Django Unchained

2012 spaghetti blaxploitation flick

Rating: 17/20 (Jen: 19/20)

Plot: A dentist-turned-bounty-hunter buys the titular slave in order to hunt down some white guys. Django does such a good job, that the bounty hunter decides to work with him throughout the winter and then agrees to help him locate his wife Broomhilda. That leads to lots and lots of violence.

Tarantino blends genres effortlessly and gloriously. Here, you get historical drama mixed with Italian Western with a pinch or three of blaxploitation, and I'm really not sure there's ever been another director who could put all that together so well. Being part-spaghetti, you might expect meandering with some bits drawn out enough to try most people's patience. Of course, Tarantino does that anyway. This does meander and go a few places that I might--upon further viewings--wish it didn't. From my theater experience--rare enough that I often have to curb my enthusiasm--I can tell you that I enjoyed every single minute of this bloated near-masterpiece. The movie looks beautiful, individual shots that you could probably show somebody and trick them into thinking they came from a Leone movie. A Wild West town drowning in mud, a few plantations, lots of good interior shots with what might be accurate period details. I'm not sure where any of this was filmed, but it was all great to look at. And with Tarantino, you expect certain excesses--blood, cursing, the n-word, and dialogue. This doesn't disappoint there if you're type of person who would be disappointed by a lack of those. The dialogue's rich and often funny, and the violence is quite possibly even more ridiculous than the House of Blue Leaves sequence in Kill Bill. It was definitely more shocking for me to see all that red, and I really wasn't aware that guns in 1858 were capable of making people explode. It felt weird to let out a little chuckle during one out-of-control shootout scene when an already-shot-to-death villain gets shot in the crotch again. Tarantino's boldness with inserting humor in all this violence and in a topic that there's really nothing at all funny about definitely helps this stand out, gives it that unique feel that makes Tarantino's movies so rewarding and special. It's all those minor touches. That wobbling tooth-on-a-spring makes me laugh just thinking about it. (Note: It's an LOL, not a real laugh.) And there's a scene featuring the Klan (or some sort of Klan prototype--I don't know their history) that might surpass the one in O Brother, Where Art Thou? as my favorite KKK movie scene ever. That's difficult to pull off even if Jonah Hill isn't involved. There are all kinds of funny asides that make me want to see this again. The characters' interactions are often troubling, of course but they sometimes manage to be both humorous and troubling at the same time. The actors portraying these characters at times make them seem like caricatures, but they do a terrific job making them semi-realistic, completely entertaining, and most importantly just fucking cool. Jamie Foxx gives a perfectly quiet performance as the hero, but he's not helped by how completely awesome Christoph Waltz is as Dr. Schultz. This guy's one of my new favorite movie heroes ever, and although a lot of it is how the character is written, a lot of it has to do with Waltz. I think it's because he kind of sounds like Werner Herzog. DiCaprio's good enough as the villain although he might be a bit too pretty. Prettiest villain in any spaghetti Western probably. There is a really intense scene that Leo pulls off really well, however. Tarantino-regular Samuel L. is also great in a much-different role. He's very funny here. And there are loads of filthy ruffians and rough-faced thugs that look like they came straight off the set of a late-60's Italian western, all craggy and with skin that looks well lived in. Also typical of a Tarantino movie--you're going to notice the music. You do here, too, and I loved hearing a lot of borrowed Morricone. I'm not sure if I loved hearing the modern hip hop or the Johnny Cash. It just didn't feel in place here. Still, it's a minor complaint. It's early January, and I doubt that I'm going to see a new movie that is this consistently entertaining.

For all you spaghetti-philes, Franco Nero does make a cute little appearance. You probably would have guessed that though.

Titanic

1997 blockbuster

Rating: 12/20 (Abbey: 16/20; Becky: only watched enough to ruin the experience for me)

Plot: As you can easily tell by the above poster, this is about the historic boat that sank in 1912 after ramming into a giant poor guy and a giant slut who were impersonating icebergs in the Northern Atlantic.

I'd already seen this monstrosity for the 100 year anniversary of Titanic, but Abbey and I had some time to kill and decided to pop this in. Of course, I only wanted to watch it for Kate Winslet nudity and was hoping that my daughter would have fallen asleep way before that, likely since large chunks of this compete for Most Boring Chunks of Movie of All Time. But no, Abbey didn't fall asleep. Not only that, my mother-in-law came into the room to watch the movie with us and asked specifically about that scene. Talk about killing the moment. I mean, Gloria Stuart and her wrinkles butting in intermittently is nearly enough to make a guy flaccid for life anyway. And then you add a mother-in-law? There's a cure for virility if you're ever looking for one. So I did what probably any other guy would do in a situation as awful as this one--skipped over the best scenes of the movie and be forced to watch them on Youtube more than a week later. Eight times.

And that, dear readers, is as terrible as what any of the actual victims of the Titanic tragedy had to deal with.

In fact, one could watch Titanic as a metaphor for my personal tragedy.

1) Leo is dissatisfied with his life, wants a change, and finds his way onto Titanic. In my situation, I had just watched a movie called Monster from a Prehistoric Planet that, despite frequent references to "Playmate Island," lacked nudity. So I perused my mother-in-law's dvd collection, saw Titanic, remembered that it's got Kate Winslet's boobs in it, and popped it in.

2) Leo sees Rose for the first time. I also saw Kate Winslet for the first time, and like Leo, I liked what I saw. She's very nearly perfection in this movie. Leo and I both think, "I should just skip ahead to the scene where she's naked."

3) Leo and Rose develop a friendship, a development that lasts well over four hours. I develop sleepiness but stay awake in anticipation of the best scene in Titanic.

4) Bang! The boat hits an iceberg. That iceberg symbolizes my mother-in-law in my tragedy. The boat represents my journey to see Kate Winslet naked, of course.

5) People start drowning, falling to their deaths, and turning blue in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. In my tragedy, that represents me hitting the forward arrow button on the remote and skipping over the only scene that matters in this movie with the exception of the couple shots where computer-animated people are falling from the back of the ship when it's all ass-up and hitting parts of the ship and flipping around.

6) Rose lets go of blue Leo who dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. That's just like my dreams of seeing Kate Winslet naked!

Obviously, James Cameron didn't make this movie as a metaphor for my personal tragedy. No, he made it to make a buttload of money. That this movie starts with the money-grubbing explorer looking for a gigantic blue diamond, a grave robber tearing apart the ghostly remains of this beautiful and very real ship that once had beautiful and very real people on it in order to become a rich king of the world. And that's offensive.

Look, if I made a 9/11 movie in which two fantastic-looking young people, knowing that their plane has been taken over by terrorists, decide to have sex in the airplane bathroom, a lot of people would be offended by it regardless of whether or not one of them was Leonardo Dicaprio. My special effects might be spectacular, but it wouldn't matter. My movie would be offensive. This isn't different. Cameron's taken a historical tragedy and added a lot of flair, an unbelievable love story, and a pair of nipples. The focus is just all wrong here. The lessons of the Titanic are in this bulbous motion picture, but the viewer is distracted by what's going on with the two main characters.

Cameron does a lot really good here. The underwater footage of the sunken ship, whether it's real or not, is really cool. It's haunting footage, and any emotion I felt during this movie was during these early scenes and not when the boat was sinking and its passengers dying since the movie had essentially turned into an action movie with only two characters who matter by that point. There are other individual scenes--the death of some poor people, the captain's demise, the stuff with the musicians--that worked really well, and in a movie that was about Titanic instead of Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet, they would have contributed to an emotional piece of historical fiction. The ship looks great even though you can tell in all the grand sweeping shots that it was created with a computer. I can't imagine another movie giving a better experience of what it was like on this ship. Well, other than that cartoon with the rapping dogs.

Click on that link there if you want to see the dumbest thing ever made.

Inception

2010 cerebral action movie

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: Loosely based on Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, this involves Leonardo Dicaprio busting into people's dreams to steal their ideas. It's a confusing job, but somebody's got to do it. The work's cost him. His wife's dead, and for various reasons, he can't return to the United States and be with his children. An Asian guy offers him a job, but instead of the extraction he's used to performing, he's given the task of planting an idea in a guy's brain. That's called inception. He gathers together a team and meticulously plans this reverse heist. It won't be easy, and there will be a lot of explosions.

While watching this movie, I fell asleep and had my own tri-level dream. I don't remember my dream details often, but I know this one had something to do with trying to warn a dog that my friend Don's hot older sister who liked The Doors had put dynamite under his bowl. Then Lionel Richie broke into my dream and sang that "I had a dream; I had an awesome dream" song, but I couldn't pay attention to lyrics because his pants were too bright. Suddenly, I'm shooting at gypsies. Blam blam blam blam! Explosion! It was a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within Christopher Nolan's jism. And Shooby Leboof (he's in all of my dreams) taps me on the shoulder and says that we've only got thirteen third level dream days remaining before we'll have to clean up dog guts from the first level dream. I had enough of that sort of thing on my honeymoon, so Shooby and I walk arm in arm so that we can push my cousin off a ladder so that he can pop balloons in close proximity to our faces. When I woke up, Roger Ebert was standing by my bed (this is not unusual lately) calling me a genius. And he knew the lyrics to that Lionel Richie song, but he couldn't sing them.

The general idea behind this movie is pretty cool, and the special effects are dazzling. But all that razzle-dazzle is really just hiding the fact that this is a big, dumb action movie covered in layers and layers of intellectual mumbo-jumbo. It's a simple story packed in multicolored packing peanuts, surrounded by shimmering baubles, and scrambled by the world's most expensive spatula. It's not nearly as masturbatory as the worst parts of the Matrix movies, but it has more than a little bit in common with them. After the intriguing premise and the rules of the movie unfold with Dicarprio explaining things to that girl from Juno, you get a solid hour and fifteen minutes or so of car chases, shoot 'em ups, and those aforementioned 'splosions. I didn't just have a headache because I already developed a headache from trying to think too much. It was a double headache, a headache that folded over on top of itself like the city in that dream. Boredom set in. I give credit to Nolan for coming up with a very original idea and for allowing the story to unfold in an interesting way. The performances are fine, maybe better than you'd expect from a movie with more special effects than non-special ones. It's really a pretty good movie, but it could have been a whole lot shorter. I had heard that the ending is ambiguous, but it seemed self explanatory to me. I think the fact that I don't really care to think about it all that much shows my true feelings about Inception.

The Man in the Iron Mask

1998 Three Musketeers movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: King Leonardo the XIV isn't a very good king. In fact, he's an asshole, and nobody in France likes him except for one of the four musketeers who is sleeping with the queen mother. When King Leonardo makes a military decision based only on his sexual desires (a move he must have learned from reading about King David and Bathsheba), Musketeer Malcovich's son is killed in battle. The three musketeers who aren't sleeping with the queen mother decide to bust the man in the iron mask, Leonardo's brother Leonardo, out of prison and pull an ol' switcheroo.

If you were magically transported via a magical remote control and a time machine into this movie and asked anybody in France, "Hey, how's King Leonardo XIV working out for ya?" you would fall to sleep before the answer was finished because the Frenchman or Frenchwoman answering your question would deliver a verbose answer so monotonously that you'd think, "Oh, man. Is this answer ever going to get to an endmark?" and then decide to close your eyes for a little bit, just a little bit like you do sometimes when you're driving, but then fall fast asleep. The Man in the Iron Mask needed some of that bumpy pavement they put on the shoulders of highways so that the bumbabra-bumbabra-bumbabra noise wakes you up before you hit a tree, a ditch, or a hobo. I don't know whether to blame the dialogue, the bland music, or the acting, but this was just so stuffy. I normally like John Malcovich, but his uninspired performance here typifies what's wrong with this. He always performs his dialogue in a very deliberate Malcovichian way that ends up making the movie a lot longer, but here, it just seems like his character is struggling to get the words out, almost like he can't believe he used to be a musketeer but now has to say such boring things. He and the other musketeers (Irons, Depardieu, Byrne) each have moments where they shine, but more often than not, they overtheatricize and get all actor-y and make me think I'm watching performances instead of characters. And the biggest problem of all? I might be able to tolerate a single Leonardo Dicaprio in a movie, but this one has two. He plays two characters who not only look identical but act identical even though the story would seem to require that they don't have that much in common. I don't even know if Leonardo Dicaprio is a good actor or not, but I don't like him here one bit. I don't think the part(s) suit him, and I thought his face was tedious. This movie did get better as it went along, but it unfortunately went along a little too much. Or maybe a lot too much.