Film review - Django Unchained

After the disappointment of Inglorious Basterds, I wasn’t really looking forward to seeing Tarantino’s latest offering, so I suppose I can no longer call myself The World’s Biggest Tarantino Fan™. I needn’t have worried, though, as Django Unchained avoids (almost) all of the ridiculous, poorly-judged moments of Basterds and is a thoroughly entertaining epic with a poetic script. It also manages to depict slavery in a more interesting and (I can’t quite say accurate, so I’ll say…) appropriate way than one might expect.

The setting is the Deep South in the 1850s. Verbose German bounty hunter Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) buys a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) because he can recognise the faces of three wanted men. Django quickly shows natural flair for the bounty hunting business, so the two partner up to kill the South’s worst offenders and to rescue Django’s beloved wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).

Quentin’s script is detailed, funny and shows his brilliant use of language. He is most famous for his chats about American popular culture, and in Inglorious Basterds these became chats about German cinema of the 1930s. As this is his first film set before the moving image, he has had to forego all that, making Django Unchained feel a little less referential and arch than his other films.

Instead we have the wonderful Christoph Waltz rat-a-tat-tatting through line after line of flowery prose. His character really is the best thing about this film – a charming, cunning murderer with morals. Why he is nominated again for best supporting actor rather than full actor, I do not know. Foxx’s Django is a tower of quiet strength, and he is impressive in the role, but Waltz is on screen just as much and has a lot more to say.

Perhaps the most surprising performance comes from Samuel L. Jackson, who is almost unrecognisable as an elderly house slave. He’s the one who should have been nominated for best supporting actor. The part is quite small but crucial, and asks uncomfortable questions. And he plays it exquisitely.

Slavery is an issue that is hardly explored in cinema. Apart from a few worthy films that focus on it, it is generally glossed over in tales of the Old South, or just given a gentle nod to make sure we know the filmmakers are aware of it. Here it is integral to the plot, but it isn’t the plot alone. And it is shown to be brutal in the extreme – Tarantino isn’t taking the subject lightly, as Spike Lee presumed without seeing the film. Although he is often accused of making violence seem fun, the violence inflicted on the slaves is that other type of Tarantino violence – shocking, real and deeply unsettling.

Unfortunately, the film does go downhill a bit at the end. After a wonderful build-up of tension we get a lot of silly shootouts. These go on for too long and aren’t as beautiful, or cool as any of the sequences in Kill Bill, and instead are a bit jokey. Of course the redemptive aspect to the violence is nice, but if it was done in a more majestic way, it would have been the ending the film deserved.

Which brings me to the one truly stupid bit of the movie. A scene which took me completely out of the story and made me truly despair of my favourite director. It is the scene close to the end in which he plays an Australian ranch hand.

An Australian.

In 1850s Mississippi.

I’m not going to take cheap shots at Tarantino’s acting ability (I actually like him in From Dusk Till Dawn and Pulp Fiction), but it isn’t even a good Australian accent.

Some switch must have flipped in Quentin’s head in 2008, and he can no longer tell when an idea is good or hideously embarrassing. This is why he is playing an Australian here, and why the whole scene with Mike Myers in Inglorious Basterds exists. If he had been walking this tightrope in 1994, one step to the left and he’d have had Jules and Vincent whacking each other over the head like the Three Stooges before bringing Brett breakfast.

So, if you ignore that bit, Django Unchained is a very enjoyable cinema experience. It does not reach the majestic highs of a few scenes in Inglorious Basterds, but it doesn’t sink to that film’s lows either. There are no truly great Tarantino moments, but this is mature filmmaking with only a smattering of self-indulgent childishness.  

Film review - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I am not a Lord of the Rings fan. Kevin Smith got it right when he described them as “three movies about walking to a fucking volcano”. So I was not looking forward to ruining another three Christmases in a row with Peter Jackson’s new endurance tests. Yet somehow I quite enjoyed The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Maybe it was because Cate Blanchett’s celestial droning was kept to a bare minimum. Maybe it was because Martin Freeman got to use Tim from The Office’s “Really?” face in a scene with Gollum. Maybe it was because I feel more kindly to Peter Jackson after watching West of Memphis. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t bored half to death.

The film tells the first part of Bilbo Baggins’s epic adventure helping the dwarves of Erebor regain their kingdom from the fearsome dragon Smaug. All the great effects, scenery and cinematography from the Lord of the Ring films are here again, and the cast give good performances. I particularly enjoyed the scenes with Sylvester McCoy’s Radagast the Brown (I believe these did not appear in the original book, so I risk the wrath of Tolkien geeks by saying that).

My problem with LOTR was not that they were bad films, just that they went on and on and on. If you are mesmerised by this universe, you want as much detail as possible and every incident from the books to be shown on screen. If you are not, it can be quite punishing. The Hobbit is a lot lighter in tone, reflecting its origin as a children’s book. Here you get the quality from LOTR with added fun.

Yes some scenes could probably have been shortened, and yes I am concerned about how another two films are going to be strung out of this one, reasonably short, book. But I will not roll my eyes when my family suggest seeing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug next Christmas. I might even be the one to suggest it.

Film review - Pitch Perfect

When I saw the trailer for Pitch Perfect, I got all excited. Though it is transparently a Glee rip off, it looked funny and bitchy and it stars Anna Kendrick (little miss actressy actress who is so amazing in 50/50 and Up In the Air – I love her!), Rebel Wilson (the strangely-Australian one in Bridesmaids – I love her!) and Adam DeVine (writer/creator/star of Workaholics, my new favourite stoner comedy series – I love him!). I even did a happy little dance in my cinema seat when it ended.

I should have quit while I was ahead.

This really is one of those films where the only good bits are in the trailer. The full-length cinema cut of Pitch Perfect contains exactly 27% of the wit of a season one Glee episode (which is equal to 43% of the wit of a season three episode).

The film follows college freshman Beca (Kendrick) as she is forced to join the uptight Barden Bellas a cappella singing group.  Now, Beca takes her music seriously, and doesn’t like the Bellas’ attitude and dreary, out-of-touch song choices. Can the Bellas change their image with the help of Beca and win Nationals? I think they just might.

My problem with Pitch Perfect isn’t that it is predictable, or even that it is silly (though it is both these things). My problems are:

1. Beca is extremely unlikeable, moping around for no reason and being horrible to everyone around her because she is “artistic” and “deep”. She is supposed to be cool and have a serious taste in music, but she seems to like only David Guetta and La Roux, neither of whom are cool. Someone must have explained contemporary music wrongly to the screenwriter.
2. Almost all of the humour fell flat for me because the director just didn’t get me onto his side. Vomit slapstick is not my favourite comedy style, but it seems to really tickle director Jason Moore. And the film also makes fun of Asian people much more than you would expect for a mainstream comedy from whatever-we-decide-to-call-this-decade (the Teens?). Usually I try to give people the benefit of the doubt about things like this, but it seemed mean-spirited and lazy in this case. 
3. A lot of Beca’s romance storyline is predicated on you believing that The Breakfast Club has the best ending in cinema history. And that you could understand why from watching just the ending without seeing the rest of the film. And that characters who were born in approximately 1993 could ever think these things. 

While there are some funny moments and lines (mostly from Rebel Wilson), this is a waste of a lot of talented people’s time.

London Film Festival review - The Central Park Five

This documentary looks at a high-profile crime and the less high-profile miscarriage of justice that went with it, showing how difficult it is to get justice when the public are baying for your blood.

In 1989 a young woman was raped and brutally beaten while out jogging in Central Park. At the same time in a different part of the park, a large group of teenage boys from Harlem were causing trouble. When the jogger was found barely alive, the police started interrogating the boys they had in custody, using the classic “good cop/bad cop” technique and telling each one that their friends had already dobbed them in. Using 14-, 15- and 16-year-old logic, five made statements that they saw the others rape the woman.

The Central Park jogger case was the last straw for embattled New Yorkers. Their city was a mess, ravaged by a crack-induced crime wave. Mayor Edward Koch called it “the crime of the century” (quite a claim for a town which a decade earlier had been terrorised by the Son of Sam, but there you go) and said that prosecuting these boys would be a test of the criminal justice system. The trouble was, the boys had nothing to do with it. Their statements didn’t add up, they didn’t know details of the crime, their DNA didn’t match, and the timeline didn’t make any sense. They had never been in trouble before. These small issues didn’t seem to matter to the police or the prosecutors. Or the jury.

The Central Park Five is a very angry film, showing the indifference, cruelty, racism and just plain stupidity of the system. The boys, now men, speak eloquently about what happened (after watching this and West of Memphis, I swear going to prison for a crime you didn’t commit makes you really clever and poetic). Directors Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s unfussy approach uses archive footage really well, painting a picture of a New York very different from the city seen today. Hopefully this means that mistakes like this are less likely now, but you just can’t be sure. If the press gets whipped up into a frenzy, the truth can still just go out the window.

London Film Festival review - Compliance

Truth really is so much stranger than fiction. While there have been films centring on a menacing phone call before, no Hollywood screenwriter would have come up with the plot of Compliance off the top of their head, it is just too outlandish.  These events happened in real life, making this low-budget indie thriller into an examination of the very nature of free will.

The film takes place over a day at a branch of the Chick-Wich fast food chain. Manger Sandra (Ann Dowd, the spitting image of Lisa Dingle from Emmerdale) is having a bad day because someone left the freezer door open overnight. But it is about to get worse. A policeman (Pat Healy) rings the office and tells her that one of her employees, Becky (Dreama Walker), has stolen money from a customer. This sparks off a chain of events which I won’t spoil, but suffice it to say that are as disturbing as they are unbelievable.

The cinematography is plain and to the point, bathing the claustrophobic sets in a sickly beige light which perfectly suits the events. All the performances are excellent and the characters feel real. Dowd walks the thin line between villain and object of pity well, and Walker puts her wide eyes to good use. I particularly liked Ashlie Atkins as Marti the shift supervisor, part of the staff who gave the whole thing a realistic workplace vibe.

Compliance is a film which asks us how much power we give to authority, how much we are willing to ignore for an easy life, and who amongst us will stand up and say “no”. To me it had echoes of the Holocaust, but interestingly at the LFF screening, a lot of the questions centred on America (both about the perceived passivity of its people and – for reasons I didn’t fully understand, other than some people see Iraq everywhere – its foreign policy). The director Craig Zobel explained that everywhere he showed the film people said “That could never happen here!” including in America, so nationality is probably a red herring. You would hope that most people would be more questioning than the characters in the film, but it only needed a few people for it to happen.

This is an uncomfortable watch, but one that will definitely spark a debate with your friends.

London Film Festival review - Bayou Blue

This documentary is an interesting counterpoint to West of Memphis.  What happens when the police investigate murders thoroughly, prosecutors act fairly, and the media doesn’t turn the whole thing into a three-ring circus? The right man is arrested and sent away for a long time.  Does it make an interesting film? Not really.

Bayou Blue looks at a spate of murders of young men that took place around New Orleans between 1997 and 2006.  Body after body was found face down in creeks or on verges, victims of rape and strangulation. Some of the men were openly gay, some were straight. The police were baffled as to how the killer had lured each one into his car and gained their trust enough to overpower them.

Eventually the killer was caught, but the world wasn’t interested and one of America’s most prolific serial killers hardly made the papers. In a culture obsessed with the grizzly details of crime, you’d think that the sheer number of victims would guarantee column inches, but in this case many of the victims were homeless, most were black, and the area they lived in was poor and remote.

This lack of interest on the part of the media is a scandal, but unfortunately directors Alix Lambert and David McMahon’s style doesn’t let the viewer get too worked up about it. The film is as lugubrious as the flow of the titular bayou. The story isn’t really shown in order, so there is no sense of a story unfolding, of the growing concern of police or really how they pieced together the investigation. It’s just one body discovered in 2003, one in 2002, one in 1999.

The families and friends of the victims are interviewed – their words heart breaking, their faces testaments to their hard lives. But their stories are presented in a very haphazard way, again chopping back and forth. The detectives come across as extremely professional people who take their work very seriously. We hear from the killer himself, but the audio recordings are crackly and just contain perfunctory details of each death that are played behind lingering shots of yet more barren fields and remote ditches. We learn nothing about the killer’s background, a staggering omission that leaves him an almost faceless figure.

Perhaps the aim was to make a quietly creepy film full of menace, but to me it was just dull. I don’t want to say that the papers and news channels were right not to cover this story – the victims deserve our attention as much as any middle class white girl who vanishes – but you have to prove its worth to the audience by making it gripping. It would have been better if the makers of Bayou Blue had used a few more of the enemy’s tactics and sensationalised what happened just a little to keep the audience’s emotional interest, rather than just piquing liberal guilt.

London Film Festival review - My Amityville Horror

I think I was the only person at the screening of this documentary who hadn’t seen any of the Amityville Horror films. While I am interested in the supernatural, I am not really into horror. Despite not knowing anything about the original case or its pop-cultural aftermath, I could still enjoy My Amityville Horror as a very odd character piece.

The film looks at Daniel Lutz, who was ten years old when his family moved into 112 Ocean Avenue in 1975, where the DeFeo family had been murdered a year earlier. The Lutzes abandoned the house after 28 days, claiming that they had experienced a smorgasbord of ghostly activity, including poltergeists, possession and ectoplasm.  It would be fair to say that these events have affected Daniel deeply. He is a very intense guy, a tough nut who left home as a young teenager never to return. He appears to have been in therapy for most of his life.

Director Eric Walter has been fascinated with the case for years, and started a website as a teenager dedicated to gathering together all the evidence he could. He said that even he found a lot of new information in Danny’s testimony. Certainly Danny’s feelings about his step-father bring a whole other dimension to this story.    

I have one specific issue with this film – the cinematography is a little too slick and artistic. Digital technology allows professional results at a fraction of the cost compared to a few years ago, but that doesn’t mean that it is always necessary to have moody lighting. In a documentary like this it seems unnecessary and distracts somewhat from the person in question.  

I don’t know what to make of the events at 112 Ocean Avenue, and we’ll never know what really happened.  The tales Danny tells seem unbelievable, but he does seem to believe them.  This is diverting rather than fascinating little film about a very strange guy who had some very strange experiences.  Though I’m sure it is essential viewing for classic horror fans.