Tarantino Goes South: Django Unchained

When Quentin Tarantino opens his new film, Django Unchained, with a shot of the Alabama Hills badlands emblazoned with the lurid red letting of the main title, immediately reminiscent of the many Westerns filmed in that very location, notably the Randolph Scott Westerns of Budd Boetticher, I felt a thrill of anticipation, wondering where Tarantino might be taking us this time as he blends two late 60s, early 70s genres: the less innocent Westerns influenced by Sam Peckinpah and the outrageously violent, racially charged Blaxploitation flick. Tarantino’s Southern/Western/Blaxploitation film is, appropriately, a revenge tale in which Dr. King (I get it, Quentin) Schultz, a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) and Django, a liberated slave (Jamie Foxx) work together as bounty hunters and later set out to rescue Django’s enslaved wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from bondage.

Although slow and sometimes ponderous, the film’s episodic, picaresque first half works fairly well. Schultz frees Django, uses him to track down wanted men, eludes and obliterates a posse of hooded racists in a momentarily spectacular mock up of The Birth of a Nation, and transforms his bitter protégé into a bounty hunter in a snowy scene reminiscent of Little Big Man and Jeremiah Johnson.

Already overwrought in its depiction of violence accented by exploding slabs of flesh and geysers of blood, the film goes South in its second half in more ways than one. In Mississippi, Schultz and Django meet Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), trainer of gladiatorial “Mandingo” fighters (so called in an allusion to the 1975 Southern plantation film Mandingo) and the owner of Broomhilda. At times engaging, as mesmerizing as a swamp snake, Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal of Candie quickly wears thin in this long, latter part of the film that features one long dialogue after another. If you see a table, characters sit around it and lengthy dialogue ensues, but it is dialogue that is rarely engaging and never builds tension as Tarantino so masterfully did in Inglourious Basterds. For the most part, Waltz drives the film in his role as the articulate German bounty hunter, a clever redemptive twist on his Jew hunter role in Basterds, but it is a long film to carry. Eventually Waltz’s performance weakens under the load, and the endless dialogue sags like a slave-catching bloodhound’s drooping jowls.

This half of the Django Unchained is the lurid slavery half, with grainy footage appropriate to a low-budget 70s film. A runaway slave is torn apart by dogs. We see whippings and brandings. We see slaves shackled with bits and collars. In the film’s most serious moment, we see a naked Broomhilda released from a hot box and carted away in a wheelbarrow. Yes, as Quentin shows us, slavery was horrendous, but any gravity Tarantino achieves is swallowed up by heavy-handed, self-indulgent ridiculousness. And if the film starts to wobble when Schultz and Django meet up with Candie, it falls flat on its face when Tarantino appears on screen in a jarringly bad cameo as an inept slave catcher who gets blown to bits, as though Tarantino realizes subconsciously that he deserves such a fate.

I don’t care how Tarantino alludes to other films, and his own films, how he toys with genres and boldly depicts the horror of slavery and interjects his little jokes. I get the ironic twists (Samuel L. Jackson as a white-haired Uncle Tom). Ultimately, however, it all adds up to one of the worst films of the year, a bloated bag of ineffectual performances and uninteresting writing.

"The play's the thing": Joe Wright's Anna Karenina

Shakespeare certainly liked to draw attention to his own stagecraft. O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/ The brightest heaven of invention.” He saw the theater as an apt little world that paralleled everything going on in the larger world outside. All the world’s a stage/ And all the men and women merely players. The stage was always a useful metaphor. When we are born, we cry that we are come/ To this great stage of fools. Cleverly, he uses a play within a play to dramatize the conflicts in Hamlet. The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

Nifty, but I wonder if Shakespeare’s critics got on his back for drawing too much attention to his own devices. Not likely. Nothing seems to get in the way of Shakespeare’s drama, which is not always true of Joe Wright’s staging of Anna Karenina, in which most of the scenes are enacted upon actual stages.

When Wright’s conceit works, it works well. In my favorite cut, Anna’s son plays with his trains on a huge diorama of a snowy countryside, and as the train (electric trains in the 1870s?) moves along the tracks, it becomes the train that Anna is riding on. Here, the train compartment is an obvious staging with windows painted with ice, but the toy train has established the scene’s realism. This is also a wonderful transition, and a nostalgic allusion to all those old films that employed model trains in place of real ones.

The staging of the grand ball as a scene in a play is initially thrilling, though it goes on for too long. We quickly get the smoldering passion between Anna (Keira Knightley) and Count Alexei Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). They achieve a lot of that just with their eyes, and the ritualistic hand and arm movements quickly lose their effect. Less would have been more in this episode. More dramatically effective is the horse race in which the audience on one stage watches the horse race on another stage. When Vronsky’s horse falls from the track into the audience, It is transformed from a claustrophobic tableau into the film’s most shocking image.

At other times, especially in his manipulation of his extras, Wright lets his staging get in the way. At first, the strictly choreographed office workers stamping documents establish an ominous Kafkaesque bureaucracy, but when this goes on too long, the choreography becomes silly. Silly, too, is the servant who walks a full circle around Oblonsky (Matthew Mcfadyen) each time he hands him what he needs. Meaning can be construed in all of this, but at times I felt I wanted more of Anna and Vronsky, definitely more of Keira Knightley, whose talent for being radiant, desirable, and full of hot passion reminded me of Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago, especially when Knightley wears the ubiquitous fur hat and collar all Russian beauties wear.

I was not always dazzled by Wright’s staging of Anna Karenina, but I enjoyed many moments. The story is slow to start – too much Oblonsky in the beginning – and the ending could have been more dramatic. The staging is interesting, though when Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) takes us out into the sprawling Russian countryside, I found myself wishing the film had employed more exteriors to counterbalance the claustrophobia of the interiors in which characters enact their dramas amidst backstage pulleys and props. To be fair, however, it is easy to see how the cluttered interiors are appropriate to a story about what goes on in the confines of urban Russian society as well as within the confines of Anna's heart.

In the film’s impressive final image, Levin’s rural Russia is framed as a backdrop on a stage in a theater sprouting wheat. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s a nice image. Perhaps it means that Levin’s Russia is the real Russia, and Russian high society is “a great stage of fools.” Similarly, Anna Karenina provides moments of drama and clever imagery, but some of this gets smothered by the confines of the device.

“THE MORNING OF THE VOTE:” Spielberg’s History Lesson: Lincoln

When it comes to the Civil War, I have always been more interested in what it was like for the individual nameless soldier thrown into the vast hell of combat rather than in the large mythologized characters of Grant and Lee and Lincoln. This will be shocking to many Civil War enthusiasts, but my least favorite Civil War novel is Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels. It does little to depict the gritty horror of the most horrific battle in American history. Instead, it focuses on famous generals who stand around discussing strategy and spouting memorable quotations. My favorite Civil War novel, which focuses more on individual soldiers and memorably presents the Battle of Antietam as a savage slaughter, is Confederates, written by the Australian author Thomas Keneally.

For this reason, one of my favorite moments in Spielberg’s Lincoln involves the nameless “Second White Soldier,” played by Dane (Chronicle) DeHaan, who stands nervously in front of Lincoln, swearing and stuttering as he tries to recite the Gettysburg Address. I suppose the device is a little corny, but I see this character. He is real. As for Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis does a masterful job of portraying the thoughtful, erudite, yarning, folksy side of the great American president, speaking in a tight-jawed, laid-back country voice. However, in a long film that has trouble generating a compelling pace, Lincoln’s yarns wear thin. Day-Lewis injects some life into his character and the film when he pounds the table and willfully rants about getting what he wants: the Thirteenth Amendment, and very poignant are the quiet moments with son Tad (Gulliver McGrath), who is fascinated by images of slaves (a nice way to illustrate the film’s focus), sets up his lead soldiers on War Department maps, and drives his goat-drawn cart around the White House. But Lincoln the man is eventually overshadowed by big events and hobbled by Spielberg's reverent tone.

Spielberg’s topic is a grand one: the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment that ends that “peculiar institution” of “involuntary servitude” that is America’s Holocaust. But as Spielberg gets wrapped up in treating this grand topic with the same high reverence he treats the tragic ordeal of Jews in the Holocaust in Schindler’s List, throwing in the same close-up of a flame that dissolves to an image of Lincoln giving his second inaugural address, Lincoln the man recedes into the background of House bickering, pushed aside too by the film’s painstaking effort to eke climactic moments out of each House member’s momentous vote. Amidst the squabbling, Tommy Lee Jones takes center stage as Thaddeus Stevens, though I found myself preferring the solid presence of David Straithairn as Secretary of State William Seward.

Spielberg’s film is an enjoyable, well-performed, serviceable history lesson, full of chuckle-inducing quips and anecdotes as it focuses narrowly and reverently on one event in Lincoln’s last year alive even though it is based on a work of non-fiction (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln) that covers multiple dramatic events during the last five or six months of the Civil War. Yes, yes, I know Lincoln is about the Thirteenth Amendment and not about the Civil War, but I feel the film loses power and historical context as Lincoln spins his yarns and congressmen quibble over whether or not all men are created equal, and I found myself hankering for the story to break out of its claustrophobic interiors into something shocking and dramatic that might have broken the slow pacing and provided a panoramic backdrop for this historic debate.

My favorite scene, a masterful image, comes early in the film when we see Lincoln’s spooky, ominous dream. This hints at the great film Lincoln could have been - a haunting look at the last months of the great man's life as he juggled management of political rivalry over the Thirteenth Amendment with orchestration of the final fierce campaigns of an epic war.

Why not parallel the suspense and drama of the House debate with some cuts to the suspense and drama of the war? When Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Bruce McGill) describes his plans for the bombardment of Fort Fisher in which Union ships will fire more than a hundred shells per minute, why not cut to a shot of this fearsome assault made possible by the North’s vastly superior resources? Before Lincoln visits the Petersburg battlefield, why not show Grant’s all-out advance on the Confederates’ fifty-three-mile-long defenses, to show Grant’s assertive total-war battle tactics and how Lee was still able to escape so that he could stubbornly prolong the war? Instead of something expansive, Spielberg takes time for a puzzling, lifeless, overly reverent tableau depicting the surrender at Appomattox. Set to a choral lament, the image seems to pay last-minute homage to Robert E. Lee. The violence is kept off-screen to the very end when Lincoln and his wife, Mary, played splendidly by Sally Field, go off to Ford’s Theater, (an episode that very closely resembles Lincoln's departure for the theater in this summer's Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). When a man runs on stage to shout, “The President’s been shot!” it is on the stage of another theater in which Tad is viewing a swashbuckling play.

For good or ill, Spielberg keeps his narrow focus, the vote is won, and Thaddeus Stevens’s African American housekeeper lies in bed with him and reads the Thirteenth Amendment aloud. (Thankfully, it is short.) In this way, Spielberg teaches us and teaches us and teaches us. Indeed, he doesn’t trust us to know a little bit about the period. When Jared Harris first appears, it is obvious that this stern, bearded, cigar-chomping commander is Ulysses S. Grant, but the subtitle reads, ULYSSES S. GRANT. Conversely, subtitles name the three Confederate peace commissioners, one after the other, even though we don’t need to know their names; we know they are the peace commissioners and that is enough. Later, when the congressmen gather for what is obviously the beginning of the debate, we see the words, THE HOUSE DEBATE BEGINS. When it is obvious that the vote is going to take place in a day or two, we cut to custodians setting things up in the empty House chamber, and John Williams’s momentous music cues us to what we know is going to take place, but still the subtitle tells us it is THE MORNING OF THE VOTE.

High Noon at Skyfall

The rave reviews are out there. Entertainment Weekly gave it an A. They’re calling it the “best Bond.” But I didn’t see it that way.

In the latest James Bond film starring Daniel Craig, Bond is recovering from a near-death experience. He looks older, his cheeks are sunken, and his hand shakes when he aims his gun. That won’t do! Out to thwart him is a villain named Silva, played by Javier Bardem who taps into his own Chigurh from No Country for Old Men as well as Heath Ledger’s the Joker. (Like the Joker, Silva seems to have a limitless army of goons willing to do his bidding and die in droves for him. I always wonder how much these fools are getting paid! Whatever it is, it's not worth it!) The conflict is simple. Silva wants to kill M (Judi Dench) for some past betrayal when Silva was an agent for MI6 – but it seems to be more than that. When, at the end, Silva is just about to shoot M, I almost expected her to say, “No, Silva, I am your mother.”

All sounds good, but the first half of the film is a snooze. We start with yet another chase across the roofs of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. Ah, this time it’s with motorcycles, but the Turks need to ban films from shooting in this over-used location. This follows the car chase through the bazaar. Saw that in Taken 2. Then we proceed to the fist-fight on the top of the speeding train. I’m starting to nod off. Hasn’t this been done in a previous Bond film? The Turkish engineer blithely speeds on while Bond rips the roof off a car with a ditch digger. Then, another head scratcher when Bond’s sidekick Eve (Naomie Harris) takes “the shot,” hits Bond, but then doesn’t take another shot at the bad guy! Suck it up, Eve, and do your job!

Later, after Shanghai and a mysterious island, things grow tense when it appears that Silva is going after M in London! But the writers should have thought of any kind of chase other than a chase through a subway. All future films need to be banned from shooting chase scenes in subways. Also, if the sewer roof explodes behind Bond and he says, “Was that for me?” and Silva retorts “No, this is for you,” you and I and James all know that a train’s going to come through the roof and all he has to do is step aside, which he does with no problem. What a waste setting that up, Silva, just to give it away!

The second half (probably less than half) of the film gets better, starting with the chaotic shootout in the hearing chamber, with desk-job agent Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) pulling a gun and joining in. I enjoyed that. Appropriately, what follows plays like High Noon at Skyfall Manor, very much a Western scenario, with a bit of Straw Dogs thrown in for good measure, as Bond, M, and the old game warden (Albert Finney) defend the Alamo. “Welcome to Scotland.”

I liked all the Western stuff, and I liked the stark setting of the stone manor in the middle of the Scottish moor, and the wonderful Roger Deakins-framed images of the pursuit across the moor shot against the bright flames. Loved all that, and I enjoyed the humorous tributes to previous Bond films (the ejector seat), but at nearly two and a half hours, Sam Mendes could have trimmed off most of the first half and gotten us more expeditiously to Showdown at Skyfall. Also, M should have been Silva’s mother.

Chasing a good movie? See Chasing Mavericks

Disgusted that Flight, a serious film about an airliner crash and a pilot (Denzel Washington) struggling with alcoholism, crash-dives when John Goodman struts on screen to "Sympathy for the Devil," trying on a little bit of the Big Lebowski, playing a cheerful provider of booze, cigarettes, and cocaine?

Is Cloud Atlas, at two hours and forty minutes, way too much Tom Hanks for you?

You've seen Argo and one Taken too many?

Then get out there and see Chasing Mavericks, a film about Jay Moriarty, the young man who made surfing history by riding the highest wave off Half Moon Bay, California. If, like me, you had seen the ridiculous preview that makes it look like the latest made-for-Disney Channel teen romance/impossible-athletic-feat movie, you will be surprised to find a more mature drama about mentorship and facing fears, and you can fill your eyes with some stunning cinematography of the gnarly waves off Half Moon Bay. One surprising shot made me exclaim out loud. You can also feast your eyes on the beautiful stretches of Highway 1 between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay.

A big plus for me is that I grew up twelve miles from Half Moon Bay and I have gone down those stretches of Highway 1 countless times since childhood, but the story and the gripping climactic scene are well worth viewing no matter where you are from.

Who are your favorite characters in American history?

Upon seeing the cover of this week’s TIME, I felt a burst of emotion, not because I'm a Lincoln enthusiast, though there is much to admire about the much-admired 16th President of the United States. It was more out of a passion for the performances of Daniel Day-Lewis, the actor shown on the cover, and my eager anticipation for Spielberg’s upcoming Lincoln.

Once again, Day-Lewis has invested himself in his role in true Day-Lewis immersion style. Apparently, he has reproduced Lincoln’s odd voice like no other performer. It sure sounded that way as I sat through the preview this weekend before a showing of Cloud Atlas; though I closed my eyes to avoid spoiler images, I couldn't help hearing Lincoln's voice, which sounded nothing like Daniel Day-Lewis. Much more than that the film is about Lincoln, I look forward to the film for Day-Lewis’s performance and for the Civil War period depictions, as well as for a sense of wonder and a swelling hope-in-cinema I always feel in anticipation for a Spielberg-directed film (although that butterflies-in-my-stomach hope is often disappointed).

As for Lincoln, one of the most famous figures in the American history I have taught 8th graders for the past twenty-seven years, I have always felt kind of indifferent toward the man. Yeah, he was folksy, funny, bookish, determined, assassinated, and he put an end to the pernicious institution of slavery (which inevitably would have been ended by some president), but he was surrounded by monumental events that always seem to dwarf the man. I never feel Lincoln. Perhaps Spielberg and Day-Lewis will make me feel differently.

That said, I got to thinking about my favorite characters in American history. I have selected five of my favorites and matched each with a performer who has played him or her well, a performer who could play this personage for the first time, or a performer who could play the part better than previous performers in an updated depiction.

I welcome you to join me. Who are your favorite characters in American history? Pick one, three, or five, however many you want. Explain a little why they are favorites. Go a step further and imagine these figures in a bio-pic. Who would you like to see play these characters in films? Or, if you are satisfied with a past portrayal, who played the role well?

My Favorite Characters in American History

1. George Armstrong Custer

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t idolize the man. (If anything, I idolize his Native American enemies.) I see him for what he was – a reckless glory-seeker. But I have to admit I have a read a lot about the guy, and my fascination for him, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, drew me to make two trips to the National Monument in Montana during two consecutive summers. He certainly had a dramatic life: all those daring cavalry charges during the Civil War and, of course, his demise in one of the most dramatic moments in American history. I am fascinated by his audacity and blind courage and the enigma that surrounds him. Why the hell did he divide his meager, exhausted troop into four contingents in his advance upon a vast Indian village that contained two thousand fighting men? And then why the hell did he leave half of his contingent on a ridge while he went ahead with a hundred to look for a way to attack the village? My fascination for this enigmatic American man, as well as a childhood during which I played Custer in countless re-enactments of Custer’s Last Stand in my backyard, makes him my favorite character.

As for the many performers who have portrayed him in films, none of them have captured the real Custer. I’d like to see Ryan Gosling take a stab at it.

2. Clara Barton

She might well be the famous American I admire the most. She’s a man’s woman, helping the wounded under fire at Antietam, identifying the dead at Andersonville, organizing relief measures for the survivors of the Johnstown Flood. Wow! Why hasn’t anyone made a movie about this woman?

As for an actress to play her, Claire Danes has something in her face that bears a resemblance. I’m open to suggestions, but I’m sure Danes could do a good job. Somehow, Clara Barton is the type of role Hilary Swank usually lands, but I just don’t see her in the part.

3. Lucy Parsons

When political affairs in D.C. are at their most absurd, I turn anarchist. Long live anarchy! And my favorite anarchist is Lucy Parsons, wife of Albert Parsons, one of the four anarchists wrongfully tried, convicted, and hanged for their beliefs as a result of the 1886 Haymarket Square Bombing. When Lucy went to the prison to see her husband on the morning of the executions, she was cruelly told to wait in a room. Three hours later, the police came for her and told her the hangings were over. Lucy took up her husband’s crusade as an anarchist labor activist, campaigning for labor reform and women’s rights. She died in a fire in 1942; some sources suggest foul play, so perhaps she had been killed for her beliefs as well. Again, somebody make a movie about this woman! I have a poster of her up in my classroom.

I’d like to see Halle Berry take on Lucy; Berry needs a substantial role.

4. David Crockett

Yeah, I know. What did he do? Died at the Alamo. But his is such an iconic American persona. As the backwoodsman who served a number of periods in the U.S. Congress, he is a fine example of the egalitarian ideal. He was funny, too. When he lost his final campaign, he said, “You may go to hell, and I will go to Texas.” Darn! See what you get for cussin’, Davy! In addition, Disney’s The Adventures of Davy Crockett and John Wayne’s The Alamo impressed themselves upon my childhood imagination so deeply that I can’t leave Davy off the list.

I thought Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of Crockett in the 2004 The Alamo was spot on and very memorable, but I’d love to see a film that covers Crockett’s whole life, and I’d like to hand the job to Sam Rockwell, who fit right into that backwoodsy atmosphere in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

5. Theodore Roosevelt

Teddy is my favorite American president. (He and Lincoln are the only Republican presidents I admire.) He was a Republican with a social conscience and quite the character. With a little more effort, I might think of a recent actor who could portray him memorably, but I am totally satisfied with the memorable performance of Brian Keith as Teddy in the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion. Keith masters the toothy grin and sometimes plays Roosevelt as caricature, but in a number of touching, quiet moments, Keith captures the man. Out on the shooting range, he confesses to his daughter, “I’m blind in that eye . . . but don’t tell Edith. Maybe it’ll go away.” In another scene, after all the foreign tension is resolved, Teddy just wants to commune with the bear he shot while playing cowboy in Yellowstone. “And now, I’d just like to be alone with my bear.” Bully!