Django Unchained

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:

Inception

Christopher Nolan obviously has a fascination with the notion of reality.  In Memento, he focused on how our memories shape us and how we shape our memories.  In The Prestige, he looked at the power of illusion.  Now, with Inception, Nolan ditches the pretenses and goes for broke; this film delves into the world of dreams.

In this story, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate spy with a unique modus operandi: he enters dreams with his intended victims and steal their ideas right out of their minds, a process called extraction.  Inception is the flip side of that coin; instead of stealing an idea, you plant one.  Just as it is far easier to destroy than to create, it is far more difficult to perform inception than extraction.  Indeed, Cobb's partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and others insist that inception is absolutely impossible.  However, after botching a job, their intended victim, Saito (Ken Watanabe), makes them an offer they can't refuse.  If they successfully perform inception and convince his corporate rival's heir, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), to dismantle his father's massive corporation, Saito will pay everyone handsomely and give Cobb access to the only thing he truly wants --- his family.

There's more to it than that --- a lot more --- but I can't simplify it and still do the story justice.  I can, however, marvel at the unique story elements.  This is a very intelligent story that has been thought through from start to finish.  To pull off the inception, Cobb and his crew design several elaborate dreamscapes and they layer the dreams one inside of another inside of another.  So, they all go to sleep and go into the shared dreamscape, and then they go to sleep in that dream and then go to sleep in the next dream to reach that third layer.  Does that sound complicated?  Well, wait.  Each layer of dream has a different concept of time.  In the first layer, five minutes of real-world time equals an hour of dream time.  In the second layer, that becomes ten hours, in the third, a hundred.  What makes that notion interesting is the fact that the dreamers have some level of awareness with the level above them; like someone that has water dripping on them might dream of drowning, these characters are affected by what is happening around their sleeping bodies.  There is an extended sequence where a car is falling, for instance, and the next dream layer has everyone floating in mid-air because their bodies are all asleep in the falling car in the dream layer above.  What only takes a few seconds (a falling car) feels like several minutes to those dreamers.  That opens up a lot of layered storytelling possibilities and introduces some tricky timing, and Christopher Nolan did a great job making each layer work.

While this is more of a psychological thriller than anything else, Inception has its share of solid action sequences.  There is a surprising amount of gunfire in the movie and a lot of full-contact driving sequences.  These are nice, but that should come as no surprise from the director of The Dark Knight.  The movie's uniqueness is shown primarily in a great scene where Joseph Gordon-Levitt fights in a hallway with no consistent gravity.  It's not a particularly flashy scene, and Gordon-Levitt doesn't come across as ridiculously bad-ass or anything, but it's a wonderful illustration of the possibilities available in the dream worlds.

Something that surprised me about this film was the emotional content.  Clever ideas and good action are nothing particularly new to Nolan because his movies are all about the plot.  Honestly, I don't think I've seen an incredible acting performance in his movies, aside from the notable exception of Heath Ledger.  That diligence to the story usually sacrifices any true emotional attachment.  Here, though, we are given two distinct and satisfying stories with heart.  On the one hand, we have Robert Fischer, who felt like a disappointment to his empire-building father (Pete Postlethwaite).  By the film's end, though, there is a genuine moment between the two; the fact that the moment was completely engineered by Cobb and his crew doesn't negate the scene's emotion.  On the other hand, we have Cobb.  He has been dealing with intense loss and guilt for a while, to a degree that is affecting (and infecting) his work.  When he finally confronts the manifestation of his guilt, there are a few minutes that acknowledge the importance and limitations of dreams, and these moments are the core of the story.  If that scene had felt forced or flat, the whole movie would have seemed like a clever piece of filmmaking, but not an important work.  And this is undoubtedly an important film.

What is odd in a movie filled with oddness is the absence of any truly charismatic character.  Leonardo DiCaprio does a very good job as Cobb, willing to risk his sanity and that of his friends just to see his family again.  The character is smart, but flawed, and DiCaprio (who I think is a good actor that is smart enough to work with great directors) gives his best performance in recent memory.  He is the heart and brains of the story and he deserves recognition for how well he carried this film.  Of course, his performance would have been wasted without someone of equal talent in his scenes.  Marion Cotillard turns in a varied and emotional performance, alternately cooing with love or screaming with hate.  DiCaprio's performance required someone to react to him, and Cotillard played her part well.  Her performance is somewhat hampered by the limitations placed on her character, but she still was able to convey a lot of emotion.

The rest of the cast is good, but their characters are not as integral to the plot as DiCaprio's or Cotillard's.  Cillian Murphy has the next most emotionally complicated role, and he does it well.  Resentment is often a trait that makes characters unsympathetic, but he is able to show that emotion and still come across as someone in need.  Ellen Page acts as the story's point-of-view character, the character least familiar with the dreamscape.  Her scenes are primarily used to show off the possibilities of dreams, and her character acts as Cobb's conscience.  It's not a terribly complex role for Page, but her character still seems well developed.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt turns in another subtle performance as the matter-of-fact member of Cobb's team, but he shows personality in a few brief scenes that help change him from just another character into someone you're rooting for.  Tom Hardy is appealing as the rogue of the group as well.  The rest of the cast has more limited roles, either because of screen time, or because of their character's role.  Still, Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Tom Berenger and Lukas Haas all add something to their roles that make them feel more substantial than they are.

This film was written and directed by Christopher Nolan.  I've already mentioned how clever the story is, but it's worth mentioning again.  This is a smart screenplay that has heart and some humor.  Most importantly, though, this is a unique story.  You can argue that it shares some similarities with Dark City or The Matrix because it plays with the notion of reality, but Inception is a lot deeper than that and is better in almost every way than any movie with a similar conceit.  The acting is full of competent performances, but it is noteworthy that this is the first time Nolan has been able to capture this much honest emotion on film.  The cinematography is good for the most part, with a few truly exceptional scenes that show the potential of the plot.  I think this is Nolan's best work to date.

The one thing it lacks is an extraordinary character.  I find it odd that a movie with so many bigger-than-life moments has characters that are all essentially normal.  Well, except for the entering people's dreams thing.  I can see the importance of having DiCaprio, Cotillard, and Page as regular folks, but I think an opportunity was missed by having Hardy do the same.  Hardy was somewhat sarcastic, but I think his character would have been a little more appealing if he had been a little more of...I don't know...maybe a lovable bastard; he was only a few steps away from the guy you like to hang out with, but wouldn't trust alone with your sister, but those few steps can make a big difference for supporting characters.

That is just me nit-picking, though.  This is a visually interesting, intellectually fascinating movie with good direction and acting.  It has a good ending, too, but it's better seen than read.  I expected to enjoy this movie because I like so many of the people involved, but this turned out to be the best new release I have seen in a few years.

Shutter Island

It's difficult to write about a thriller or mystery movie because nobody wants to be That Guy who reveals that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's Keyser Soze.  This presents me with a challenge: to ramble on at length without being That Guy.  I think I can manage that, but this is a mystery movie, so it has a twist.  That's as much of a spoiler as I'm going to give you.

Adapted from Dennis Lehane's best-selling book of the same name, Shutter Island has more than a few similarities to Lehane's Mystic River.  Boy, that Lehane has a tough life; a best-selling author who gets his books optioned into movies that are directed by some of the most talented directors in the world.  You would think he'd write happier tales.  Anyway, both Mystic River and Shutter Island are mysteries that rely heavily on their characters' secrets to reach their logical conclusion.

Here, we have Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), a US Marshall that volunteered for a case that would give him an excuse to poke around Shutter Island, a maximum security mental hospital for the criminally insane.  On the ferry ride to the island, Daniels meets his new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), and they enter the facility together.  They are ostensibly there to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), a patient --- not a prisoner! --- that managed to escape the facility, despite a locked door, barred windows, no shoes, rugged terrain, and several guards stationed throughout the building.  That doesn't sound like an inside job at all, does it?  Rachel was incarcerated for drowning her three children.  The real reason for Daniels' visit is to learn the fate of Andrew Laeddis (Elias Koteas), the pyromaniac that burned down Daniels' home with his wife (Michelle Williams) inside.  Laeddis was assigned to the facility after going to jail, but his paper trail ended on Shutter Island...but no one admits to knowing him.  Once inside the facility, Daniels and Chuck meet Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), a practitioner of humane treatment for the mentally ill, and Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), a member of the old-school of psychiatric treatment that prefers lobotomy over patience.

From the start of the investigation, nothing goes Daniels' way.  The facility guards refuse him entrance while armed, so he has to give up his gun.  He asks for files that are clearly commonsense ways for him to get the essential information he needs, but he is blocked by the facility's bureaucracy at every turn.  He lost his cigarettes before the boat arrived at the island, and is forced to bum smokes from his new partner.  Orderlies and nurses are sarcastic and generally less than helpful.  The patients he interviews appear coached and seem afraid when he questions them about Andrew Laeddis.  When he faces the truth that the doctors are refusing to aid his case, Daniels can't even leave the island because a hurricane is on its way.  With nothing else to do, Daniels continues his investigation.  Clearly, there is some secret that is being covered up, and he is determined to discover that truth.  He eventually meets with an old informant (Jackie Earle Haley) that is now confined in the most violent ward of the facility, who seems to confirm Daniels' greatest fear; Daniels can uncover the truth behind the island and blow the lid off the whole conspiracy, or he can find out what happened to Andrew Laeddis.  He cannot do both.  The question is what is more important to Daniels: uncovering a terrible truth for the world to see, or finding (killing?) the man responsible for the death of his wife?

Martin Scorsese's direction really stands out in this film, particularly because of Daniels' dreams.  Daniels is suffering from a string of nightmares, hallucinations and waking dreams that are reminding him of his late wife and the Dachau concentration camp that he helped liberate in World War II.  In the dream world, identities are transposed, but the emotions are not.  Memories are shown, but they are spliced with his own subconscious.  At times, the imagery is a little trippy, like when his cigarette briefly smokes in reverse.  Other times, it is sad, as when his wife becomes ash in his arms while he professes his love for her.  And yet other times are the stuff of nightmares, with Holocaust children accusing him of not doing enough to save them.  Scorsese is given free reign to use a lot of symbolism in these scenes, and he throws a lot at the viewer.  In a lot of Scorsese films, he makes good use of camera angles and general cinematography to imply moods or hint at his characters' frame of mind.  He does that in Shutter Island, as well, but he has a lot more freedom to get creative, thanks to the dream scenes.

As far as acting goes, it is all pretty much above board.  Leonardo DiCaprio is consistently good, and working so frequently with Scorsese seems to have taught him the value of subtlety and nuance.  I'm not saying that he was ever an over-actor, but there are a lot of little things he does with his character that I appreciate, from the hunched shoulders and bold stance to the frequent (but not horribly obvious) reminders of his character's tendency for migraine headaches.  DiCaprio carries this movie on his own, but there are a lot of good supporting cast members that briefly pop up.  Mark Ruffalo does a pretty good job as the junior partner and his compassion shows through consistently.  Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow both play their parts well, but what else would you expect from two respected actors?  Ted Levine has a very brief, but frightening, cameo as the facility warden.  Jackie Earle Haley appears to be having a career renaissance playing disturbed characters, and that pleasant trend continues here with some of the more curious wound makeup I have seen in a while.  Michelle Williams was impressive in her small supporting role and was used effectively.  The rest of the cast (including Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer, and John Carroll Lynch) is good too, but perhaps not as attention-grabbing.

Even with good direction and good acting, a mystery movie can still be underwhelming if the mystery is no good.  I really liked the story in Shutter Island, even though I was not particularly surprised by the ending.  Normally, if I guess the ending to a mystery correctly, it bothers me a bit.  Here, though, Scorsese drops a lot of hints that flesh out the story and the characters.  While one side effect of those choices was a less than surprising answer to the mystery, it was also satisfying because the twist made sense.  You still might not guess the ending correctly (or, at least, not entirely correctly), but you won't feel as if the end came out of left field.  Since the movie spent so much time on Daniels' subconscious mind, the mystery really takes a back seat to that as the primary plot propeller.  As such, the surprise-worthiness of the ending turned out to be a lot less important than I thought it would be.

This is the sort of film that college students love to write about.  It has excellent direction with a lot of stylistic choices and meaningful symbolism and imagery.  After the movie, you can revisit scenes in your head (or just re-watch the scenes on your DVD) and pick out important details that you missed the first time through.  This is a movie that I expect to be better the second time I watch it because being fully informed of the story will allow me to understand many of the scenes from a different angle next time.  While I completely understand anyone who enjoyed the movie less because the mystery's answer was a little predictable, I thoroughly enjoyed the story, acting and the film as a whole the first time through, and look forward to a repeat viewing.  I may be a little artsy fartsy with movies sometimes, but I appreciate good craftsmanship when I see it.