I made a deal with my wife this year, in regards to what movies we would see in the theater. You see, we've attended a Best Picture marathon at our local movieplex for the past few years, cramming nine movies into two days, and we've always had a few that we were re-watching. That's fine when you're at home, in the mood for a particular flick. It's draining when you're in hour 8 of a marathon. As such, we made a deal to not see anything in theaters that we thought would be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. For my wife, that meant putting off a viewing of Argo. For myself, it meant postponing the gory joy of Quentin Tarantino's latest film. It was a mature choice, I suppose, but I was so happy to finally scratch my Django itch this past weekend.
The Django Unchained trailer really covers the basics. Like so many other Tarantino movies --- Kill Bill, especially --- the premise is fairly simple. A bounty hunter in pre-American Civil War times, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), enlists a slave, Django (Jamie Foxx) to help him out on a bounty assignment. As it turns out, Django is a natural when it comes to killing people. What a happy coincidence! Working with Schultz allows Django to earn his freedom, but his ultimate goal is to find his wife. He doesn't know who owns her, but Schultz agrees to help his new friend find his lost love. Of course, there are some twists and turns down that road, usually involving racist white people and gore, but that sums things up pretty nicely.
Okay, there are bad black guys, too. It's a complex film.
It's a good thing that I feel silly summarizing the plot in detail, because I have a lot to say about everything else in Django Unchained. While I have some concerns about Tarantino's writing and direction, the man has a knack for getting great work from his actors. I honestly think this is my favorite performance by Jamie Foxx --- of course, if you don't count Ray or Collateral, there's not much competition. He was understated at times, but was able to rise to whatever level of silliness or violence the script demanded.
Violence and a silly suit --- in the same scene! Levels!
His character was a little light on depth, though. That may be because this movie --- which is definitely about Django's journey --- was dominated by Christoph Waltz. Do you remember those awkward, slightly philosophical monologues that Uma Thurman sometimes delivered in Kill Bill? Waltz takes that same sort of material and makes it magical. I don't know if it is his voice or his natural charm, but Waltz is the best thing to happen to Tarantino's movies since Sam Jackson. I was also impressed by Leonardo DiCaprio's heel turn as the primary villain.
He doesn't need the hammer here. With that grin, even flowers would look threatening
I've always liked DiCaprio, but his role selection over the past few years has bored me. Playing a character with no regard for human life was a nice change of pace, and he was convincingly nasty. Samuel L. Jackson was also (unsurprisingly) good as DiCaprio's right-hand slave. Jackson swims through his profanity-laced dialogue, but what makes his performance stand out are the moments that he spends one-on-one with other characters. Look at his face:
That is not the look of a slave. That is the look of an evil bastard who loves to manipulate, and that is why this was a standout role for Jackson. Like most Tarantino movies, the cast is substantially large, but those four are the major players. Kerry Washington was fine as Django's wife, but her role was reactionary, so it was hard to like much about her. Don Johnson had a better part, as one of the many racist white people that needed killing, but it's not like he had to do much in his role. Walton Goggins made a welcome appearance as a henchman. Goggins is quickly becoming one of my favorite villains, thanks to his work in Justified, but his caveman-brow and so-laid-back-it's-sinister Southern drawl make him a scene-stealer regardless of his medium. Here, he played tough very well (as expected) and gave a truly fantastic frightened howl (less expected). I'm not exactly sure why James Remar had a dual role, since his characters were never revealed to be brothers, but it's nice to see him get back to his bad guy roots, instead of all this bland authority figure crap he's been putting out lately. The rest of the cast was essentially a series of cameos. The ones that paid off fairly well were Jonah Hill, M.C. Gainey, and Bruce Dern; none of them did anything special, but they played their familiar parts well enough. The rest were surprisingly brief. Amber Tamblyn looked out a window, Franco Nero was there to pass on the legend (he was the original Django), and Ato Essandoh died poorly.
And then there is the hillbilly family, which consisted of Tom Savini, Robert Carradine, Zoe Bell, and Ted "Jesus Christ Superstar" Neeley, among others. I don't know if they had a line between them. Of course, Quentin Tarantino had to cast himself in a small role. While his Australian accent was horrible, his character's fate was hilarious, so I'm counting this as one of his better bit roles.
Quentin Tarantino wrote and directed Django Unchained, and it is definitely a Quentin Tarantino movie. If you don't already like his fast-talking and (occasionally) brutally gory films, Django will not change your mind. Similarly, if you're already on board with Tarantino, I can't imagine Django disappointing. In terms of dialogue, there are more than enough actors here that are capable of delivering QT's lines well. Pairing Waltz and Jackson in the same film --- even though they didn't interact much --- was a lot of fun to watch, because you can tell that their dialogue was written specifically for them.
"What can I say? I'm his muse."
Tarantino always has a strong vision of what he wants from each scene, and that is true in Django Unchained. The story was nothing special --- it's a Spaghetti Western with racism --- but the script and the performances made it extremely entertaining.
Since this is a Western and a Quentin Tarantino film, I should probably take a moment to address the level of gore and violence in Django Unchained. Simply put, it is awesome and abundant.
...and this is only a small taste of the exploding blood packs in this film
I love the fact that Tarantino is sticking to actual fake blood, instead of adding CGI blood in post-production. QT is currently the leader in fake blood usage in modern films, and the ridiculous excess of it always makes me smile. To put it another way: if you don't like gore, this is not the movie for you.
To put it another way, *slowly licks Leo's hand*
The gunfighting is done well, and there are plenty of shootout scenes --- particularly toward the end. More important than the quantity is the quality. These scenes are violent, and they occasionally have repercussions (although not really). I also have to admit that Foxx and Waltz looked pretty damn cool most of the time, which is about 60% of any good Western.
This still alone is better than American Outlaws
There are three problems I have with Django Unchained. The first is that the movie is too damn long. Tarantino loves to hear himself talk, so I suppose it is no surprise that he can't seem to cut out much from his films. That's not a huge problem, but this story could have been twenty or thirty minutes shorter and still been awesome.
He could have cut the scenes where they shopped for drapes, for example
My next issue was how well Tarantino built up a large cast of villains and then dispatched most of them with little more than an afterthought. The most obvious example of this was the hillbilly family; the cast was noteworthy and Sam Jackson built them up like the damn bogeymen for slaves (which would seem to make them extra-extra-scary), but the payoff never came. You can make the same argument about almost all of the slavers in this film, but that was the instance that bothered me the most. The most irritating aspect of this film is convoluted plan to retrieve Django's wife. The script went to great pains to justify this roundabout attack, but the direct approach ("Hello, can I buy your slave?") seems too reasonable to have been dismissed as something not worth trying.
Are any of those issues critical flaws? Not for me, although the last one still bothers me, even days after watching it. Django Unchained does so many things right that its missteps barely matter. And I haven't even mentioned the amazing soundtrack! Ennio Morricone. Western. 'Nuff said. I went into this with extremely high expectations, and I loved every minute of it. The violence was ample, the dialogue was funny and clever, and the villains (especially Sam Jackson) had depth. It's not perfect, but I find the imperfections pleasantly interesting.
Here's the song from the opening credits, which also happens to have been the song from the original Franco Nero Django:
Apparently, America, we are having trouble saying goodbye to our aging action stars. If you truly doubt that, please explain the appeal of Rambo or The Expendables. Don't get me wrong, I miss the days when a hero could stand in one spot and shoot down fifteen thousand ninja-Communist-Nazis, without getting even a flesh wound, and I've enjoyed Stallone's increasingly idiotic movies. Still, it's kind of strange that we haven't seen anybody (except maybe Jason Statham) truly embrace the stupid action hero role, given how important dumb action movies were in the 80s and 90s. When you think about it, the success of The Expendables is an amusing insight into just how badly we want these actors to keep killing bad guys. I don't know how intentional this was, but Red seems to be in on that joke, too.
It's kind of like the song from White Christmas...what do you do with a former CIA black-ops agent when he stops being a CIA black-ops agent? Well, if you are Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), and you are living an inoffensive existence as a lonely retiree whose only friend is a customer service representative at a bank several states away, the answer is simple: kill him. For reasons unknown to him, Frank discovers that his status in the intelligence community has been changed from "retired" to RED ("retired, extremely dangerous"). Being RED means that assassination squads infiltrate your home in the middle of the night, looking to terminate with extreme prejudice. However, the "extremely dangerous" bit is an understatement; Frank quickly kills his attackers and begins a quest to find out who wants to kill him and why.
Along the way, Frank has to pick up that bank representative, Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker). He realizes that his phone must have been tapped prior to the assassination attempt and that the next logical step for the bad guys would be to kidnap Sarah and use her as leverage against him. She's not very willing at first, but as more people keep showing up to kill her, Sarah quickly gets on the Frank Moses bandwagon. Frank can't unravel the plot against him all by his lonesome, though, which means he needs to find help. Since he's retired, it turns out that his help is also a little past their prime. Joe (Morgan Freeman), Frank's mentor, is now living in a retirement home and passes the time by ogling his nurse's ass. Marvin (John Malkovich) is a well-armed conspiracy theorist that is paranoid to the extent of having a decoy house. Victoria (Helen Mirren) is a prim and proper housewife, formerly the best wetworks specialist in the business. With a little help from Ivan (Brian Cox), a Russian spy and former adversary, the group sets out to learn the truth.
I so so so wish he yelled "Flava Flaaaaav!" here.
I was excited to see this movie after seeing the trailers for it. It didn't look like a great action movie --- it has Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren, remember? --- but I thought it looked funny. I was wrong. It is funny and a good action movie. This is one of Willis' more wooden roles, but I don't know if I would have bought a black-ops specialist with a talent for wisecracks. His stoicism was probably for the best. Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren clearly had a lot of fun in their roles, with Mirren taking particular relish in being the gun expert. I go back and forth with my appreciation for John Malkovich, but he plays a pretty amusing paranoid here. Malkovich was probably my favorite character in the film, but I also really enjoyed Brian Cox. I think I just like the idea of former arch-enemies getting together and reminiscing about "the good old days," when they used to try to kill each other. Cox doesn't get nearly enough comic work, in my opinion. Mary-Louise Parker was also good as the relative newbie to all the danger. Is it just me, or was Parker neither attractive or talented until she turned 40? Weird. I liked seeing Ernest Borgnine again, even if he wasn't threatening to shoot anyone in the face. The rest of the cast was kind of meh. James Remar was in the movie for all of two seconds. Rebecca "Mrs. David Mamet" Pidgeon and her ugly jaw was as awful as she usually is, as was Richard Dreyfuss in his small-but-overacted role. I'm not exactly sure why Julian McMahon took his small part in the film, but he was definitely many years too young for the character he played. The bulk of the meh comes from Karl Urban, though. While I appreciate his dedication to the action movie genre, Urban is best when he speaks little and doesn't develop as a character. Here, he tries to actually act, with little to show for it.
Though this isn't from Red, Ernest Borgnine is still awesome.
This movie shouldn't be as good as it is. The screenwriters that adapted this story from the comic book series are the same people who wrote the dreadful Whiteout. The director, Robert Schwentke, has never shown a talent for either action or comedy, with his only other English films being The Time Traveler's Wife and Flightplan. Somehow, those films managed to collectively gross over $300 million and still have absolutely zero appeal to me. Regardless, the script was smart, the actors were directed well, and the action was pretty cool. I don't think I've ever seen so many bullets fired into one suburban home before, but I liked it.
Probably the thing I appreciated most about this movie was that it didn't keep calling attention to the age of its characters. Aside from an assassin calling Malkovich "old man," and maybe a similar remark made during a Willis-Urban fight, age was not a joke in this movie. Thank you, screenwriters. Instead, the humor was largely contextual and delivery-based. The main actors were all very good, and only the bad guys weren't funny. The pace is quick, the action is good, and many things go boom. This is exactly what From Paris With Love should have been, but was not. I will go so far as to say that Red is one of the most enjoyable action movies of 2010, and the perfect antidote for anyone who cannot fathom the success of The Expendables.
Sometimes you watch a movie because it stars an actor that you like. Sometimes, you're a fan of the director. Big film buffs (like me) will even choose films because of the writer. It is unusual for a movie to use the writer as a big selling point for a movie, though. The writer/director of The Unborn happens to be David S. Goyer, whose writing credits include Dark City, the Blade trilogy, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and, uh, Kickboxer 2: The Road Back. That's a pretty impressive list of credits. The Unborn also features actor's actor Gary Oldman and Idris Elba in the supporting cast. This is definitely a film with promise.
But before I go into the plot, I would like to point out the promotional poster for the movie. Judging from that image, I would assume that the plot of The Unborn is heavily involved in female butts. Perhaps this is a supernatural thriller about an entity that has one of those FoodSaver vacuum sealers, only instead of vacuum sealing food pouches, it sucks the air out of panties. And that creepy kid in the mirror is like, "Hey, that can't possibly be comfortable, lady." Or maybe later, he asks, "If you fart in vacuum sealed underwear, is that smell kept fresh?" Yeah, I feel pretty safe assuming that this movie's story follows something along those lines.
The film opens with Casey (Odette Yustman) jogging down a road, when she sees a blue glove in the road. When she stops to look at the glove, the movie takes a brief detour into my favorite string of commercials. Look at the glove. Now at me. Now, look behind you; there is a creepy and possibly dead child staring at you. Look again; he has become a dog wearing a mask. Look down, now up; where is the dog? He is gone, but you hear him scampering in the woods. Follow the dog, find the mask, dig under the mask and you find...a fetus in amber. And it's looking at you. And all this time, you have kept your iPod earbuds in. Anything is possible when you smell like Old Spice. Or when, in Casey's case, you are dreaming.
Yeah, it's a dream. Too bad, since that scene was decently creepy. The film then cuts to Casey discussing her dream over the phone with her friend Romy (Meagan Good), who reads from her Psych 101 textbook and tells Casey that dreaming about dogs can mean something about death. I bet that doesn't foreshadow anything. Casey goes to check on the baby that she's sitting and finds the infant's four year-old brother, Matty (Atticus Shaffer), holding a small mirror up to the baby, trying to get it to look at itself. When Casey asks Matty what he's doing, he surprises her by smashing the mirror into her face (HA!) and telling her "Jumby wants to be born now." That doesn't seem so bad; that poor genie has been a disembodied head since the 80s. Mecca lecca hi, mecca hiney ho, right? Oh, wait, that's Jambi. Never mind. For a while after this, Casey starts hallucinating all sorts of things, like seeing the phrase "Jumby wants to be born now" and the dead kid. She handles these images in stride, offering just a quizzical tilt of the head. But when her hallucinations start to include bugs, GET OUT OF HER WAY. Bugs? Game over, man, game over.
About this time, one of Casey's eyes starts to change color, from blue to brown. Like a smart lady, she gets it checked out; her doctor (CS Lee) asks if she was a twin. Apparently, she's not sure, so she asks her father (James Remar), who tells her that, yes, she had a twin in the womb, but her brother choked on her umbilical cord early in the pregnancy. Did he have a name? I knew you'd ask that. The answer is no, since it was so early, but they did have a pet name for him: Jumby. That's right. Casey was damn lucky to get named "Casey" and not, say, "Fu Schnickens." Okay, so dead baby brother wants to haunt his big sis/murderer. Not a bad premise. Apparently, that was not nearly enough plot on David S. Goyer's proverbial dinner plate. The second half of the movie ties into Auschwitz (the concentration camp, not the theme park), Nazi medical experiments, Jewish mysticism (specifically Kabbalah), and exorcism. What the hell, Goyer?
As you might imagine from the plot vomit, this movie is a mess. There is way too much exposition in this film and none of it get more than a few moments to sink in. To be fair, the awesomely overcomplicated plot does try to distract viewers from the main actors' talents. Specifically, Odette Yustman is better off playing that girl in Transformers whose car attacks her than an actual character with dialogue and alleged depth. The best thing she did in this movie was allow somebody to airbrush her underwear on for the promo poster. Her fellow actors are no big help; Meagan Good and Cam Gigandet (Casey's boyfriend) are just as vapid as she is. That's too bad, since the adult supporting cast consists of solid actors who don't have the opportunity to shine. Gary Oldman is pretty decent, but his role is not extraordinary. Idris Elba, James Remar, and Jane Alexander all make brief appearances, but none of them are memorable. I will give writer/director Goyer credit that the movie does maintain a decent pace through this breakneck plot. He needed to spend more time on his principal actors, because they were, without exception, dreadful.
That's too bad, because this movie had a lot going for it. Like what? Oh, lots.
The script has plenty of hep sexual dialogue that is not awkward at all. I love to hear characters reference their "wood" and "disease filled vagina," especially when the characters are not in raunchy comedies.
All the college age characters attend the same university, and yet all of them live with their parents. Really?
When women are home alone, in an obviously chilly house, their comfy clothes are always paper-thin tank tops and tighty whities.
After hallucinating in a club, running to the bathroom and vomiting in a stall, does Casey take the opportunity to peer into her stall's glory hole? Of course she does.
Little known fact: Odette Yustman is Megan Fox's long-long, less talented sister.
What utter garbage. I will give Gary Oldman and Idris Elba credit for pretending that they were in a legitimate exorcism movie, but that is nowhere near what this movie needed to not be awful.
