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:

Cowboys & Aliens

If absolutely nothing else, Cowboys & Aliens has two things going for it: a title that accurately describes the plot, and a title that sounds stupid enough to make many people not want to watch this movie.  Take heed with this movie title; if you don't want to watch a movie about cowboys fighting aliens, then this is not the film for you.  I, however, happen to generally enjoy Jon Favreau and Daniel Craig, and I keep hoping for Harrison Ford to make up for the last Indiana Jones movie, so I opted to watch this sci-fi/western mash-up.

A man (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the desert, wounded and alone, with no memory of himself or how he got there.  All he knows is that he has a weird thing clamped to his left wrist.  Oh, and he remembers that he's a bad-ass, because he kills the hell out of a trio of bounty hunters.  Our man with no name finds a name (Jake, as it turns out) when he moseys on over to the nearest town, Absolution.  The town is a washed-up mining spot that never had much luck with mining.  The town is still kicking only because old man Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) uses it as a base for his cattle operation.  This tends to put him and his men --- especially his spoiled rotten and frequently drunken son, Percy (Paul Dano) --- above the law.  Well, Jake publicly humiliates Percy while Percy attempts to publicly humiliate the local saloon owner (Sam Rockwell), which leads to Percy accidentally shooting a deputy.  Percy gets locked up, ready to be sent to the big city to be arraigned.  Jake is also locked up for apparently being a bad, bad man, even if he doesn't remember any of it.  When Dolarhyde hears about Percy's arrest and Jake being in town, he rushes home to confront the sheriff.  A surprisingly interesting battle of wills commences, until aliens happen.

Two plausible reactions to aliens happening

Yep, the titular aliens appear in flying machines, blow some stuff up, kidnap random people, and kill anybody who gets in their way.  This would make modern men scramble, much less someone from the 1870s.  I mean, it would make most men scramble, unless they happen to be Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.

To broaden the appeal of this film, assless chaps were seriously considered.

Jake's arm clamp/bracelet comes to life around the aliens, and it is a weapon.  Not some wimpy weapon, either; he manages to shoot down one of their ships.  What happens next?  Not surprisingly, everybody teams up to take on the "demons" that have ravaged the town and taken their people.

The acting in this movie is a lot better than it deserves to be.  After all, this is a genre mash-up that, logically, shouldn't work.  It's surprisingly fun, though.  Daniel Craig does his scowling bad-ass thing again; I would have liked to see him show off a little more of his charm, but this is a movie about cowboys fighting aliens, so I guess deep characters are probably not on the menu.  I didn't love Harrison Ford in this movie, but I didn't hate him, either.  In the beginning, he does a pretty good job of playing a bastard, but his performance was missing a crucial extra bit to make it awesome; later, his character softens and falls back into Ford's more comfortable likeable-but-kind-of-gruff territory.  I would have liked to see him enjoy his mean moments more, though.  At least his hat wasn't too reminiscent of Indiana Jones, right?

Are they rebooting the City Slickers franchise?

Sam Rockwell has a bit part in the film, which I was happy to see.  It's not very impressive, though; he plays a weenie.  Adam Beach plays Dolarhyde's semi-adopted son/trusted cowhand and he plays it with as much intensity as you might expect from him; I really wish Beach wasn't the preeminent Native American actor in Hollywood, because his range shows its limits whenever he is asked to do anything more than read lines.  Here, he succeeds in keeping any charisma from accidentally getting on-screen by having his character's most emotional moment (him convincing an Apache chief to follow Dolarhyde) translated by another character.  Walton Goggins was fairly entertaining as a none-too-bright thief, which is just another notch in his belt of unsavory characters.  Keith Carradine was okay as the sheriff, but nothing special.  Similarly, Noah Ringer did a decent job of making googly eyes and looking scared, but his performance was not revelatory.  I did like Clancy Brown's character; for some reason, he seems less evil as he gets older.  I also thought that Paul Dano did a good job as Dolarhyde's insufferable son, who gets hurt just often enough to keep him from getting annoying.  You might also recognize Scottish character actor David O'Hara as Jake's gang-leading nemesis; he's a solid actor that looks mean for a few minutes and then usually dies like he does here.  My biggest problem with the cast was actually with Olivia Wilde as a beautiful stranger.  That's weird, since the kid from The Last Airbender is in this movie, right?  Well, she was okay, I guess, but her flawless complexion, clean hair, and super-white teeth didn't make her the most believable single lady in the Wild West.  I also find it interesting that no men hit on her in this entire film.  I don't ask for a whole lot of realism in my cowboys vs. aliens movies, but she stuck out like a sore thumb.

Where do you get your eyebrows done in a one-horse town?

This is Jon Favreau's  first directorial effort after making blockbusters Iron Man 1 & 2.  How did it turn out?  Well, I have to admit that Favreau could definitely make a good, old fashioned Western if he wanted to.  I was shocked at how engaging I found the alien-free Western scenes.  As for the movie as a whole, well...it's kind of silly.  Luckily, the title clued me in on that possibility, so I wasn't surprised.  I thought the action scenes were pretty good (seeing horses flying in the air is oddly amusing) and I liked how he handled the main actors and characters.  It did seem a little piecemeal, though.  Sure, that makes sense, since you are shoe-horning aliens into a Western, but a lot of the characters felt like they were simply tacked on (the Apaches, the thieves, Adam Beach, etc.) and didn't feel like organic parts of this story.  Favreau made the very best alien/cowboy movie possible, but there was a lot going on in a film that would have benefited from simplicity.  Hell, this might have been a better movie without the aliens.

Overall, Cowboys & Aliens manages to succeed more than a movie of this type (or name) should.  It is an entertaining blend of sci-fi and Westerns, where tough actors get to act tough and we see lots and lots of people get killed by aliens.  Seriously, it seems like a hundred people die, and yet there always appears to be about a dozen or so survivors.  I wouldn't call this a great movie or an unequivocal success, but it is fun and I always like seeing a quality Western, even if it is just in the first fifteen minutes of the movie.  I was hoping for greatness, though, and this film falls a little short --- primarily because the alien plot trampled over the cooler tough guy Western story.  Whatever.  I saw cowboys, I saw aliens, and I saw lots die on both sides.  The movie lived up to its title, at the very least.

Predators

When I learned that Robert Rodriguez was making a new Predator movie, I was pretty excited.  Rodriguez is a guy that knows how to make an amusing action movie that doesn't take itself too seriously (Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City, etc.), and I think that is exactly what this franchise needs.  Sure, the original Predator was awesome, but let's not look at it with rose-colored glasses; the movie is essentially a live-action G.I. Joe sci-fi flick, drenched in steroids.  Predator 2 wasn't great, and neither were the Alien vs. Predator movies.  Sure, why not make another Predator?  The past twenty years has only dropped expectations for the series, so there's almost no risk and I trust Rodriguez.  What's that?  Rodriguez is only producing this movie, handing over the director's chair to Nimrod Antal?  Oh.  I don't know how I feel about that.

Okay, imagine that you wake up and you are falling.  Not off your bed, but out of an airplane.  What do you do?  Soil yourself?  Well, that's a given.  Don't worry, your parachute will open without your help.  If your next move is to prepare to shoot anything you see, welcome to Predators.  That's pretty much how the film starts, with several people landing confused in a jungle, armed to the teeth.  Royce (Adrien Brody) is a mercenary, Isabelle (Alice Braga) is a sniper, Cuchillo (Danny Trejo) is a Mexican drug cartel enforcer, Nikolai (Oleg Taktarov) is a Russian soldier, Hanzo (Louis Ozawa Changchien) is Yakuza, and Mombasa (Mahershalhashbaz Ali) is an African death dealer.  Heavy hitters, each and every one of them.  There is also Stans (Walton Goggins), a death row inmate with a fondness for cocaine and rape.  And there's Edwin (Topher Grace), a doctor.  If you have "one of these things is not like the other" in your head, you're not alone.  What are the chances that Edwin has a secret?

Opting for strength in numbers in an unfamiliar jungle, an uneasy truce is formed between these hardened killers (and Edwin) and they head to high ground, trying to learn their location.  The initial signs are bad; from personal experience, they acknowledge that they are not in Asia or Africa, which basically leaves the Amazon as the sole likely possibility.  But the sun doesn't seem to be moving and the wind is coming from all directions, neither of which makes any sense.  Oh, but wait...they get to high ground, see a bunch of suns and moons and realize that they are probably not in the Amazon, or even Earth.  That's when the hunt begins.  First, we get some Predadogs (Predator + dogs) chasing the group.

YOU let it lick your face.

These ugly, horned, lion-sized things take a beating and most of the group's ammunition; after the group has killed a few, the Predadogs are called back with the sound of a horn.  Royce realizes that the group is being hunted and decides to hunt the hunters; they follow the Predadog tracks back to the Predator base camp, where they find hundreds of hunting trophies, including many human skulls.  They also find a Predator tied up to a post, presumably for punishment of some kind; this is their first look at the enemy.  Here's a quick rundown on Predators for the uninitiated.  They have:

• dreadlocks, which seems an odd choice for an entire species
• a mouth that looks suspiciously like a female body part, but with pincers
• laser-targeted energy cannons
• cool masks that are often customized with bones and other morbid stuff
• large, retractable knives located in their body armor
• cloaking technology, for near-invisibility
• a fondness for hunting dangerous animals

A little later, they learn even more about the Predators when they encounter Noland (Laurence Fishburne), a man who has survived on Planet Predator alone for quite some time.  After that, it's basically a hunt or be hunted scenario, as the group tries to kill their way to freedom and maybe a way off the planet.

This movie is an interesting blend of stupid and cool.  On the one hand, "Killers From Around the Globe" is a pretty lame theme for the characters, but the cast is varied in appearance and acting skills, so it actually works decently well.  And I was impressed by the order in which the characters died; it was not the typical "least famous dies first" routine.  The title alludes to many things, including the fairly obvious (there is more than one Predator in this movie) and an homage (Predators is what Aliens was to Alien --- or it wants to be, anyway).  The title also refers to the humans, because they are all killers; that last one made me roll my eyes when I heard it mentioned in the movie, but at least its not too pretentious.  We get to see a few different types of Predators in this film, which is an interesting and untapped concept.  We also get Predadogs, which are significantly less cool. 

The acting is about what you would expect from a cast chosen (at least partially) by ethnicity.  Most of the actors have bit parts with little dialogue and no character development.  That's fine.  Movies like this need cannon fodder.  That left the bulk of the acting to Adrien Brody, who did a pretty good job bulking up for the role.  He was a pretty good solider, even if his character was clearly designed to have the illusion of depth --- "Ooh, he quoted Hemmingway!  There's more to this character than we thought!"  Alice Braga was fine as the mandatory conscience of the group, but it was a thankless role and was a little annoying.  Topher Grace's character was obviously designed to have a not-too-subtle secret, but he was still pretty entertaining, especially in the lulls between action scenes.  SPOILER: Okay, so Topher is a serial killer.  Couldn't they have thrown in a red herring, like he's a mercy-killing battlefield doctor, or an abortionist, or something?  Any explanation for his presence on Planet Predator would have been appreciated.  Laurence Fishburne and Walton Goggins also add some spice as clearly unstable people.

Overall, this isn't a bad time.  Nimrod Antal does a solid job directing, even if the plot is occasionally ludicrous and predictable.  The Predators get fleshed out a little more as characters and we see some more of their technology, which is not as interesting as it sounds.  This is definitely the best-acted film in the series (aside from Jesse Ventura in the original), too.  It doesn't quite succeed in matching the awesomeness of the original.  The filmmakers made a big deal about the "s" in the title, and frequently pointed out how James Cameron's Aliens was a very different, but equally awesome, movie than Ridley Scott's Alien.  These guys missed the point of that comparison, though; Alien is a suspense/horror movie, while Aliens is a flat-out action movie.  They are different genres, not just different movies.  Predator is possibly the most testosterone-infused movie ever made, and Predators is a slightly smarter, less muscular version of that.  It's not bad.  It's just playing the same game as the superior original, which makes it somewhat predictable.  That said, I think the door is left open to a truly awesome sequel, so I suppose this film served its purpose of reinvigorating this franchise.