s Francis Ha, it seemed that the only aspect of the American DIY movement that would survive the transition from mumblecore to mainstream was a naturalistic acting style. Founding father Soderbergh announced his retirement in 2013 with a blistering condemnation of the Hollywood machine. Lena Dunham’s 2010 festival hit Tiny Furniture caught the eye of producer Judd Apatow, and the pair hatched HBO’s Girls, which wears its indie roots on its sleeve and has become a national phenomenon.

The Indie spirit is alive and well, even if it may bypass theaters in the future.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Sweet Thereafter

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Memphis Flyer (our first quarter quell, as it were), I have chosen my personal favorite film from each year since the Flyer began publication. Then, for each of those films, I unearthed and have excerpted some quotes from the review we ran at the time. — Greg Akers

1989: #1 Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch (#2 Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee)

“While all the scenes in Mystery Train are identifiable by anyone living west of Goodlett, their geographical relationship gets altered to a point where we start to trust Jarmusch more than our own memories.” — Jim Newcomb, March 8, 1990

“Filmed primarily at the downtown corner of South Main and Calhoun, Jarmusch does not use the Peabody Hotel, the Mississippi River, Graceland, or most of the other locations that the Chamber of Commerce would thrust before any visiting filmmaker. His domain concerns exactly that territory which is not regularly tread by the masses, and his treatment of Memphis is likely to open a few eyes.”
— Robert Gordon, March 8, 1990

1990: #1 Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese (#2 Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder)

“This may not be De Niro’s best-ever performance, but he’s got that gangster thang down pat. His accent is flawless, his stature is perfect, and, boy, does he give Sansabelt slacks new meaning.”
— The Cinema Sisters, September 27, 1990

1991: #1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron (#2 The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme)

“Terminator 2 is an Alfa Romeo of a movie: pricey, sleek, fast, and loaded with horsepower. By comparison, the first Terminator was a Volkswagen. On the whole, I’d rather have a Volkswagen — they’re cheap and reliable. But, hey, Alfas can be fun too.” — Ed Weathers, July 11, 1993

1992: #1 Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley (#2 The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann)

“Mamet’s brilliantly stylized look at the American Dream’s brutality as practiced by low-rent real estate salesmen who would put the screws to their mothers to keep their own tawdry jobs doesn’t relax its hard muscle for a moment. In the hands of this extraordinary cast, it is like a male chorus on amphetamines singing a desparate, feverish ode to capitalism and testosterone run amuck.”
— Hadley Hury, October 15, 1992

1993: #1 Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater (#2 Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg)

“Dazed and Confused is a brief trip down memory lane. The characters are not just protagonists and antagonists. They are clear representations of the folks we once knew, and their feelings are those we had years and years ago. Linklater doesn’t, however, urge us to get mushy. He is just asking us to remember.”
— Susan Ellis, November 4, 1993

1994: #1 Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino (#2 Ed Wood, Tim Burton)

“Even though Tarantino is known for his bratty insistence on being shocking by way of gratuitous violence and ethnic slurs, it’s the little things that mean so much in a Tarantino film — camera play, dialogue, performances, and music.”
— Susan Ellis, October 20, 1994

1995: #1 Heat, Michael Mann
(#2 Toy Story, John Lasseter)

“I’m sick of lowlifes and I’m sick of being told to find them fascinating by writers and directors who get a perverse testosterone rush in exalting these lives to a larger-than-life heroism with slow-motion, lovingly lingered-over mayhem and death, expertly photographed and disturbingly dehumanizing.”
— Hadley Hury, December 21, 1995

1996: #1 Lone Star, John Sayles
(#2 Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Although Lone Star takes place in a dusty Texas border town, it comes into view like a welcome oasis on the landscape of dog-day action films … Chris Cooper and Sayles’ sensitive framing of the performance produce an arresting character who inhabits a world somewhere between Dostoevsky and Larry McMurtry.”
— Hadley Hury, August 8, 1996

1997: #1 L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (#2 The Apostle, Robert Duvall)

L.A. Confidential

“L.A. Confidential takes us with it on a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes … to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of trust.”

— Hadley Hury, October 2, 1997

1998: #1 Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg (#2 The Big Lebowski, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Spielberg is finishing the job he began with Schindler’s List. He’s already shown us why World War II was fought; now he shows us how. … Spielberg’s message is that war is horrifying yet sometimes necessary. And that may be true. But I still prefer the message gleaned from Peter Weir’s 1981 masterpiece, Gallipoli: War is stupid.” — Debbie Gilbert, July 30, 1998

1999: #1 Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson (#2 The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan)

“Magnolia is a film in motion; there’s a cyclical nature where paths are set that will be taken. It’s about fate, not will, where the bad will hurt and good will be redeemed.”
— Susan Ellis, January 13, 2000

2000: #1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee (#2 You Can Count On Me, Kenneth Lonergan)

“Thrilling as art and entertainment, as simple movie pleasure, and as Oscar-baiting ‘prestige’ cinema. Early hype has the film being compared to Star Wars. … An even more apt comparison might be Singin’ in the Rain, a genre celebration that Crouching Tiger at least approaches in its lightness, joy, and the sheer kinetic wonder of its fight/dance set pieces.”
— Chris Herrington, February 1, 2001

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2001: #1 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg (#2 Amélie,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

“What happens when Eyes Wide Shut meets E.T.? What does the audience do? And who is the audience?”
— Chris Herrington, June 28, 2001

2002: #1 City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
(#2 Adaptation., Spike Jonze)

“The mise-en-scène of the film is neorealist, but the cinematography, editing, and effects are hyper-stylized, as if The Bicycle Thief had been reimagined through the post-CGI lens of Fight Club or The Matrix.”

— Chris Herrington, April 3, 2003

Lost in Translation

2003: #1 Lost in Translation, Sofia
Coppola (#2 Mystic River, Clint Eastwood)

“Lost in Translation is a film short on plot but rich with incident; nothing much happens, yet every frame is crammed with life and nuance and emotion. … What Coppola seems to be going for here is an ode to human connection that is bigger than (or perhaps just apart from) sex and romance.”
— Chris Herrington, October 2, 2003

2004: #1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry
(#2 Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino)

“This is the best film I’ve seen this year and one of the best in recent memory. Funny, witty, charming, and wise, it runs the gamut from comedy to tragedy without falling into either farce or melodrama. Its insights into human loss and redemption are complicated and difficult, well thought out but with the illusion and feel of absolute spontaneity and authentic in its construction — and then deconstruction — of human feelings and memory.”
— Bo List, March 25, 2004

2005: #1 Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee (#2 Hustle & Flow, Craig Brewer)

“The film is a triumph because it creates characters of humanity and anguish, in a setup that could easily become a target for homophobic ridicule. Jack and Ennis are a brave challenge to the stereotyped image of homosexuals in mainstream films, their relations to their families and to each other are truthful and beautifully captured.” — Ben Popper, January 12, 2006

2006: #1 Children of Men,
Alfonso Cuarón (#2 The Proposition, John Hillcoat)

“As aggressively bleak as Children of Men is, it’s ultimately a movie about hope. It’s a nativity story of sort, complete with a manger. And from city to forest to war zone to a lone boat in the sea, it’s a journey you won’t want to miss.”
— Chris Herrington, January 11, 2007

2007 #1 Zodiac, David Fincher
(#2 There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson)

“[Zodiac is] termite art, too busy burrowing into its story and characters to bother with what you think.”
— Chris Herrington, March 8, 2007

2008: #1 Frozen River, Courtney Hunt (#2 The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan)

“Frozen River is full of observations of those who are living less than paycheck to paycheck: digging through the couch for lunch money for the kids; buying exactly as much gas as you have change in your pocket; popcorn and Tang for dinner. The American Dream is sought after by the dispossessed, the repossessed, and the pissed off.”
— Greg Akers, August 28, 2008

2009: #1 Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze (#2 Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron)

“I know how ridiculous it is to say something like, ‘Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best kids’ movies in the 70 years since The Wizard of Oz.’ So I won’t. But I’m thinking it.”
— Greg Akers, October 15, 2009

2010: #1 Inception, Christopher Nolan (#2 The Social Network,
David Fincher)

“Nolan has created a complex, challenging cinematic world but one that is thought through and whose rules are well-communicated. But the ingenuity of the film’s concept never supersedes an emotional underpinning that pays off mightily.”
— Chris Herrington, July 15, 2010

2011: #1 The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (#2 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson)

“The Tree of Life encompasses a level of artistic ambition increasingly rare in modern American movies — Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood might be the closest recent comparison, and I’m not sure it’s all that close. This is a massive achievement. An imperfect film, perhaps, but an utterly essential one.”
— Chris Herrington, June 23, 2011

2012: #1 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow (#2 Lincoln, Steven Spielberg)

“Zero Dark Thirty is essentially an investigative procedural about an obsessive search for knowledge, not unlike such touchstones as Zodiac or All the President’s Men. And it has an impressive, immersive experiential heft, making much better use of its nearly three-hour running time than any competing award-season behemoth.”
— Chris Herrington, January 10, 2013 

2013: #1 12 Years a Slave, Steve
McQueen (#2 Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón)

“Slavery bent human beings into grotesque shapes, on both sides of the whip. But 12 Years a Slave is more concerned with the end of it. McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley are black. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t be notable but is. If you consider 12 Years a Slave with The Butler and Fruitvale Station, you can see a by-God trend of black filmmakers making mainstream movies about the black experience, something else that shouldn’t be worth mentioning but is.”
— Greg Akers, October 31, 2013

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Cold in July is a joyful throwback to 1980s thrillers.

Quentin Tarantino killed the non-ironic action movie the way Nirvana killed hair metal. It probably needed to be done, but let’s not pretend something of value wasn’t lost.

Remember when cinematic violence could be menacing, gratuitous, and funny, but also earnestly delivered all at once? When a thriller could be grippingly serious but with character transformation rather than character depth, and themes rather than social commentary? When everything didn’t have to be hyper-clever, it could just be nicely pulled off?

Cold in July remembers; it takes place in 1989 — not just as a setting but as a state of mind. It’s the middle of the night, and the Dane family, husband Richard (Michael C. Hall, who doesn’t get enough credit as a thoroughly outstanding actor), wife Ann (Vinessa Shaw), and their son, Jordan (Brogan Hall), are sound asleep. That is, until the parents hear an intruder in their home. Richard gets his pistol from a shoebox in his closet, loads it with shaky hands, and ventures down the hallway to confront the burglar. The confrontation goes south, and Richard shoots the unknown man dead.

The police, in the person of Detective Ray Price (Nick Damici) have no qualms about calling it self-defense. Price says the perp was Freddie Russell, a known criminal. Richard is nevertheless devastated; he’s not a violent man. He wants to know if Freddie had any family. Just the one, he’s told: a dad who just got out on parole from prison.

You see where this is going, right? Ben Russell (Sam Shepard) rolls into town, all scary and mysterious, and starts threatening the Dane family. He wants an eye for an eye, which means young Jordan is in danger since Richard killed the Russell scion. Ben is an almost supernatural force of evil: In his first appearance, he just shows up in the frame, looming over an unsuspecting Richard, and he manages to get past a squad of police to get to the Dane family. It’s all very Cape Fear — though Cold in July‘s homage is to Scorsese’s 1991 over-the-top remake rather than the hardboiled original.

But, Cold in July (based on a novel by Joe R. Lansdale) is tricking you. I won’t spoil the finer points of the narrative, but when you think you’ve got where it’s going figured out, its plot takes left turns. The film’s references go from period, ’80s and ’90s domestic horrors like Unlawful Entry, Pacific Heights, and Flesh and Bone to period action thrillers like Blind Fury, The Hitcher, The Osterman Weekend (I might have Rutger Hauer on the brain), Road House, the Dolph Lundgren version of The Punisher, Blood Simple played straight, or even a human-scale Commando.

All that, plus Hall sports a sweet ‘stache and mullet, and Don Johnson shows up as a private detective named Jim Bob Luke, who wears loud country-and-western shirts and a cowboy hat and drives a red convertible with fuzzy dice and a hula girl on the dash. And it works!

The score, by Jeff Grace, is straight up synthesizers and rock guitars. The whole endeavor is appreciatively cheesy, including the direction from Jim Mickle — but there are no hints of mockery. It’s a #throwbackthursday kind of film: outdated hair and fashions and concepts not better off forgotten.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Tarantino, Unhinged

The worst moment of Quentin Tarantino’s film career came in his best film. It was when, in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino cast himself as a some sort of mid-level crime-world figure who chastises a Jheri-curled Samuel L. Jackson, whose professional hitman was trying to dispose of a body: “Does this look like dead n**ger storage?” Tarantino asks.

Tarantino’s new spaghetti-western/blaxploitation-mashup revenge fantasy Django Unchained uses that racial pejorative perhaps more rampantly than any mainstream American film, but this time the usage comes with more deliberate and arguably righteous intent — as a historically accurate signifier of ignorance and brutishness.

Django Unchained is something of a spiritual/thematic sequel to Tarantino’s last film, Inglourious Basterds, which imagined an alternate history where Jews hunt Nazi scalps and take out Adolf Hitler. I didn’t have a problem with Tarantino’s irreverent approach to the provocative material or his embrace of violent retribution there, and I don’t here. But I did have modest issues with Basterds on pure filmmaking grounds, and I have more such qualms with Django.

Basterds breakout star Christoph Waltz is Dr. King Schultz, a German bounty hunter in the American South and West in the years just before the Civil War. In an opening set piece, Schultz accosts two slave traders in the woods and “acquires” one of their property, Django (Jamie Foxx), whom he wants to use to identify three wanted men who had been overseers on the plantation where Django and his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), had been captive.

“For the time being, I’m going to make this slavery malarky work to my benefit,” Schultz tells Django, who agrees to partner with him for a cut of the bounties before being officially set free. “Killing white people for money? What’s not to like?” Django later explains.

Waltz and Foxx make for an enjoyable buddy team, their early, episodic exploits peaking when Django, posing as Schultz’ freed-man valet, takes a whip to a plantation overseer in front of a group of slaves. These journeys culminate in a trip to Mississippi, where Schultz and Django have hatched a plan to rescue Broomhilda from servitude on the plantation owned by “Mandingo-fighting” enthusiast Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and run, in part, by his loyal house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson, fully committed).

In a film culture that still generally hails a monstrosity like Gone With the Wind as an unambiguous classic, Django Unchained turns plantation owners and overseers and night riders into lazy brutes worthy of scorn and ridicule (especially in an extended comic bit partly derived from Blazing Saddles) without shortchanging their danger. DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie might be a deliciously villainous Colonel Reb caricature, but slaveholders deserve no better, and Tarantino digs beneath his cartoon veneer in the uncomfortable depiction of how Candie uses his slaves for sport fighting — and how he treats them when they refuse to fight.

But Tarantino’s deeper concern for grindhouse homage than historical corrective gets the best of him in the end. Django‘s style — quick zooms, extreme close-ups, expectedly unexpected music cues — is rampant, but individual scenes and sequences generally lack the snap of even Inglourious Basterds, much less Tarantino’s best work. While his concept and casting are deeply intriguing, Tarantino’s actual direction has perhaps never been this limp. And the last, listlessly bloody half hour of this 165-minute opus is a chore. Early in the film, Tarantino finds a perfect image of poetic irreverence when a dead overseer’s blood splatters red on a field of white cotton. In the end, however, he lacks the maturity to maintain a tone that pointed or nervy.

Django Unchained

Opening Tuesday, December 25th

Multiple locations