Django Unchained

Django Unchained – 165min – R

The 70’s pulp or exploitation films Quentin Tarantino has based his career on were not really focused on making well made movies as much as just banging out movies to get them out there. What was once just an excuse to make a quick and dirty movie he has worked to make a legitimate art form. This is one of his better films. I am not a fan of this style or his gratuitous nature in his films, but he is an excellent wordsmith when it comes to dialog. This movie is still dripping in blood but he is refining his filmmaking skills to include a good story. I enjoyed the ride even if I was uncomfortable with the subject matter. This one gets a green light from me.

Django (Jamie Fox) starts the movie as a slave in a chain gang being marched across the land from a slave market. He is abruptly “bought” by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter who needs Django to identify three fugitives. After Django identifies the three people he is set free, but the two have developed a friendship. Django is going to go and try and free his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from slavery. The two go to the plantation that owns his wife and try and trick the plantation owner into selling her. Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) owns Candie Land *RIMSHOT* a plantation he uses to train slaves to fight to the death. He is brutal and ignorant -- a deplorable person. His house slave is Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), he plays the weak and subservient slave but he is the one who is really in charge. After copious buckets of blood and swearing there is a resolution that ends as a revenge picture.

Christoph Waltz is wonderful in this movie. He has a wonderful presence on the screen and it is very nice to see him as a good guy for a change, I think it fits him better. Jamie Fox is great as two types of characters the naive slave and the then the refined world wise bounty hunter. Leonardo DiCaprio does a great job of wearing the vile skin of the completely appalling character. I wonder if he had to use mental floss to get Calvin out of his head. Samuel L. Jackson can do no wrong, but the thing about him is even of he is in a bad movie he is going to play it to the hilt and own it. It’s great to watch him get his.

Warring Spoilers!!!! Only Grindhouse fans beyond this point!!!!!

I am going to use this section for talking through something that’s bugging me, excuse me for not talking about anything more than this, but as it is my blog I can use it. Forgive me for the self indulgence.

I am completely uncomfortable with the word nigger and they use it in almost every scene. At the beginning of the movie, I flinched at every instance but I got more used to it as the movie went on. I did not like it but it was a very common word in the time the movie was set. I can see using it in this context but as a person in the modern time it’s hard for me to see past the ugliness of the word to enjoy the story the movie makers are trying to tell. I recently watched Blazing Saddles and it was not on Network TV. They used that word over and over again and I was just as uncomfortable. Lenny Bruce said “the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.” I have to look at myself and examine why I was uncomfortable. It is because I have given that word power over me. I am not going to start using it but I am going to look at how I am affected by it. I would like to think that Tarantino was trying to desensitize the viewer to it but I really think he is just using it as set dressing and a way to shock people. Regardless at least as a viewer, it made me think.

Do you think that he will ever make the movies of his youth a true and respected art form, or is he just looking back with nostalgia that will never really have a place of honor?

J Edgar

J Edgar – 137 min - R

J. Edgar Hoover is a unique historical character that can be easily overlooked. He was credited with developing the FBI and organizing criminal investigations to include forensic investigation. With all of the good things he did for us, he was also a focus of scandal and a prime example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely. He was rumored to have surveillance on many political figures and would use them as blackmail material.

Does the movie, J. Edgar, mirror the facts of his life? I can’t say I don’t know more than what I have read on Wikipedia. Is this an intresting movie? Yes, but from a purely academic standpoint. Clint Eastwood has an eye for making movies with a clear and balanced point of view. This movie is one to see from a historical standpoint. Interesting but not entertaining, this move is a yellow light and I will present my evidence in the following review.

J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) grew up with his mother, Anna Marie Hoover (Dame Judi Dench). As an eager new employee at the Department of Justice, he was given the chance to develop the new FBI after his participation in a successful raid on some Communist dissidents. Using this opportuniy he grew his department and his influence. He used his resources to gather information on political figures to use in his “Confidential, Private” files with friend and partner, Associate Director Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). There are rumors that they were more than just friends, as the heir of Hoover’s estate some believe that Tolson was his domestic partner.

The story takes us from the past and the future and someplace in the middle while J. Edgar is dictating his story to a number of writers he uses to document the history of the FBI. He tells the revolving scribes about his many high adventures in the FBI, in cluding details of his acts of heroism and the hard work of starting the system we now know today as the FBI.

Most of it was fabricated to make him and his bureau more entertaining to sell some of the comic books he was advisor on. He felt that American youth was in love with the gangsters in the movies and he decided to wage a war of image and made the G-man the new focus in film and media. Unfortunately, it was at the cost of the reality of many of the things he claimed to have done.

Clint Eastwood does make a great picture. He has a great eye for capturing the figures form history that can be easily overlooked. He reminds me of the correspondents on This American Life. They all take ordinary things and make them into an interesting story. This movie looks great but it has a History Channel documentary feel.

The subject of this film has some interesting points but they seem to be overshadowed by the overall creepiness of the man behind the power and his unchecked and corrupt rule of the FBI. Eastwood’s choice of blending the past and the future did not seem to work as well in this film. It was hard to follow where we were at in the story. Is this the past? The present? Is this him reminiscing? Or are we seeing the events unfold?

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DiCaprio does a great job of wearing this persona like a costume. I forgot that it was him at a few points in the film. The age make up did a great job of transforming him through the story. He seems to be very vulnerable when his mother dies. Instead of being free from her tyranny he seems to be completely lost.

Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts) is fiercely loyal secretary and loves him in a familial way. Even up to the end she keeps J. Edgar’s secrets and shreds his personal and confidential files. I wonder it was out of loyalty or out of knowing how dangerous a weapon those files were, or both.

Those files were the only thing that saved him from the winds of political change. I can see where he needed to have them to keep control of his bureau. it also seemed like they became something more than just an insurance policy. They seemed to be a drug he couldn’t give up.

What historical figure should Clint Eastwood focus his next movie on? Who do you find interesting and under publicized?