Tag: Samuel L. Jackson

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Spider-Man: Far From Home

Tom Holland as Peter Parker as Spider-Man

What is the essence of Spider-Man? Is it the hyphen?

In a time when people are pushed to accept some kind of singular identity, Spider-Man is hyphenated. Peter Parker (Tom Holland) would prefer to be just an ordinary teenager, but he got bit by a radioactive spider, and with great power comes great responsibility. So he’s trying to live the best of both worlds.

Spider-Man is both a teenager and a superhero, which means he is both a powerful archetype and a member of the target audience for Marvel Comics. He’s like Shazam in that way. Superman is an alien; his everyman routine is just that — a routine. Bruce Wayne is so super-rich, he’s aspirational, but that also makes being Batman unattainable to us down here among the proletariat. Wonder Woman is literally a demigod. Spider-Man is just a teenager like you, only he’s got an opportunity for greatness. How he balances that opportunity with the needs of teenage life is the essence of the Spider-Man.

In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Parker just wants to go on a class trip to Europe, and possibly get with MJ (Zendaya) in the process. Being Spider-Man is cool and all, but kissing MJ on the Eiffel Tower would be truly amazing. Unfortunately for him, Spider-Man is on the agenda of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). Newly Avenger-less after the deaths of Iron Man and Black Widow, and the retroactive retirement of Captain America, he needs a new team, and Tony Stark picked Parker as his successor. Plus, there’s a new threat brewing.

In an opening scene reminiscent of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Fury arrives upon a scene of devastation at a Mexico town with his S.H.I.E.L.D. right-hand woman Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders). A group of inter-dimensional elemental monsters is causing havoc worldwide, and only one hero, the similarly inter-dimensional Quintin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal), aka Mysterio, knows how to fight them.

Jake Gyllenhaal as Mysterio

The key to making a good superhero movie is having a good villain. Gyllenhaal delivers as the vain, weaselly Beck. He and Holland, who is now in his fifth friendly neighborhood outing, have an enviable chemistry as they move from allies to enemies.

But remember, Spider-Man is also a teenager. So there’s a second movie going on at the same time as the Spider-plot. This one is more Hannah Montana. Peter’s plan to present MJ with a token of his love is repeatedly thwarted by his teacher (J.B. Smoove), Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), and Nick Fury’s catspaws. His best bud Ned (Jacob Batalon) gets a chance to have his own relationship arc while covering up for his super friend’s unexplained absences when Spider-Man shows up.

If those were the only two movies unspooling here, Far From Home would be pretty good. The action sequences are decently constructed, even if some of Mysterio’s psychedelic sequences invite comparison to the superior Into the Spider-Verse. The tour of Europe frame allows for a Bond-esque travelogue feel. It’s a fairly simple comic plot, with thematic overtones that make it relevant in our world, where people rule by illusion.

Spider-Man: Now more like Iron Man!

What drags Far From Home down is the perceived necessity to fit the story into a continuum with the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Way too much time is spent cleaning up after the events of Avengers: Endgame, especially during the film’s early passages. Tony Stark posthumously chooses to tap Peter Parker as the heir to his technological superhero operation, and it somehow diminishes the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Yet another subplot with Peter’s Stark handler Happy Hogan attempting to woo Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) is simply wince-inducing.

I understand the need to bring Spider-Man into the MCU after years in the Sony wilderness, but after the unabashed triumph of Into the Spider-Verse, there’s a strong argument for making Spidey an animated franchise and turning Marvel’s live-action resources towards finally doing a decent Fantastic Four adaptation. Spider-Man works better when he’s alone, just a scared high school kid trying to negotiate a crazy world where Jake Gyllenhaal wears a fishbowl on his head.

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Glass

“How much of human life is lost in waiting?” is a line by Emerson quoted in one of the worst movies of all time, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I could not help but think of it while watching M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass, the capper to a trilogy that took 20 years to make. It started with 2000’s Unbreakable, a drama whose ending twist explained that it was really the prologue to the adventures of a superhero, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), and a mad genius, Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson). 2017’s Split was about James McAvoy’s dissociative identity disorder-suffering villain, The Beast, with an ending twist that this took place in the same universe as the previous film, with the director resurrecting earlier characters. Glass is here to let these superbeings finally be unbound, which it tries to accomplish by stranding them in an insane asylum and locking them in cells for most of the film.

Shyamalan was hailed as a wunderkind after The Sixth Sense. He quickly fell into self-parody: His twists strayed to left field, his quirky dialogue turned odd. I prefer his films when they got weird. The Village has so much craft and prestige wrapping its silly, trashy plot. The Happening had none, and I love it the most: the cast speaking entirely in non sequiturs about a world taken over by angry plants, who in the end are defeated by love. Pure, glorious schlock.

Like Spielberg, Shyamalan is good at dramatizing neurotic childhood fears of loneliness and abandonment, but when the emotion becomes positive, it gets manipulative. Orchestral music tells you to feel happy, but you might feel alienated instead. Shyamalan is great at showy long takes. He loves to hold on a medium or close-up reaction shot well past the point most movies cut. It’s both economical and unnerving.

I watched all of his unclassifiable trilogy in one day, like a child forced to smoke a pack of cigarettes in order to hate them. Unbreakable is a dour retread of The Sixth Sense, enlivened by Jackson in a purple jacket and shock hair dramatizing the nightmare of brittle bone disease. Split is buoyed by McAvoy.

Unfortunately, Glass is horrible, but it’s as odd and idiosyncratic as his other films. Psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) captures Dunn and The Beast and moves them into an asylum with Glass. She tries to convince them that their superheroic abilities are just delusions. When Dunn believes her, he does so because the story needs to sideline him, and the seams of threadbare writing start to show. Most of the budget may have gone to the salaries of the three headliners, and their schedules might not have connected, as they rarely share the same screen.

For half the runtime, Jackson is in a comatose state, staring emptily from a wheelchair, and when he wakes he says meta lines that might have been fresh 20 years ago, when Unbreakable opened with text explaining what comic books are.

Memphis filmmaker Chad Allen Barton has pointed out that Shyamalan is a religious storyteller. He often shows characters needing to believe in themselves, their family, and the afterlife. This is usually expressed in a spiritual way and affirmed with an inspirational twist. This faith serves an additional role of keeping expensive special effects to a minimum.

In what other superhero movie would the final fight between good and evil (in a parking lot) cut away at first punch to the viewpoint of nameless extras looking at a van? Or be preceded by Jackson pointing at a skyscraper where the fight would have occurred had the film had more money? Shyamalan is interested in not just twists, but delayed gratification.

In the theater on opening weekend, you could feel the excitement slowly go out of the audience. The final twist here is a conscious wrongheaded choice that is bugfuck in its disconnection from viewers’ enthusiasm, yet lovely for its wrongness. Marvel is sleek and sometimes great, but when it doesn’t fire on all cylinders, it smothers you like a committee-made sitcom. Glass is terrible but at least feels personal.

The finale doesn’t work as storytelling, but it might make sense as an accidental middle finger to the idea that superheroes are inherently inspirational, when the reason for their omnipresence is monetary, as with westerns and Roman movies before them. Remove the money, and you lose the faith.

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Incredibles 2

This is the fourth superhero movie review I will write this year. People have been asking me, are you sick of them? The answer is yes.

But I still get excited about a sequel to The Incredibles. The Brad Bird film is a top tier Pixar creation, one of the best superhero movies ever made, and, since it was released in 2004, clearly way ahead of the curve.

Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl, Dash, Violet, and Jack-Jack are back after a 14 year hiatus.

Incredibles 2 opens pretty much immediately after the events of the first film. Tony (Michael Bird), a classmate of Violet (Sarah Vowell), is recounting the events of the attack by the Underminer (John Ratzenberger) that served as the original’s coda. His audience is Rick Dicker (Jonathan Banks), a government operative whose job it is to keep secret the true identities of superheroes. Dicker dutifully erases the memory of moment when Tony saw Violet without her domino mask on, which has the unfortunate side effect of erasing all memory of her, including the fact that they had a date tomorrow night.

The battle against the Underminer provides the bravado opening action sequence any self-respecting superhero movie wants to have, and it immediately outdoes most all of them. The kinetic sections of The Incredibles, like the fight with the Omnidroid, were groundbreaking, and in the five-superhero-movie-a-year timeline we find ourselves in, frequently copied. Fourteen years worth of Pixar technological advances get splashed up on the screen in the first ten minutes, and it’s, well, incredible. A few jokes seem to be written just to show off the water modeling advances. The depth of the image in some shots is mind blowing, even in 2D. IMAX is definitely the preferred format for this one.

With the help of Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson), Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson), Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), Violet, Dash (Huck Milner) and Jack-Jack stop the Underminer’s destructive rampage, but they still run afoul of the secret bane of every superhero—massive property damage liability. About to be cut off by their government benefactors, the heroes are contacted by Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk), a telecom tycoon who wants to mount a campaign to legalize superheroes once and for all. He and his sister Evelyn (Catherine Keener) have crunched the numbers, to discover that the least destructive super hero in existence is Elastigirl. They offer to back her with a generous salary, a new Mid Century Heroically Modern house, and most importantly, insurance.

Holly Hunter voices Elastigirl, who gets to go all Batman in this long-awaited sequel.

After a heartfelt talk, the Parrs decide to accept the offer, even though it means that Mr. Incredible will be a stay at home dad to three super kids of varying ages. From there, the film falls into what is now a familiar episodic pattern. Pixar’s studio mates Marvel have succeeded by emphasizing character over plot, and Incredibles 2 follows suit. Mr. Incredible’s parenting tribulations are put on a equal footing with Elastigirl’s increasingly perilous confrontation with Screenslaver. Incredibles 2 once again proves that the key to truly great superhero films is a strong villain with the timely Screenslaver, who uses smartphones and TV screens as tools of mass hypnosis.

Judging from the responses of opening night audience, Jack-Jack is the breakout star of the picture. Trying to keep tabs on a toddler is hard enough for Mr. Incredible, but Jack-Jack is exhibiting all kinds of new superpowers, like eye lasers and shape changing. His ability to travel through parallel dimensions provides a great opportunity for Bird to stage a Poltergeist callback with Nelson, who plays the beleaguered dad in both films.

Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson, center) is called to help Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) parent the super toddler Jack-Jack.

Bird, who returns to voice super-designer Edna, makes a major comeback after his last film, the disastrous Disney corporate branding assignment Tomorrowland. Incredibles 2 fires on all cylinders, but now that we’re all immersed in the expected beats of the superhero movie, it lacks the shock of the new felt in 2004. But it’s a genuine crowd pleaser that rewards viewing on the big screen, which is what a summer movie is all about.

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Kong: Skull Island

I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: Kong: Skull Island is a bad movie.

That doesn’t really tell you much, because movies can be bad for many different reasons. Unlike the cynical cash grab of Independence Day: Resurgence, I got the impression that director Jordan Vogt-Roberts was attempting to make an enjoyable film. So rather than just lambasting everyone involved, I’ve decided to use this as a teachable moment. Here are five lessons to take home from Skull Island.

1. There’s a difference between a screenplay and a list of things that would be cool to put in a movie. Granted, a screenplay is, on some level, a list of things that would be cool to put in a movie. But a good screenplay must put the cool things in the correct order, something that does not seem to have been a priority here. Effect should follow cause, and then each effect should become a cause for another effect, and so on. Emotions should ebb and flow, and the screenplay’s job is to map out those beats. A lot of stuff happens on Skull Island, but none of it makes much sense, so there’s no emotional movement. It’s 1973, and as the Vietnam War winds down and Nixon’s grip on power is failing, Bill Randa (John Goodman), director of a shadowy group called Monarch, is eager to get to Skull Island. He sees his chance in the chaos (“There will never be a more screwed-up time in Washington,” he says in the film’s only real laugh line.) to piggyback on an expedition to the South Pacific mounted by Landsat. Which brings us to …

2. Suspension of disbelief is a gift from the audience. Don’t abuse it. King Kong is a giant monster, but monsters don’t really exist. (Insert your own Trump joke here.) People going to see a King Kong movie know this, but they are willing to accept the existence of cryptids for a couple of hours in exchange for some entertainment. But just because they’ve accepted one impossible thing doesn’t imply permission to just throw a bunch of other unbelievable stuff at them without some background work. Take the Landsat expedition, for example. Why are a bunch of space scientists humping it halfway across the planet to look at an island? Why introduce them at all when you’ve got a perfectly serviceable secret government agency to mount the expedition — led by national treasure John Goodman, no less! Which leads to …

3. Good casting will not save you. Kong: Skull Island has a great cast. There’s Goodman, 2015’s Best Actress winner Brie Larson as a photographer, the legendary Samuel L. Jackson as an Air Cavalry officer who is none too thrilled about losing ‘Nam, comedic genius John C. Reilly as a World War II aviator whose been stuck on the island for 28 years, and Loki himself, Tom Hiddleston, looking buff as a jungle guide. Dozens of people of questionable utility tag along on the expedition to deliver a couple of quips before being eaten by Skull Island’s spectacular collection of megafauna. Not that you’ll care about any of them, because they’re not characters, just loose assemblies of traits pulled out of a hat marked “Hollywood cliches.” Even the marquee star, King Kong, lacks depth, having somehow overcome his two greatest weaknesses — pretty girls and military aircraft.

4. Movie references are harder than they look. Quentin Tarantino has made an entire career out of stringing together borrowed scenes from other movies, so why not Kong? But here’s the thing: QT isn’t just throwing stuff in there to look cool (see #1). He knows the emotional beats he wants to hit and chooses a scene to reference that evokes the desired emotions. Thus, his references work on two levels at once. Kong: Skull Island throws out references left and right, most notably to Apocalypse Now. But director Vogt-Roberts does not seem to understand that. For example, the scene where Robert Duvall’s air cav cowboys attack a village to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” is meant to evoke horror at kids with guns treating battle as a lark. Nor does he understand that when Kubrick used the song “We’ll Meet Again” over images of detonating atomic bombs at the end of Dr. Strangelove, it was the blackest irony — nobody is meeting anybody again, because we’re all dead in a nuclear holocaust. When Vogt-Roberts uses the song as our surviving heroes ride to safety, the movie’s not even over yet.

5. It’s probably not the director’s fault. According to Hollywood Reporter, Kong: Skull Island will have to make $500 million just to break even. With half a billion bucks on the line, why did Warner Bros. choose an unprepared director whose only credits are a cheap Sundance comedy and Nick Offerman’s stand-up concert? Was it because he had a unique vision? No. It’s because he’s a rookie with no power whom the producers know they can steamroll, and he’ll make a good scapegoat if and when the whole thing blows up in a giant ball of red flame. I suspect Vogt-Roberts is about to learn that lesson.

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I Am Not Your Negro

Midway through I Am Not Your Negro, director Raoul Peck takes a moment to give us a peek at author James Baldwin’s FBI file. According to the G-Man who wrote the memo, Baldwin was a black agitator, a homosexual, and a “very dangerous individual.” By this time in the film, we have gotten to know Baldwin beyond just the usual blurb points: the guy who wrote The Fire Next Time and Notes on a Native Son, parts of which you might have had to read in school during Black History Month. The FBI is supposed to deal with murderers and criminals, and the erudite, quietly passionate man the documentary audience has seen chatting with Dick Cavett and debating at Cambridge University does not look like someone the FBI would describe as a “dangerous individual.”

But Baldwin would have instantly understood why J. Edgar Hoover’s boys were afraid of him. “The root of the white man’s rage is terror,” he says a few moments later, of a figure “who lives only his mind.”

Baldwin is a fascinating figure of the civil rights era, but in recent years he hasn’t gotten as much attention as leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. Part of that might be that he came along earlier than the others — his first novel was published in 1953, when King wasn’t even a pastor yet and Malcolm had just met Elijah Muhammad. For Baldwin, the writer’s life meant being an observer. He was neither a Christian nor a Muslim nor a member of the NAACP, but first and foremost a man of letters. Still, it was hard to maintain his objectivity in the waning days of Jim Crow. In a televised debate from the early 1960s, Baldwin found himself between Dr. King and Malcolm X as they outlined their competing visions for black liberation in America. The excerpts chosen by Peck for the documentary are extraordinary, both for the power of the two men’s personalities and the clarity with which they speak (especially in an era when a president can respond to allegations of treason with “No puppet! You’re a puppet!”). “The line that divides a witness from a participant is a fine one,” Baldwin would later say about his time in the civil rights struggle.

Both Malcolm and King would be dead before the decade was out, but Baldwin would continue to write well into the 1980s. In 1979, he wrote a 30-page outline for a book that would be called “Remember This House,” where he proposed to outline the struggle through the stories of three martyrs: King, Malcolm, and Medgar Evers. The book was never completed, but Peck took the framework, added quotes from Baldwin’s massive corpus, and layered in some choice archival footage to create I Am Not Your Negro. Samuel L. Jackson reads Baldwin’s words in something that is not quite an imitation of Baldwin, but quite different than the actor’s usual speaking voice. Jackson’s virtuosic voiceover performance is a reminder that one of America’s greatest living actors has been relegated to a caricature of himself while white actors his age still get juicy parts. This would not surprise Baldwin, who hated Stepin Fetchit and revealed to white audiences that black people disliked the Academy Award-winning 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, because they thought Sidney Poitier was “being used against them” to neuter their movement. There are choice revelations like this about every five minutes in I Am Not Your Negro.

We’re in the middle of what has been called the Golden Age of Documentary, but cultural docs have triumphed at the Oscars every year but one this decade (the exception being 2014’s Citizenfour). This year, however, an issue documentary is almost assured to win. On the race relations front, I Am Not Your Negro is nominated alongside Ava DuVernay’s 13th and OJ: Made in America, while Fire at Sea takes on the Syrian immigrant crisis in Europe. I think it’s unlikely that Academy voters will choose the refined rthymns of I Am Not Your Negro over the epic sprawl of OJ: Made in America, but that doesn’t mean that Peck’s work is less worthy. Thirty years after his death, Baldwin’s words and deeds still speak to an America that needs to listen.

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The Legend of Tarzan

Has any fictional character been portrayed on film more than Tarzan? John Clayton, the Viscount of Greystoke, was created in 1912 by pulp writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. Six years later, Tarzan was the subject in the first of eight silent films. In 1932, Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller brought Tarzan into the talkie age, kicking off more than 30 films produced over the next 50 years. So when someone (like me, for example) bemoans Hollywood’s current mania for franchises, remember that it has always been thus.

Tarzan is a prototype superhero, so naturally, in this silver age of superhero movies, he’s ripe for a reboot. But there’s a problem with importing the character into the 21st century. Burroughs was an Englishman of his time, so his Lord of the Jungle is a white, English aristocrat constantly demonstrating his superiority over black, African tribesmen. To resurrect the franchise, a new angle was needed, and the person who cracked the problem was Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer. The solution he offered in his 2011 script for the film that would eventually become The Legend of Tarzan was to make colonialism itself the enemy. Brewer’s story was influenced not only by the extensive Tarzan lore Burroughs left behind, but also by King Leopold’s Ghost, a history of the African genocide the Belgian monarch perpetrated between 1885 and 1902, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The strength of Brewer’s script briefly landed him in the director’s chair, but he fell victim to studio machinations at Warner Bros. that took the project to the brink of collapse.

When Tarzan was resurrected, it was with David Yates, the director of the last four Harry Potter films, at the helm. Although several different writers were called in to try new drafts, the final script still retained enough elements of Brewer’s original that he retains a credit, alongside Adam Cozad.

Would The Legend of Tarzan have been better with Brewer in the big chair? That’s an academic question now, but one thing’s for sure: Yates was the wrong choice. The Legend of Tarzan is a wildly uneven film. Yates adopts the same languid pace he did for The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Part 2, when narrative propulsion would better suit the pulpy material. We first meet Belgian bad guy Leon Rom in a scene that echoes the immortal beginning of Raiders of The Lost Ark. Brewer’s version of the character was a Colonel Kurtz figure, a Westerner gone savage trying to colonize darkest Africa. Christoph Waltz, however, plays him like Indiana Jones’ dandy nemesis Belloq. Alexander Skarsgård turns out to be a good choice for Tarzan. He’s the strong, silent type, introduced in London as an English aristocrat grown beyond grunting “Me Tarzan. You Jane.” Watching Tarzan code switch between English drawing rooms, daub huts of tribal Africa, and the apes of the jungle is one of the film’s pleasures. Unfortunately, Yates pairs Skarsgård with one of the greatest living American actors, Samuel L. Jackson, as George Washington Williams, an adventurer on a covert mission for Uncle Sam. Although Jackson is clearly toning it down, he can’t help but steal all of his scenes with the emo Skarsgård. Worst of all is Margot Robbie, whose phoned-in Jane fills me with dread for her turn as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad.

Yates tries to create tense buildups to explosive action scenes, but his gratuitous slow-motion fetish inevitably mucks it up. True to superhero movie form, Tarzan’s origin story must be shoehorned in. It’s handled much better than in Batman v Superman, but when the flashbacks stretch into the third act, things get confusing.

It’s not all bad. Like Yates’ Potter films, the supporting cast, such as Djimon Hounsou as Tarzan’s enemy, Chief Mbonga, are consistently compelling, and chunks of Brewer’s dialog still float through the butchered screenplay. I had more fun in The Legend of Tarzan than I did in The Jungle Book reboot, or X-Men: Apocalypse, but fun product from the Hollywood sausage factory has been in short supply this year.

The Legend of Tarzan
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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.

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The Hateful Eight: 70 MM Roadshow Edition

The Hateful Eight: 70MM Roadshow Edition (2015; dir. Quentin Tarantino)—First impressions: Formally striking but morally bankrupt, just like always. What a waste of a potentially awesome widescreen format. What a way to spend Christmas night.

Second impressions: Maybe The Hateful Eight isn’t so disappointing after all. Maybe once you wash all the blood off your face and out of your hair, it’s actually pretty effective in its savage and meaningless way. Maybe I’m just being contrary because so many other people love QT so unconditionally, it’s embarrassing.

Or maybe when it comes to Tarantino movies, I shouldn’t trust my first impressions.

I am a deeply conflicted QT fan whose minor-to-major issues with most of his films has never prevented me from seeing them on the day they premiere. And once I found out that the “Special Roadshow Engagement” of The Hateful Eight was coming to my town a week before its nationwide release, I even bought my tickets in advance, like I was going to an unrepeatable event. Rather than running down The Hateful Eight’s numerous strengths and weaknesses, though, I want to focus on the roadshow experience—the first of its kind in American theaters since Khartoum in 1966.

Like many cinephiles, I love celluloid a lot more now that it’s virtually extinct. And I’ve been very fortunate to see Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jacques Tati’s PlayTime in the 70mm format; in fact, the Kubrick and Tati screenings are two of the most profoundly affecting moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had. Celluloid has a depth and warmth that digital photography can’t yet replicate; the browns and blacks in particular have volume and presence onscreen, and larger vistas, like a stagecoach wending its way through the mountains during a blizzard, are stark and elemental and man-made in a way that digital photography often isn’t. The format is ideal for capturing the nuances of the human face as well; Samuel L. Jackson’s unblinking glower, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s cruddy teeth and Kurt Russell’s magnificent walrus ‘stache are a few of The Hateful Eight’s more indelible physiognomical details.

I remember seeing the reels for the 70mm 2001 in the theater lobby and thinking that they were as big as stagecoach wheels. As Chapin Cutler of the specialty projection company Boston Light & Sound notes, the Ultra Panavision 70 format for The Hateful Eight is even bigger. According to Cutler, “Each shipping case is 5 ft. x 5 ft. by 1 ft. thick. When loaded, it weighs about 400 lbs. . . . With the reel full, out of the box, the film and reel weigh about 250 lbs. Four people can easily lift it onto a platter deck.”

The informative if overenthusiastic program notes in the 16-page Hateful Eight booklet handed to me by the woman who took my ticket assert that “The exclusive 70mm Roadshow engagement of The Hateful Eight pays homage to and recreates the grand film exhibition style popularized in the 1950s and ‘60s and that brought audiences to theaters with the promise of a special event. Taking place in the nation’s largest and grandest theaters, Roadshows presented a longer version of the film than would be shown in the film’s subsequent wider release, included a musical overture to start the show, an intermission between acts and a souvenir program.”

Great! I’d never call the AMC Southdale in Edina, Minnesota one of the nation’s “grandest theaters,” but I’m glad the management there made the efforts to accommodate Tarantino’s mad vision. I liked the slow burn of Ennio Morricone’s eerie, chiming overture, which plays before the film starts (there were no trailers beforehand) and mirrors the uncharacteristically slow burn of the film’s first 100 minutes. If I could guess which scene won’t make the cut of the official release edition, I’d say it was the one where two shady characters stake out the path to the outhouse as the blizzard gets worse. Tarantino’s decision to stay indoors most of the time is a strange one, and I wish he’d done more with the theatrical arrangements of tables, beds, chairs and chains in the mountain outpost where all of the action takes place. But there’s a musical number that plays with racking focus and the superwide format very well in case you thought he had no reason for shooting things the way he did. Also, the intermission is perfectly timed.

Some random notes:

  • Has any white male filmmaker ever enjoyed using the words “nigger” and “bitch” as much as Tarantino has? The knee-jerk defense for his kind of verbal button-pushing is, of course, that he’s challenging PC limits for entertainment and authenticity’s sake. Fine, whatever. So all he’s doing is portraying a bunch of racists. But he sure loves listening to those racists be racist, doesn’t he? Are we supposed to? Or are we supposed to be offended, thus PLAYING RIGHT INTO HIS HANDS? If that’s so, then perhaps the true antecedent of The Hateful Eight is not the Spaghetti Western. It is Blazing Saddles. 
  • Although the commemorative booklet informs us that, “The cast and crew would eventually finish the shoot on a Los Angeles soundstage, which was chilled below freezing temperatures to mimic the Telluride (Colorado) climate,” there’s no genuine feeling of wintery chilliness in the film. As a guy who’s spent his life in the snow, this is a hard one to explain but an easy one to spot. I just didn’t believe they were all that cold. (The champ in this regard remains Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller.) 
  • The best part of this Western is when Samuel L. Jackson starts sleuthing about and turns it into a mystery. His long fact-finding mission slowly and inexorably turns into the kind of scene for which Tarantino is best known—a long monologue filled with thinly veiled threats disguised as folksy, profane erudition. 
  • One scene in particular plays on prior knowledge so effectively that it is as nerve-wracking as anything Tarantino’s ever done.
  • Food for thought, per critic Armond White of Out (and, amazingly, The National Review): “Tarantino exploits gay porn—and repressed gayness—in the same vein that he notoriously exploits race.” You’ll know what I mean when you get there. 
  • Relevant Tweet #1, from Rembert Browne: 
  • “there’s nothing that has been allowed to slide, by liberal & conservative folks alike, quite like the notion of the big scary black person.”
  • Relevant Tweet #2, from someone named Zodiac Motherfucker: “TARANTINO REALLY DOES BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER. THIS THEATER IS LIKE A MELTING POT OF ASSHOLES”

Happy to be counted among them!

Grade: B+

[Editor’s Note: This review refers to the 70 MM film edition of The Hateful Eight, which is not screening in Memphis. The nearest theaters screening in this format are Ronnie’s in St. Louis and the Carmike Thoroughbred 20 in Franklin, TN. A full review of the film as it appears in Memphis will run in the Flyer’s January 7 issue. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Year in Film 2015

It’s fashionable to complain about how bad Hollywood movies have become. But from the perspective of a critic who has to watch it all go down, it’s simply not the case. At any given time in 2015, there was at least one good film in theaters in Memphis—it just may not have been the most heavily promoted one. So here’s my list of awards for a crowded, eventful year.

Worst Picture: Pixels

I watched a lot of crap this year, like the incoherent Terminator Genysis, the sociopathic San Andreas, the vomitous fanwank Furious 7, and the misbegotten Secret in Their Eyes. But those movies were just bad. Pixels not only sucked, it was mean-spirited, toxic, and ugly. Adam Sandler, it’s been a good run, but it’s time to retire.

Actually, I take that back. It hasn’t been a good run.

Most Divisive: Inherent Vice

Technically a 2014 release, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s ode to the lost world of California hippiedom didn’t play in Memphis until January. Its long takes and dense dialogue spun a powerful spell. But it wasn’t for everyone. Many people responded with either a “WTF?” or a visceral hatred. Such strongly split opinions are usually a sign of artistic success; you either loved it or hated it, but you won’t forget it.

Best Performances: Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, Room

Room is an inventive, harrowing, and beautiful work on every level, but the film’s most extraordinary element is the chemistry between Brie Larson and 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay, who play a mother and son held hostage by a sexual abuser. Larson’s been good in Short Term 12 and Trainwreck, but this is her real breakthrough performance. As for Tremblay, here’s hoping we’ve just gotten a taste of things to come.

Chewbacca

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Chewbacca

Star Wars: The Force Awakens returned the Mother of All Franchises to cultural prominence after years in the prequel wilderness. Newcomers like Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver joined the returned cast of the Orig Trig Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in turning in good performances. Lawrence Kasdan’s script gave Chewbacca a lot more to do, and Peter Mayhew rose to the occasion with a surprisingly expressive performance. Let the Wookiee win.

Best Memphis Movie: The Keepers

Joann Self Selvidge and Sara Kaye Larson’s film about the people who keep the Memphis Zoo running ran away with Indie Memphis this year, selling out multiple shows and winning Best Hometowner Feature. Four years in the making, it’s a rarity in 21st century film: a patient verité portrait whose only agenda is compassion and wonder.

Best Conversation Starter: But for the Grace

In 2001, Memphis welcomed Sudanese refugee Emmanuel A. Amido. This year, he rewarded our hospitality with But for the Grace. The thoughtful film is a frank examination of race relations in America seen through the lens of religion. The Indie Memphis Audience Award winner sparked an intense Q&A session after its premiere screening that followed the filmmaker out into the lobby. It’s a timely reminder of the power of film to illuminate social change.

Best Comedy: What We Do in the Shadows

What happens when a group of vampire roommates stop being polite and start getting real? Flight of the Conchords‘ Jemaine Clement and Eagle vs Shark‘s Taika Waititi codirected this deadpan masterpiece that applied the This Is Spinal Tap formula to the Twilight set. Their stellar cast’s enthusiasm and commitment to the gags made for the most biting comedy of the year.

Best Animation: Inside Out

The strongest Pixar film since Wall-E had heavy competition in the form of the Irish lullaby Song of the Sea, but ultimately, Inside Out was the year’s emotional favorite. It wasn’t just the combination of voice talent Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, and Phyllis Smith with the outstanding character design of Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness that made director Pete Docter’s film crackle, it was the way the entire carefully crafted package came together to deliver a message of acceptance and understanding for kids and adults who are wrestling with their feelings in a hard and changing world.

It Follows

Best Horror: It Follows

The best horror films are the ones that do a lot with a little, and It Follows is a sterling example of the breed. Director David Robert Mitchell’s second feature is a model of economy that sets up its simple premise with a single opening shot that tracks a desperate young woman running from an invisible tormentor. But there’s no escaping from the past here, only delaying the inevitable by spreading the curse of sex and death.

Teenage Dreams: Dope and The Diary of a Teenage Girl

2015 saw a pair of excellent coming-of-age films. Dope, written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa, introduced actor Shameik Moore as Malcolm, a hapless nerd who learns to stand up for himself in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Inglewood, California. Somewhere between Risky Business and Do the Right Thing, it brought the teen comedy into the multicultural moment.

Similarly, Marielle Heller’s graphic novel adaptation The Diary of a Teenage Girl introduced British actress Bel Powley to American audiences, and took a completely different course than Dope. It’s a frank, sometimes painful exploration of teenage sexual awakening that cuts the harrowing plot with moments of magical realist reverie provided by a beautiful mix of animation and live action.

Immortal Music: Straight Outta Compton and Love & Mercy

The two best musical biopics of the year couldn’t have been more different. Straight Outta Compton was director F. Gary Gray’s straightforward story of N.W.A., depending on the performances of Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre, and O’Shea Jackson Jr. playing his own father, Ice Cube, for its explosive impact. That it was a huge hit with audiences proved that this was the epic hip-hop movie the nation has been waiting for.

Director Bill Pohlad’s dreamlike Love & Mercy, on the other hand, used innovative structure and intricate sound design to tell the story of Brian Wilson’s rise to greatness and subsequent fall into insanity. In a better world, Paul Dano and John Cusack would share a Best Actor nomination for their tag-team portrayal of the Beach Boys resident genius.

Sicario

Best Cinematography: Sicario

From Benicio del Toro’s chilling stare to the twisty, timely screenplay, everything about director Denis Villeneuve’s drug-war epic crackles with life. But it’s Roger Deakins’ transcendent cinematography that cements its greatness. Deakins paints the bleak landscapes of the Southwest with subtle variations of color, and films an entire sequence in infrared with more beauty than most shooters can manage in visible light. If you want to see a master at the top of his game, look no further.

He’s Still Got It: Bridge of Spies

While marvelling about Bridge of Spies‘ performances, composition, and general artistic unity, I said “Why can’t all films be this well put together?”

To which the Flyer‘s Chris Davis replied, “Are you really asking why all directors can’t be as good as Steven Spielberg?”

Well, yeah, I am.

Hot Topic: Journalism

Journalism was the subject of four films this year, two good and two not so much. True Story saw Jonah Hill and James Franco get serious, but it was a dud. Truth told the story of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes’ fall from the top-of-the-TV-news tower, but its commitment to truth was questionable. The End of the Tour was a compelling portrait of the late author David Foster Wallace through the eyes of a scribe assigned to profile him. But the best of the bunch was Spotlight, the story of how the Boston Catholic pedophile priest scandal was uncovered, starring Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo. There’s a good chance you’ll be seeing Spotlight all over the Oscars this year.

Had To Be There: The Walk

Robert Zemeckis’ film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who tightrope-walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, was a hot mess. But the extended sequence of the feat itself was among the best uses of 3-D I’ve ever seen. The film flopped, and its real power simply won’t translate to home video, no matter how big your screen is, but on the big screen at the Paradiso, it was a stunning experience.

MVP: Samuel L. Jackson

First, he came back from the grave as Nick Fury to anchor Joss Whedon’s underrated Avengers: Age of Ultron. Then he channeled Rufus Thomas to provide a one-man Greek chorus for Spike Lee’s wild musical polemic Chi-Raq. He rounds out the year with a powerhouse performance in Quentin Tarantino’s widescreen western The Hateful Eight. Is it too late for him to run for president?

Best Documentary: Best of Enemies

Memphis writer/director Robert Gordon teamed up with Twenty Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville to create this intellectual epic. With masterful editing of copious archival footage, they make a compelling case that the 1968 televised debate between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal laid out the political battleground for the next 40 years and changed television news forever. In a year full of good documentaries, none were more well-executed or important than this historic tour de force.

Best Picture: Mad Max: Fury Road

From the time the first trailers hit, it was obvious that 2015 would belong to one film. I’m not talking about The Force Awakens. I’m talking about Mad Max: Fury Road. Rarely has a single film rocked the body while engaging the mind like George Miller’s supreme symphony of crashing cars and heavy metal guitars. Charlize Theron’s performance as Imperator Furiosa will go down in history next to Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven and Sigourney Weaver in Alien as one of the greatest action turns of all time. The scene where she meets Max, played by Tom Hardy, may be the single best fight scene in cinema history. Miller worked on this film for 17 years, and it shows in every lovingly detailed frame. Destined to be studied for decades, Fury Road rides immortal, shiny, and chrome.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Chi-Raq

There’s so much to say about Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, I don’t know where to begin.

One of the film’s themes is the nature of power. Since its inception, the film industry has been characterized by a struggle for power between directors, producers, stars, and writers. As seen in Trumbo, the first to lose the battle were the writers, so they decamped to television. The power of the old-line Hollywood studios declined in the late 1960s, so the 1970s saw the ascendance of the director and, as a result, a second golden age of American film. In 1980, the directors’ power was broken on the rocks of Heaven’s Gate, and by the end of the decade, movie stars like Arnold Schwarzenneger and Tom Cruise were in charge, commanding high salaries and exerting creative control. The indie film revolution of the 1990s, which Spike Lee helped kick off, was on some level an attempt to reclaim the directors’ power. Now, in the twilight of the movie stars, power has reverted to the producers, and so resources are tied up in making endless sequels and reboots of proven properties. Enter Amazon, the internet retail powerhouse who is making a big push into video. For their first foray into theatrical film, they tapped Lee and apparently gave him free rein. Lee responded by going absolutely insane.

Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata

2015 finds Lee in a familiar state: energized with righteous rage. The director could have taken a look at widespread reports of police brutality against people of color and the resulting Black Lives Matter movement, pointed at his 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing, and said “I told you so!” Instead, he made Chi-Raq, which is like nothing else in theaters today. It’s a satire, a comedy, and a musical. It’s also based on a 2,500-year-old Greek play called Lysistrata, and so it is written mostly in rhyming verse. And yet, Chi-Raq is even weirder than it sounds. The first five minutes or so are essentially a lyric music video for “Pray 4 My City,” with nothing but text and an animated image of a map of the United States made up entirely of guns. When we finally do see someone on screen, it’s the rapper Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) rocking a packed club. Then the action freezes, and we meet Dolmedes, the narrator/chorus played by national treasure Samuel L. Jackson in full Rufus Thomas mode.

I would be content listening to Jackson speak in rhyme for two hours. Fortunately, Lee introduces us to Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata, a powerhouse of confidence and sexual energy. After witnessing the horrors of street violence and having her apartment burned down by a rival gang out to kill her boyfriend Chi-Raq, Lysistrata is inspired by Miss Helen (Angela Bassett) to organize a sex strike, asserting their power by “seizing the means of reproduction.” The gangs will either end their senseless violence or go without booty. The sex strike spreads until, as Dave Chappelle says in a hilarious cameo as a strip-club owner, “Even the hoes is no-shows.”

The sprawling cast includes Wesley Snipes, Jennifer Hudson, and token white guy John Cusack as a priest who shouts himself hoarse at a funeral for a little girl killed in the gang crossfire. Cusack looks more engaged and passionate onscreen than he has in years, but his big scene is also a symptom of what’s wrong with Chi-Raq. In isolation, it’s a powerful scene, as Lee and screenwriter Kevin Willmott indict the whole sociopolitical system that keeps African Americans locked in cycles of poverty and violence. But in the context of the film, it’s a momentum killer. Free to follow his wildest impulses, Lee constructs one killer image after another, but little thought seems to have been given as to how it all fits together, which means Chi-Raq adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.

It’s inspiring to see a talent of Lee’s caliber swing for the fences. Chi-Raq may not be perfect, but I can’t stop thinking about it.