THE STANDOUTS (20) - This should go without saying, but these are all must-sees.
Spotlight ****
Wild Tales ****
Straight Outta Compton ***1/2
Sicario ***1/2
The Revenant ***1/2
Demolition ***1/2
Room ***1/2
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl ***1/2
The End of the Tour ***1/2
The Stanford Prison Experiment ***
The Martian ***
The Walk ***
Steve Jobs ***
Creed ***
Joy ***
Inside Out ***
The Tribe ***
Bridge of Spies ***
Son of Saul ***
Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop (HBO) ***
THE GOOD (48) - These represent quality filmmaking all-around.
Everest ***
Love and Mercy ***
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation ***
Mad Max: Fury Road ***
Ex Machina ***
McFarland, USA ***
The Gift ***
Cop Car ***
The Visit ***
The Connection ***
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (HBO) ***
Cartel Land ***
The Seven Five ***
Infinitely Polar Bear ***
Tangerine ***
Diary of a Teenage Girl ***
Trainwreck ***
Spy ***
Ant-Man ***
Kingsman: The Secret Service ***
Green Room ***
The Night Before ***
The Bronze ***
The 33 ***
The Benefactor ***
Grandma ***
Truth ***
Victoria ***
Dope ***
What We Do In the Shadows ***
Son of a Gun ***
Faults ***
Creep ***
Hyena ***
Maggie ***
Vacation ***
Manson Family Vacation ***
Life in Color ***
Goodnight Mommy **1/2
Shelter **1/2
Two Step **1/2
James White **1/2
Sleeping With Other People **1/2
Digging for Fire **1/2
Cut Bank **1/2
An Honest Liar **1/2
Bloodsucking Bastards **1/2
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon **1/2
THE GOOD... BUT SHOULD'VE BEEN BETTERS (32) - Why weren't these good movies better? I don't really know. But they should've been. Hence, the name of this section.
The Hateful Eight ***
Chappie ***
Going Clear (HBO) ***
Beasts of No Nation ***
Concussion ***
Black Mass **1/2
Pawn Sacrifice **1/2
Southpaw **1/2
Star Wars: The Force Awakens **1/2
Black Sea **1/2
The Overnight **1/2
Minions **1/2
Trumbo **1/2
Eye in the Sky **1/2
Desierto **1/2
Hungry Hearts **1/2
Carol **1/2
The Witch **1/2
Focus **1/2
Irrational Man **1/2
Results **1/2
Buzzard **1/2
Fort Tilden **1/2
Road Hard **1/2
The Peanuts Movie **1/2
Goosebumps **1/2
Kill Your Friends **1/2
Veteran **1/2
Finders Keepers **1/2
Misery Loves Comedy **1/2
Being Evel **1/2
Cronies **1/2
THE GUILTY PLEASURES (38) - These are movies that I shouldn't like but I do, for one reason or another. I only feel ashamed because the Internet tells me I'm supposed to.
Hardcore ***
Run All Night ***
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. ***
Furious 7 ***
No Escape ***
Daddy's Home ***
Entourage ***
The Boy Next Door ***
The Green Inferno ***
Roar ***
Everly **1/2
The Intern **1/2
Poltergeist **1/2
The Devil's Candy **1/2
Unfriended **1/2
Staten Island Summer **1/2
Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse **1/2
American Ultra **1/2
Magic Mike XXL **1/2
Ted 2 **1/2
Krampus **1/2
Get Hard **1/2
The Wedding Ringer **1/2
Burying the Ex **1/2
Sisters **1/2
Terminator Genisys **
San Andreas **
Taken 3 **
Hitman: Agent 47 **
Fifty Shades of Grey **
Hidden **
Balls Out **
American Heist **
The Final Girls **
Final Girl **
Beyond the Reach **
Turbo Kid **
The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence **
THE UNDERWHELMING DISAPPOINTMENTS (42) - Chalk it up to expectations but these movies just didn't cut it for me.
The Big Short **1/2
Anomalisa **1/2
Legend **1/2
Our Brand is Crisis **1/2
I Smile Back **1/2
The Secret In Their Eyes **1/2
Mississippi Grind **1/2
Z for Zachariah **1/2
Knock Knock **
Spectre **
Tiger House **
By the Sea **
Point Break **
The Wolfpack **
Bone Tomahawk **
The Danish Girl **
Experimenter **
In the Heart of the Sea **
Ricki and the Flash **
Pixels **
We Are Your Friends **
Manglehorn **
The Program **
Mr. Holmes **
Macbeth **
Strangerland **
Mistress America **
I Am Michael **
Take Me to the River **
The Family Fang **
Project Almanac **
Tomorrowland **
Avengers: Age of Ultron **
Unfinished Business **
Pitch Perfect 2 **
The Girl in the Photographs **
The Mind's Eye **
Baskin **
Southbound **
The Gallows **
Martyrs **
The Lazarus Effect **
THE BAD (20) - For better or worse, I just don't know what these movies were thinking.
Rock the Kasbah *1/2
Crimson Peak *1/2
Blackhat *1/2
Lost River *1/2
True Story *1/2
Child 44 *1/2
The Gunman *1/2
Fantastic Four *1/2
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 *1/2
High-Rise *
Mojave *
Dark Places *
The Hallow *
Kristy *
The Loft *
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 *
Kidnapping Mr. Heineken *
The Nightmare *
Preservation *
Hellions *
NOTABLE MOVIES I MISSED IN 2015 THAT ARE COMING SOON, I SWEAR (34): 45 Years, Alleluia, Aloha, Appropriate Behavior, The Assassin, Best of Enemies, Brooklyn, Burnt, Chi-Raq, Cinderella, The D Train, The Duke of Burgundy, Eden, Escobar: Paradise Lost, The Falling, Felt, Freeheld, Girlhood, The Good Dinosaur, Heaven Knows What, I'll See You in My Dreams, Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, Meadowland, Mommy, Mustang, Nasty Baby, Phoenix, Slow West, Soaked in Bleach, Spring, Suffragette, Time Out of Mind, White God, Youth
Thursday, 31 December 2015
THE TWELVE CLIPS OF CHRISTMAS–DAY 7: SEVEN by THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
Back in 1979, a Canadian teacher and hymnologist by the name of Hugh D. McKellar published an article entitled "How to Decode the Twelve Days of Christmas." In it, he put forth the theory that the lyrics to the popular Christmas ditty were in fact a stealth catechetical tool designed to help Catholic children learn their faith during a time of religious opression in the 1500s. For instance, the seven swans a-swimming we sing about on this seventh day of Christmas were actually a mnemonic tool to help one recall the seven sacraments.
If that sounds like a bit of a stretch, that’s because it is. McKellar eventually admitted that he made the whole thing up. Still, it wasn’t really that far fetched an idea when you take into consideration the recurring use of particular numbers by the Biblical authors and the Early Church Fathers. The number seven and its multiples were a particular favorite throughout the years. Seven days of creation, seven years of feast and famine, seven seals and trumpets, seven sacraments, just oodles and oodles of sevens everywhere…
You just know the Pythagoreans would have loved that video. In their philosophy seven was a number of vast power, the number of all numbers, the number of the manifested universe itself. The Church Fathers, on the other hand, were careful never to assign any power to numbers themselves, even as they spent a lot of time delving into the significance behind the use of certain digits in Holy Scripture. As St. Ambrose noted in his letter to Horontianus, "The number seven is good, but we do not explain it after the doctrine of Pythagoras and the other philosophers, but rather according to the manifestation and division of the grace of the Spirit; for the prophet Isaias has enumerated the principal gifts of the Holy Spirit as seven."
Like other forms of divination, numerology is ultimately frowned upon by the Church. As explained in the Catechism, “all forms of divination are to be rejected” as they represent “a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings.” In short, it’s okay to use numbers to try and explain aspects of God, but never to try and play God. Do that and you’re bound to get in trouble. Count on it.
Oh, don’t you groan. You knew very well I was going to end it that way.
Review: THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015)
NOTE: This review made possible in part by donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you want to see more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.
Being a fan of Quentin Tarantino (or, really, even just being a critic inclined to award one of his films an asterisk-free positive review) has of late been a frustrating exercise in repeating the phrase: "Yes, but he actually pulls it off!"
In the two decades since PULP FICTION, the onetime insurgent has firmly established himself as the Id of contemporary American cinema, and as such tends to operate within attention-getting parameters that only appear all too easy to imitate to lesser filmmakers. "No, you see, I'm actually commenting on racism!" "You're supposed to be grossed-out!" "She gives and gets as good as any of the men, so we're treating her as an equal!" These are the familiar retorts of Tarantino's legions of lesser imitators, wannabes and in some cases acolytes (looking at you, Eli Roth;) deployed on cue to deflect criticism or (if we're being frank) to whip defenders into a rhetorical frenzy. And in 99.9% of case, it's bullshit - increasingly tiresome bullshit, at that.
But, damn it, above it all (and evermore above nearly everyone else) there still stands Quentin as the living, breathing 0.01% - the guy who just keeps getting away with it. Not because he's popular, or because he's famous, or because the sons and daughters of the cinematic world he exists as the heart of (he's the tone-setter: Whatever obscura he conjures today will be the new bar of "cool" tomorrow and mainstream enough to be mixed into Marvel epics and Disney fairytales a year from now) but because he always backs it up. The wannabes' bullshit-bravado consistently turns out to be his real deal. The fakers' dodges are his stone-cold truth. Where other would-be provocateurs wield smoke and mirrors, Tarantino remains the magician who really can part the sea and call down the lightning.
And, as you'll likely have already surmised, this power is once again on full and righteous display in THE HATEFUL EIGHT; whose basic conceit - eight bad guys, zero good guys, one location, let's watch what happens - sounds an awful lot like the sort of shallow excuse to load the screen with self-indulgent perversity (Matt Zoller Seitz, in his negative review, described it as "just watching a bunch of scorpions in a bucket,") and dismiss any critique with "It's a meditation on violence!" followed with "What'd you expect - we put 'hateful' right in the title!" And in 99.9% of cases, you'd be correct to call that out for the obvious cop-out that it sounds like.
But this is that 0.01%. And, damn it, he actually pulls it off.
(SPOILERS from here on out.)
The setup really is as basic as you've been led to believe: We're in Wyoming, sometime not long after the end of the Civil War. A blizzard has waylaid bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell), his prisoner-in-transport (Jennifer Jason Leigh as a venom-spewing hillbilly murderess called Daisy Domergue), fellow bounty hunter and former ex-slave turned Union mankiller Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and a racist ex-Confederate marauder named Chris Mannix who claims to be the incoming Sheriff of Red Rock (Walton Goggins) at a remote mountain inn; where something seems "off" as soon as they arrive: The door is broken (you have to nail it shut every time someone enters or exits), the owners have apparently left on Holiday with a mysterious Mexican named Bob (Damian Bichir) left to manage things, and the space is already occupied by fellow travelers including a chipper Englishman (Tim Roth) identifying himself as Red Rock's incoming (professional) hangman, Bruce Dern as an aging Confederate General familiar to Mannix (and at least one other...) and Michael Madsen as quietly-withdrawn cowboy Joe Cage. (That makes eight, with Tarantino veteran James Parks as a decidedly non-hateful stagecoach driver none the less marooned with the titular octet of villains.)
There are other clues of something unsettling being afoot (an "unlucky" half-plucked chicken, an unexpectedly bad-tasting pot of coffee, a lone jellybean lying out of place on the floor) and John Ruth - who, this being The Tarantino Universe, is expected to have some experience being stuck in the snow with unfamiliar company - thinks he's got a pretty good idea what's up: One or more of his fellow occupants is an ally of Domergue's, waiting to spring a trap. But, either way, everyone is still stuck together for awhile; and to make matters worse several of the players already have entirely separate reasons to be at eachother's throats. For example: Major Marquis' head was once a prized-bounty for the now-former Confederacy, and Dern's General has come to Wyoming to symbolically bury a beloved son who hasn't been seen for awhile...
I got into a (fulfilling) conversation not long ago on the subject of HATEFUL and it's seeming shallowness, and - after having opined that Tarantino typically has more to say than he let's on - found myself stuck trying to articulate exactly what he may have been saying here. It's a tricky question, mainly because Tarantino doesn't, in fact, always load a message into his work; and when he does it's usually something pretty difficult to argue over ("Nazis were bad." "Slavery was bad." "Misogyny is bad.") Quentin is a creature almost purely of and by the cinema, and he's never seemed particularly interested in matters of morality or philosophy. That's not to say moral or philosophical elements aren't part of the fabric: DJANGO UNCHAINED, KILL BILL or even DEATH PROOF do end up having a lot on their mind (he's too smart and much too detail-oriented for things like that not to make it in), but he's clearly more invested in what films say about themselves, the process of their making or the way they're received by an audience. That's not shallowness - that's Aestheticism.
And in HATEFUL EIGHT, Tarantino The Aesthete (or Aesthetician?) is primarily interested in exploring the nature of narrative itself. It's a film about storytelling and stories, how they can be used as weapons or traps, and how an audience processes the story being told. That makes it less a cousin to fellow racially-charged Western DJANGO and more akin to INGLORIOUS BASTERDS; which not only featured movies as both literal and figurative weapons of war but also begins by letting audiences revel in Jewish-American avengers brutalizing Nazis but ends shortly after showing off a theater full of Nazis themselves in a Goebbels-produced propaganda film that looks very much like the Nazi flip-side of the same breed of pulpy mythmaking (right down to a shared visual-cue of swastika's carved by knives in very different contexts.)
The metaphor is more explicit in BASTERDS, since the setting and story allowed for film to feature literally in the story. EIGHT is set just before the (practical) dawn of Motion Pictures, so instead the storytelling here is all about oral-tradition: The Hateful Eight are mostly strangers or threadbare aquaintances, mainly "knowing" eachother through reputation, self-exposition or by minor bits of documentation that are supposed to identify them (John Ruth's warrant for Daisy, Oswaldo the Executioner's calling-card;) with Joe Gage spending his hours quietly scrawling his life story ("only thing I'm qualified to write") in a journal for those in need of less subtle indicators of where the game is at this time.
The point is that stories like these are only as good as our faith in the telling, and given the people involved that's not very good at all. At one point, John Ruth reacts to the revelation that a particular fact of Marquis' backstory that had endeared The Major to him is a complete fabrication (and what's worse, an obvious one that everyone but Ruth had already seen clear through) with abject betrayal - as though his heart had been ripped out, Which is all the more odd, considering that John Ruth is a vicious sadist who goes out of his way to catch his quarry alive just to watch their executions and takes repulsive pleasure in beating Domergue to a bloody pulp every time she speaks out of turn (but then, Domergue is a murderous racist, and so on down it goes.)
The film goes on like that, with each new revelation (there's a time-reversal flashback that flips our understanding of prior events on its head midway through, a Tarantino signature) designed to manipulate and throw-off the audience's perception of reality and present-narrative. But more so than even that, the writer/director is clearly taking obvious enjoyment in playing with audience expectations about genre, narrative and the story itself: The title is actually an understatement, as we soon come to realize that these aren't just hateful people but genuinely rotten, subhuman monsters: Ruth is a proud sadist, The General earned "The Butcher" as a wartime nickname, Mannix is of a family of vigilantes specializing in ravaging free Black towns, Daisy is something like a screaming witch out of Shakespeare and just wait til you find out what Bob, Oswaldo and Joe Gage have been up to.
For a long while, it feels like The Major will at least be some sort of antihero, given his DJANGO-reminiscent backstory and Jackson's totemic place in the Tarantino canon; and Quentin teases that possibility out as long as possible before cruelly ripping it away in a monologue sequence wherein The General finally learns (in detail) the fate of his missing son that represents a new career highlight for both writer/director and performer and a grim revelation that a presumed plurality of the audience has been caught rooting for a guy who's among the worst of the whole crew. That Daisy Domergue gets repeatedly slugged across the jaw is a recurring bit of ugly scene-punctuation throughout the film, but in aesthetic terms nobody in HATEFUL EIGHT gets smacked around as hard as the audience...
...even if they don't realize it. Tarantino is a student of base-satisfying grindhouse schlock above all else, and he knows better than anyone how to stage a moment to trick an audience into accepting acts of grueling brutality as righteous catharsis. The Major's monologue, climaxing with the relation of an act of violence that's warranted a sentence of death by samurai sword in at least two other Tarantino yarns, has been greeted by cheers and laughter in screenings nationwide, which one can easily imagine soiling a more sober observer on the film itself - particularly if one is (for some reason) inclined to take Joe Popcorn's applause as evidence that he (or she) actually understands what they're actually applauding.
HATEFUL EIGHT may not be the new all-time champion of using the cheers of clueless viewers as a self-indicting punchline (of the audience, not the film); that's still Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS. But unless one is predisposed to imagine Tarantino as an unironic gawker at the Roman Colosseum, it's hard to imagine how anyone can see these sequences and not picture Quentin himself perched in the high-shadows, watching the watchers and rubbing his hands with puckish satisfaction: "You dumb assholes. Think about what I just got you to applaud for." There's an argument to be made where there's a level of cruelty to that, as well - the skilled, clever filmmaker lording his mastery of the form over the pathetic masses - but that doesn't mean he's not good at it or that it doesn't work.
And to be certain, Taratino's technical chops are sharper than ever. The stagebound screenplay rockets by feeling barely half as long as it is (this review concerns the 3 hour "roadshow" version, which features an overture and intermission) and what first feels like the techno-fetishist joke of shooting a single-room piece in expensive 70mm UltraPanavision film reveals itself as a canny way to make every inch of the frame sparkle with life and important detail - rarely has the gag of putting vital actions in the background of a seemingly-unrelated moment worked to greater effect; while the legendary Ennio Morricone's clever, playfully self-referencing score loads every scene with mythic emotional undercurrents that serve to ease the transition when the film abruptly cuts from being a talky, meditative chamber-piece to an absurdly over-the-top locked-room bloodbath at about the midpoint. Midpoint, incidentally, being the point where Leigh's Domergue, who's been simmering like a rattlesnake for the most part, gets to cut loose with a savagely energy that could well make hers the latest career salvaged by Tarantino's unparalleled eye for pairing talent with role; though it's Goggins who walks away as cast MVP, easily.
Speaking of cliche's that are tiresome regarding other films and filmmakers but ever-appropriate for Tarantino, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is an endurance test on multiple levels. It'll be too long for some, too talky for others, too violent for many and too unmoored from tepid moral/philosophical concerns for plenty; and even some who'll no doubt come to love it will have done so by failing the test to comprehend it: If you think there were any "good guys" by the end, that anyone was "redemeed" or that we're supposed to be "happy" about what's transpired, you missed the point - and if you're "happy" about what's transpired, well, thanks at least for becoming part of the entertainment for those who were paying attention.
This is mean, nasty, utterly uncompromised visionary filmmaking straight from the lizard brain of the filmmaker who is himself the lizard brain of his chosen medium; and the only thing more disturbing (yet repugnantly thrilling) about what he's accomplished is just how fabulously he accomplished it. Supposedly, Tarantino plans to fold up his director's chair after two more features - we should all be hoping against all hope that walking away turns out to be the one act as director he isn't capable of.
This review made possible in part by donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you want to see more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.
Being a fan of Quentin Tarantino (or, really, even just being a critic inclined to award one of his films an asterisk-free positive review) has of late been a frustrating exercise in repeating the phrase: "Yes, but he actually pulls it off!"
In the two decades since PULP FICTION, the onetime insurgent has firmly established himself as the Id of contemporary American cinema, and as such tends to operate within attention-getting parameters that only appear all too easy to imitate to lesser filmmakers. "No, you see, I'm actually commenting on racism!" "You're supposed to be grossed-out!" "She gives and gets as good as any of the men, so we're treating her as an equal!" These are the familiar retorts of Tarantino's legions of lesser imitators, wannabes and in some cases acolytes (looking at you, Eli Roth;) deployed on cue to deflect criticism or (if we're being frank) to whip defenders into a rhetorical frenzy. And in 99.9% of case, it's bullshit - increasingly tiresome bullshit, at that.
But, damn it, above it all (and evermore above nearly everyone else) there still stands Quentin as the living, breathing 0.01% - the guy who just keeps getting away with it. Not because he's popular, or because he's famous, or because the sons and daughters of the cinematic world he exists as the heart of (he's the tone-setter: Whatever obscura he conjures today will be the new bar of "cool" tomorrow and mainstream enough to be mixed into Marvel epics and Disney fairytales a year from now) but because he always backs it up. The wannabes' bullshit-bravado consistently turns out to be his real deal. The fakers' dodges are his stone-cold truth. Where other would-be provocateurs wield smoke and mirrors, Tarantino remains the magician who really can part the sea and call down the lightning.
And, as you'll likely have already surmised, this power is once again on full and righteous display in THE HATEFUL EIGHT; whose basic conceit - eight bad guys, zero good guys, one location, let's watch what happens - sounds an awful lot like the sort of shallow excuse to load the screen with self-indulgent perversity (Matt Zoller Seitz, in his negative review, described it as "just watching a bunch of scorpions in a bucket,") and dismiss any critique with "It's a meditation on violence!" followed with "What'd you expect - we put 'hateful' right in the title!" And in 99.9% of cases, you'd be correct to call that out for the obvious cop-out that it sounds like.
But this is that 0.01%. And, damn it, he actually pulls it off.
(SPOILERS from here on out.)
The setup really is as basic as you've been led to believe: We're in Wyoming, sometime not long after the end of the Civil War. A blizzard has waylaid bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell), his prisoner-in-transport (Jennifer Jason Leigh as a venom-spewing hillbilly murderess called Daisy Domergue), fellow bounty hunter and former ex-slave turned Union mankiller Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and a racist ex-Confederate marauder named Chris Mannix who claims to be the incoming Sheriff of Red Rock (Walton Goggins) at a remote mountain inn; where something seems "off" as soon as they arrive: The door is broken (you have to nail it shut every time someone enters or exits), the owners have apparently left on Holiday with a mysterious Mexican named Bob (Damian Bichir) left to manage things, and the space is already occupied by fellow travelers including a chipper Englishman (Tim Roth) identifying himself as Red Rock's incoming (professional) hangman, Bruce Dern as an aging Confederate General familiar to Mannix (and at least one other...) and Michael Madsen as quietly-withdrawn cowboy Joe Cage. (That makes eight, with Tarantino veteran James Parks as a decidedly non-hateful stagecoach driver none the less marooned with the titular octet of villains.)
There are other clues of something unsettling being afoot (an "unlucky" half-plucked chicken, an unexpectedly bad-tasting pot of coffee, a lone jellybean lying out of place on the floor) and John Ruth - who, this being The Tarantino Universe, is expected to have some experience being stuck in the snow with unfamiliar company - thinks he's got a pretty good idea what's up: One or more of his fellow occupants is an ally of Domergue's, waiting to spring a trap. But, either way, everyone is still stuck together for awhile; and to make matters worse several of the players already have entirely separate reasons to be at eachother's throats. For example: Major Marquis' head was once a prized-bounty for the now-former Confederacy, and Dern's General has come to Wyoming to symbolically bury a beloved son who hasn't been seen for awhile...
I got into a (fulfilling) conversation not long ago on the subject of HATEFUL and it's seeming shallowness, and - after having opined that Tarantino typically has more to say than he let's on - found myself stuck trying to articulate exactly what he may have been saying here. It's a tricky question, mainly because Tarantino doesn't, in fact, always load a message into his work; and when he does it's usually something pretty difficult to argue over ("Nazis were bad." "Slavery was bad." "Misogyny is bad.") Quentin is a creature almost purely of and by the cinema, and he's never seemed particularly interested in matters of morality or philosophy. That's not to say moral or philosophical elements aren't part of the fabric: DJANGO UNCHAINED, KILL BILL or even DEATH PROOF do end up having a lot on their mind (he's too smart and much too detail-oriented for things like that not to make it in), but he's clearly more invested in what films say about themselves, the process of their making or the way they're received by an audience. That's not shallowness - that's Aestheticism.
And in HATEFUL EIGHT, Tarantino The Aesthete (or Aesthetician?) is primarily interested in exploring the nature of narrative itself. It's a film about storytelling and stories, how they can be used as weapons or traps, and how an audience processes the story being told. That makes it less a cousin to fellow racially-charged Western DJANGO and more akin to INGLORIOUS BASTERDS; which not only featured movies as both literal and figurative weapons of war but also begins by letting audiences revel in Jewish-American avengers brutalizing Nazis but ends shortly after showing off a theater full of Nazis themselves in a Goebbels-produced propaganda film that looks very much like the Nazi flip-side of the same breed of pulpy mythmaking (right down to a shared visual-cue of swastika's carved by knives in very different contexts.)
The metaphor is more explicit in BASTERDS, since the setting and story allowed for film to feature literally in the story. EIGHT is set just before the (practical) dawn of Motion Pictures, so instead the storytelling here is all about oral-tradition: The Hateful Eight are mostly strangers or threadbare aquaintances, mainly "knowing" eachother through reputation, self-exposition or by minor bits of documentation that are supposed to identify them (John Ruth's warrant for Daisy, Oswaldo the Executioner's calling-card;) with Joe Gage spending his hours quietly scrawling his life story ("only thing I'm qualified to write") in a journal for those in need of less subtle indicators of where the game is at this time.
The point is that stories like these are only as good as our faith in the telling, and given the people involved that's not very good at all. At one point, John Ruth reacts to the revelation that a particular fact of Marquis' backstory that had endeared The Major to him is a complete fabrication (and what's worse, an obvious one that everyone but Ruth had already seen clear through) with abject betrayal - as though his heart had been ripped out, Which is all the more odd, considering that John Ruth is a vicious sadist who goes out of his way to catch his quarry alive just to watch their executions and takes repulsive pleasure in beating Domergue to a bloody pulp every time she speaks out of turn (but then, Domergue is a murderous racist, and so on down it goes.)
The film goes on like that, with each new revelation (there's a time-reversal flashback that flips our understanding of prior events on its head midway through, a Tarantino signature) designed to manipulate and throw-off the audience's perception of reality and present-narrative. But more so than even that, the writer/director is clearly taking obvious enjoyment in playing with audience expectations about genre, narrative and the story itself: The title is actually an understatement, as we soon come to realize that these aren't just hateful people but genuinely rotten, subhuman monsters: Ruth is a proud sadist, The General earned "The Butcher" as a wartime nickname, Mannix is of a family of vigilantes specializing in ravaging free Black towns, Daisy is something like a screaming witch out of Shakespeare and just wait til you find out what Bob, Oswaldo and Joe Gage have been up to.
For a long while, it feels like The Major will at least be some sort of antihero, given his DJANGO-reminiscent backstory and Jackson's totemic place in the Tarantino canon; and Quentin teases that possibility out as long as possible before cruelly ripping it away in a monologue sequence wherein The General finally learns (in detail) the fate of his missing son that represents a new career highlight for both writer/director and performer and a grim revelation that a presumed plurality of the audience has been caught rooting for a guy who's among the worst of the whole crew. That Daisy Domergue gets repeatedly slugged across the jaw is a recurring bit of ugly scene-punctuation throughout the film, but in aesthetic terms nobody in HATEFUL EIGHT gets smacked around as hard as the audience...
...even if they don't realize it. Tarantino is a student of base-satisfying grindhouse schlock above all else, and he knows better than anyone how to stage a moment to trick an audience into accepting acts of grueling brutality as righteous catharsis. The Major's monologue, climaxing with the relation of an act of violence that's warranted a sentence of death by samurai sword in at least two other Tarantino yarns, has been greeted by cheers and laughter in screenings nationwide, which one can easily imagine soiling a more sober observer on the film itself - particularly if one is (for some reason) inclined to take Joe Popcorn's applause as evidence that he (or she) actually understands what they're actually applauding.
HATEFUL EIGHT may not be the new all-time champion of using the cheers of clueless viewers as a self-indicting punchline (of the audience, not the film); that's still Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS. But unless one is predisposed to imagine Tarantino as an unironic gawker at the Roman Colosseum, it's hard to imagine how anyone can see these sequences and not picture Quentin himself perched in the high-shadows, watching the watchers and rubbing his hands with puckish satisfaction: "You dumb assholes. Think about what I just got you to applaud for." There's an argument to be made where there's a level of cruelty to that, as well - the skilled, clever filmmaker lording his mastery of the form over the pathetic masses - but that doesn't mean he's not good at it or that it doesn't work.
And to be certain, Taratino's technical chops are sharper than ever. The stagebound screenplay rockets by feeling barely half as long as it is (this review concerns the 3 hour "roadshow" version, which features an overture and intermission) and what first feels like the techno-fetishist joke of shooting a single-room piece in expensive 70mm UltraPanavision film reveals itself as a canny way to make every inch of the frame sparkle with life and important detail - rarely has the gag of putting vital actions in the background of a seemingly-unrelated moment worked to greater effect; while the legendary Ennio Morricone's clever, playfully self-referencing score loads every scene with mythic emotional undercurrents that serve to ease the transition when the film abruptly cuts from being a talky, meditative chamber-piece to an absurdly over-the-top locked-room bloodbath at about the midpoint. Midpoint, incidentally, being the point where Leigh's Domergue, who's been simmering like a rattlesnake for the most part, gets to cut loose with a savagely energy that could well make hers the latest career salvaged by Tarantino's unparalleled eye for pairing talent with role; though it's Goggins who walks away as cast MVP, easily.
Speaking of cliche's that are tiresome regarding other films and filmmakers but ever-appropriate for Tarantino, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is an endurance test on multiple levels. It'll be too long for some, too talky for others, too violent for many and too unmoored from tepid moral/philosophical concerns for plenty; and even some who'll no doubt come to love it will have done so by failing the test to comprehend it: If you think there were any "good guys" by the end, that anyone was "redemeed" or that we're supposed to be "happy" about what's transpired, you missed the point - and if you're "happy" about what's transpired, well, thanks at least for becoming part of the entertainment for those who were paying attention.
This is mean, nasty, utterly uncompromised visionary filmmaking straight from the lizard brain of the filmmaker who is himself the lizard brain of his chosen medium; and the only thing more disturbing (yet repugnantly thrilling) about what he's accomplished is just how fabulously he accomplished it. Supposedly, Tarantino plans to fold up his director's chair after two more features - we should all be hoping against all hope that walking away turns out to be the one act as director he isn't capable of.
This review made possible in part by donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you want to see more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.
Urban Jungle
So Disney comes in just under the wire to finally tell us what ZOOTOPIA is actually all about, after about a year of low-key (for Disney) marketing mainly focused on anthropomorphic animal visual puns. The result:
So. The basic premise for the main character is already pretty interesting from a thematic standpoint. The animals-as-people trope has pretty much always worked best when it's making points about human behavior/society/etc by associating personality types and social-structures with (broadly-held assumptions about) animal behavior - i.e. putting any kind of identifiable human uniform/costume on an animal automatically makes a statement - and the angle here is pretty nakedly all about professional gender/class/ethnic discrimination; in as much as our lead heroine is Zootopia's "first rabbit police officer" (Ginnifer Goodwin as "Judy Hopps") apparently working to crack her first big case while facing doubts, dismissals and the stigma of "tokenism" about her abilities due to size/species/etc.
Yeah, okay. That's a solid starting-point, certainly the first place I'd imagine one would have to go with an "Aesop in 2015" pretext. But it's the hinted-at main storyline (re: Judy's big case) that looks to have a lot more to unpack, theme wise: The idea looks to be that Zootopia (the city) is a kind of futuristic metropolis that's able to exist via animals of all species having long ago evolved beyond (by agreement? By happenstance?) their predator/prey/circle-of-life "natural" relationship, and that this balance is threatened by a phenomenon of seemingly-random animal citizens (only predators?) inexplicably "going savage" aka reverting back to their primal red-in-tooth-and-claw instincts. Being a "one lone cop with a hunch" story, this presumably involves some sort of far-reaching conspiracy - a G-rated cartoon-animal version of the "everybody freak the hell out" button from KINGSMAN, maybe?
It feels like there's a lot to unpack there, yes? At the most basic, you've got a lady cop versus danger posed by (chosen? encourage? forced?) reversion to violent "natural" tendencies; which has some fairly ugly parallels in the Men's Rights/PUA scene (i.e. "I should be dominant and brutish because that's how nature/evolution intended it!" "Boys are supposed to be out-of-control little monsters! It's normal!") that couldn't have been lost on whoever was working out this premise, given that Disney projects spend ages in story-development.
But more broadly, the idea that a "bright future" civilization in the upscale L.A./San Fran mold (sunny, hyper-diverse, public-transit, prevalent mall/juicebar architectural-aesthetic) held together by the citizenry agreeing to curb behaviors that would infringe on the greater whole - implicitly, even in they come "naturally" or some have more "curbing" to do than others - being a societal ideal is (intentionally or not) a pretty close shot across the bow to trendy lowercase-l "libertarianism." It's also, thematically at least, a close cousin to bugbears of the above-mentioned takes on "human nature," in as much as the idea of boys/men lashing-out because society is evolving in a "feminized" direction where they're (supposedly) unwelcome in their "normal" state being a cornerstone of MRA ideology.
Obviously, you can't expect any of that to be (explicitly) stated in the movie-proper. It's a funny-animal movie for kids, and the premise almost certainly blossomed less out of deliberate metaphor building than something more "organic" like "Okay, city of animals - how does that actually WORK?" But on the other hand, George Miller didn't deliberately set out to make the fourth MAD MAX explicitly about patriarchy, either - sometimes the theme finds the project. Given that picking through Disney features for underlying subtext is something like a national sport at this point, I can't imagine I'll be the only one making note of it if the actual movie plays out on the same lines the trailer suggests. And since we now live in a world where casting a woman and a black man as the new leads of STAR WARS can now trigger (hilariously impotent) calls for boycott, the results should be pretty interesting.
ZOOTOPIA opens March 4th, 2015.
NOTE: This post made possible in part via support of The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you read and would like to read more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.
So. The basic premise for the main character is already pretty interesting from a thematic standpoint. The animals-as-people trope has pretty much always worked best when it's making points about human behavior/society/etc by associating personality types and social-structures with (broadly-held assumptions about) animal behavior - i.e. putting any kind of identifiable human uniform/costume on an animal automatically makes a statement - and the angle here is pretty nakedly all about professional gender/class/ethnic discrimination; in as much as our lead heroine is Zootopia's "first rabbit police officer" (Ginnifer Goodwin as "Judy Hopps") apparently working to crack her first big case while facing doubts, dismissals and the stigma of "tokenism" about her abilities due to size/species/etc.
Yeah, okay. That's a solid starting-point, certainly the first place I'd imagine one would have to go with an "Aesop in 2015" pretext. But it's the hinted-at main storyline (re: Judy's big case) that looks to have a lot more to unpack, theme wise: The idea looks to be that Zootopia (the city) is a kind of futuristic metropolis that's able to exist via animals of all species having long ago evolved beyond (by agreement? By happenstance?) their predator/prey/circle-of-life "natural" relationship, and that this balance is threatened by a phenomenon of seemingly-random animal citizens (only predators?) inexplicably "going savage" aka reverting back to their primal red-in-tooth-and-claw instincts. Being a "one lone cop with a hunch" story, this presumably involves some sort of far-reaching conspiracy - a G-rated cartoon-animal version of the "everybody freak the hell out" button from KINGSMAN, maybe?
It feels like there's a lot to unpack there, yes? At the most basic, you've got a lady cop versus danger posed by (chosen? encourage? forced?) reversion to violent "natural" tendencies; which has some fairly ugly parallels in the Men's Rights/PUA scene (i.e. "I should be dominant and brutish because that's how nature/evolution intended it!" "Boys are supposed to be out-of-control little monsters! It's normal!") that couldn't have been lost on whoever was working out this premise, given that Disney projects spend ages in story-development.
But more broadly, the idea that a "bright future" civilization in the upscale L.A./San Fran mold (sunny, hyper-diverse, public-transit, prevalent mall/juicebar architectural-aesthetic) held together by the citizenry agreeing to curb behaviors that would infringe on the greater whole - implicitly, even in they come "naturally" or some have more "curbing" to do than others - being a societal ideal is (intentionally or not) a pretty close shot across the bow to trendy lowercase-l "libertarianism." It's also, thematically at least, a close cousin to bugbears of the above-mentioned takes on "human nature," in as much as the idea of boys/men lashing-out because society is evolving in a "feminized" direction where they're (supposedly) unwelcome in their "normal" state being a cornerstone of MRA ideology.
Obviously, you can't expect any of that to be (explicitly) stated in the movie-proper. It's a funny-animal movie for kids, and the premise almost certainly blossomed less out of deliberate metaphor building than something more "organic" like "Okay, city of animals - how does that actually WORK?" But on the other hand, George Miller didn't deliberately set out to make the fourth MAD MAX explicitly about patriarchy, either - sometimes the theme finds the project. Given that picking through Disney features for underlying subtext is something like a national sport at this point, I can't imagine I'll be the only one making note of it if the actual movie plays out on the same lines the trailer suggests. And since we now live in a world where casting a woman and a black man as the new leads of STAR WARS can now trigger (hilariously impotent) calls for boycott, the results should be pretty interesting.
ZOOTOPIA opens March 4th, 2015.
NOTE: This post made possible in part via support of The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you read and would like to read more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.
The Gold Rush (1925)
Genre
Director
Country
USA
Cast
Charles Chaplin, Georgia Hale, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Malcolm Waite, Henry Bergman
Storyline
A lone prospector (Charlie Chaplin) ventures into Alaska looking for gold and finds it... and more.
Opinion
If anyone doubts that Charlie Chaplin was one of the funniest comedians ever, clearly does not know a thing about comedy.
Heartbreaking and genuinely hilarious, The Gold Rush is a witty and sentimental milestone in cinema that goes beyond time and culture.
In this masterpiece, Chaplin mixes the drama and loneliness of the gold rush with brilliant humour that make good for the distressing atmosphere, especially in the first part, and tells the desire to make a fortune - the dream of many at the time, and the dream of many today - beautifully.
Then there is also an ingredient that today is in almost every film, the romance. Unlikely to work, the love story eventually gets the happy ending everyone's wishing for, but not before a ton of tragicomic adventures.
Nobody else other than Chaplin himself would have been able to mix such a social commentary with slapstick and sentimentality, and in such a good way.
Some of the scenes are hilarious -- Eating the shoe, the Roll Dance, the finale with cabin out on the edge of a cliff -- and some really touches your heart.
Brought to the screen in 1925, the film was then re-released in 1942, made a little shorter and faster, and also music and spoken narration written and performed by Chaplin himself have been included. I have seen both versions, and if you want to understand the pure intention of the film, you better go for the silent version, also because the narration sometimes interferes. The new version is easier and more suitable for modern audiences, but you should give the original a try.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)