Film Review: Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained

Granted, he doesn't take as long as Terrence Malick once did, but still, the nearly three and a half years since his Inglourious Basterds blew up the big screen, is an unbearable length of time for someone so enamoured with the cinephiliac workings of the mind of Quentin Tarantino, someone who finds each and every one of the director's films - even Jackie Brown, even Grindhouse - an almost religio-filmic experience, someone who waits with the most baited of breath for another goddamn masterpiece of uncomfortable hilarity and creatively over-the-top wham-bam-biggery to come our way, someone who doesn't care what all the (obviously wrong-minded, and quite misguided) naysayers out there say (more on these punks later), but who believes Tarantino to be the second coming of Sam Fuller or Nick Ray or Sergio Leone or even Stanley Motherfucking Kubrick - someone like, say, me - to have to wait.  Unbearable, I tell you.  Unbearable indeed.  But that wait is finally over, and now here we are, finding ourselves in, what one could call, a bit of a pickle.  

So, how exactly does one such as that adorably gaga guy described above, one such as me (adorable or not), even begin to give an honest critical analysis of a Quentin Tarantino film, without sounding like nothing more than a gushing fanboy or a lovesick schoolgirl, or even a preening motherfucking idiot?  Such worries have kept me from ever reviewing a Tarantino film.  Even though I was already a working film critic by the time of their respective releases, for fear of sounding like nothing more the president of the Quentin Tarantino fan club, no reviews of Kill Bill, Death Proof nor the aforementioned Inglourious Basterds, has ever seen the light of day 'round these parts.  But, I suppose, this is as good a time as any to let one out of the proverbial coop, and see what happens.  Let the bitch fly, if you will.  With that said, the creature you are about to read, though gushing as any preening, lovesick fanboy and/or schoolgirl-cum-idiot ever could be, not to mention most likely playing out as a defense of the director and his work, is meant as a highly critical look at the film, with all due disclosures, that this particular critic calls the best film of the motherfucking year.  Oh yeah, and in keeping with the tone set by good ole QT, there may be quite a bit of goddamn swearing.  Ye have been warned.

Based, obviously, though quite loosely, on the 1966 Sergio Corbucci Spaghetti Western, Django, starring Franco Nero in the title role, Django Unchained, the eighth feature film from provocateur Tarantino (seventh if one were to count the Kill Bill's as one entity) moves his story to Texas and the deep south of 1858 and 1859.  This new breed of film - a Spaghetti Southern, if you will (and no, I cannot take credit for that term) - takes the ultra-violence of its predecessor genre, and ramps it up to a typically burning hot Tarantino degree.  Tarantino's film tells the story of a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter (shades of Doc Holliday perhaps), played by Christoph Waltz, juiced up with just as much vim and vigor as he gave to his Oscar-winning portrayal of Colonel Hans Landa, aka the Jew Hunter, in Basterds, and the slave he purchases and then frees, and then partners with in order to make enough money to rescue Broomhilda, Django's wife, here played by Jamie Foxx in a performance that straddles the finest line between stoic early Eastwood-esque nonchalance and broad Tarantino-required over-the-top-ness.  Set up as a revenge movie - a genre that the director has some rather intimate knowledge with - Django is just as bloodthirsty as Kill Bill or Inglorious Basterds, and just as giddily playful at it as well, and believe me when I tell you that the director bloody damn well wants us to know it.

Now, there are more than a few Tarantino haters out there - movie goers, both of the knowledgeable and of the novice variety, who are put off by the director's violent tendencies, his supposed arrogance and/or self-indulgence, and what many, including most notably the always angry Spike Lee, have mistakenly referred to as political incorrectness.  There are also a whole bunch of these haters - several I know personally, and several who are not exactly unschooled in the art of film and film theory, mind you - who dislike the director for "stealing" from other movies.  Not to sound to much like the auteur's defense lawyer, but this is total hogwash.  Total hornswallow.   Total bullshit, if you will.  Sure, go ahead and dislike a film, or a filmmaker, hate them even, but at least have a viable argument for such dislike or hatred.  As far as the violence goes, I understand how weaker-stomached folk may turn a disgusted eye away (my lovely wife does such, but she never takes the other eye off the screen), and especially with both the inevitable penultimate and climactic blood baths that literally repaint the sets red with an orgiastic amount of blood (enough to even put someone like Peckinpah to shame), but the violence that Tarantino uses is like an artist painting with a super artificial palette.  In fact, the whole idea of cinema is based on the ultimate artificiality.   Outside of things like Cinéma vérité, and, of course, documentaries, what we are watching on whatever screen we happen to be watching, is a fantasy - and it is this fantasy on which Tarantino erects his own insular universe.

Granted, this universe is filled to the veritable gills with cinematic references - many of which go over the head of those non-cinephiliac filmgoers - but to say the auteur steals is something else.  Okay, okay, Tarantino himself has been quoted, half tongue-in-cheekly, saying basically the same thing, but what Tarantino steals is nothing more than what other modern day directors - everyone from Spielberg to Lynch to Scorsese, Fincher and both the Anderson's - are doing with every film.  The only difference is, Tarantino makes no bones about it.  Every great director is influenced by those before them, but when someone like Tarantino puts it out there so blatantly, it makes some cinema purists cringe.  Of course, if someone is not in on the joke, then they too, are off put.  Those who do not notice the obvious references to Leone or Peckinpah or Sammy Fuller, will just never get it.  Those who hear that Waltz's horse is named Fritz, and do not automatically think of Fritz Lang, will never get it.  Those who see the screen filled with the word Mississippi, and do not see the connection with both Gone with the Wind and the films of Jean-Luc Godard, will never get it.  Those who wonder why the soundtrack has both Tupac and Jim Croce on it, will never get it.  Those who are not thrilled by that meta moment midway through when Foxx's Django is sidled up on by the original article, Franco Nero, in one of the best played cameos in the film, and the in-joke shared between them, will never get it.  The artificial universe created by Tarantino in each and every one of his films (the director even goes so far as to claim that Django and his wife, played wispfully by Kerry Washington, are the great great grandparents of seventies iconic streetwise character, Shaft) may not be for everyone, but for those who get it, those for whom said universe was created, it is the blastiest of blasts.

As for that other argument - the one that says the constant use of a so-called N-word (and this may be a record amount of times spoken) is racist - it simply holds no water.  It is an argument that is brought forth by the same type of people - angry, fed-up blacks and guilty-feeling liberal whites alike - who want this same dreaded word erased from the likes of Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin.  This is history people.  Granted, it is a terrible, ugly history, and we as a nation should feel ashamed such a history was perpetrated on an entire race like it was, but it is still history.  In 1850's Mississippi, this word was most likely used quite a bit, and mostly unashamedly, and to remove it from such a story would just be ridiculous.  Of course, some claim it is taken overboard here, and yes, Tarantino does tend to take pretty much everything overboard in his films, but again, this is a fantasy, and should therefore be looked upon as one.  An artificial construct.  A thousand armed beast.  A goddamn movie.  But enough of all this Tarantino-defending.  There are just those who get it, and those who do not.  Instead, let us concentrate less on explaining to the unfortunate masses, why they should like, and enjoy, the work of Tarantino, and more on preaching to the so-called choir.  Well, that, and talking a bit about the film.  Of course, that latter part is a bit difficult, since too much talk will give away all the film's secrets, and all the film's surprises - and there are quite a few in the casting alone.  Then again, Jonas Mekas once said, "It is not my business to tell you what it's about. My business is to get excited about it, to bring it to your attention. I am a raving maniac of the cinema."  Well damn, I can do that.

Seriously though, this film is indeed brutal and bloody, biting and badass.  It is most certainly a film that does more than its share of button-pushing, and it is a film that will most likely be hated by as many people as love it, but it is also a film that, once one removes the stick from one's ass, can be a gorgeously shot piece of pop cinema fetish fantasy, that never once wavers in its onslaught of both its agonizing brutality and shockingly gleeful irresponsibility.  From Foxx's demanding performance as a man caught between two worlds (there is one moment of utterly harrowing wrongfulness, where Django must watch as an innocent man dies, by almost his own hand, in order to save his wife, that gives the character a terrifying depth) to Waltz's show-stealing turn as the wickedly good mirror image of his Jew Hunter role (it is funny to note that the most racially sensitive character in the film is German, and is played by the same man who made us hate/love the quite evil-minded Col. Landa just a few years back) to Leonardo DiCaprio's take on the maniacally depraved, yet oh so the southern gentleman, Calvin J. Candie (a role that the usually just meh actor, manages to devour and make his own sick and twisted amalgamation), to Sam Jackson's hybrid of Stepin Fetchit and Jules Winnfield (a character that seems to be parodying the white-washed southern house nigger of Gone with the Wind), Tarantino's film is a motherfucking blast to watch.  And at 165 minutes, still does not seem long enough.  Of course, I am far from the right person to ask to criticize such a film (remember, gushing schoolgirl and all), but for what it is worth (and remember, I even liked Four Rooms), I give it as many thumbs up as I can, and consider it the logical extension of the director who created Inglourious Basterds lo those aforementioned three and a half years ago.

Anomalous Material Weekly Feature: 10 Best Westerns

No, this is not a list of discount hotel chains.  As you may already know, I now take up weekly residence over at the great film site Anomalous Material.  The fine folks over there have given me a regular weekly gig as feature writer.  It is a series of top ten lists on various cinematic subjects (and anyone who knows me can attest to how perfectly suited I am to such an endeavor - yes I am a list nerd).  This week's feature piece (my eleventh such piece) is on the most classic of film genres - the western.  With a history nearly as long as film itself, the western has garnered some pretty spectacular pictures lo these 100+ years.  I had a tough time just naming ten (as the quite lengthy runners-up list will attest to) but somehow I did it.  Go check it out and see for yourself.

Read my feature article, "10 Best Westerns" at Anomalous Material.

And speaking of the greatest westerns of all time and my trouble of narrowing them down to just ten, I proclaim the Autumn of 2011 as "The Season of the Western".  The reason for this is that I want to extend my list to include the 100 Greatest Westerns.  I will be posting said list over at my companion site, The Cinematheque, sometime around Christmas time (nothing says happy holidays like a good old fashioned wild west revenge killing showdown on the dusty streets of a lawless town!) and want to catch up on those westerns I have not yet seen (and there are quite a few since the genre is so vast) and re-watch those I have not seen in quite a while.  But more on this in a future post - for now I will leave you with Miss Barbara Stanwyck in a great western that just missed out making the list.

The Cinematheque Reviews: Cowboys & Aliens

The lovely little missus and I were on holiday this past week, so I was unable to see and review some of the films released during this time.  This is the second of several "catch-up" reviews that I will be sneaking, at whim, into my schedule.

Cowboys & Aliens made my "Most Anticipated Films of 2011" list (it came in at no.15) and even though it doesn't live up to such anticipation, it is a fun genre mash-up nonetheless.  Let's face it, how can a film that is basically Indiana Jones and James Bond kicking alien ass in the old west not be great?  Seriously, how can it not?  Okay, perhaps it isn't great after all, but it is still a fun piece of pop summer entertainment that will satisfy all those fanboys out there -- including the one hiding inside of me.  My review of this intriguing genre hybrid (a review where I let that inner fanboy out for a little bit) is now up and running over at The Cinematheque.  Read on true believers.

Read my review of Cowboys & Aliens at The Cinematheque.

The Cheap Thrills and Kitschy Charm of Fritz Lang's Beautifully Bodacious Rancho Notorious

Rancho Notorious ranks at the top of the heap when it comes to Fritz Lang's Hollywood output.  Outside of some certain camp circles (and perhaps amongst the Deitrich cults) the movie doesn't get the respect that others of Herr Lang's Hollywood films do, such as Fury, The Big Heat, Scarlet Street and Beyond A Reasonable Doubt.  Granted, it doesn't match what Lang was doing while still in Germany - but then not many people would dare say any of his American films do such a thing - but for pure giddy enjoyment, the wonderfully (and luridly) named Rancho Notorious is the one that does it for this critic and diehard cinephile.

The story is about Vern Haskell, played by Arthur Kennedy, and his search and destroy mission against those responsible for the rape and murder of his fiancee.  After hunting down one of the culprits (who has recently been shot by his partner) the man's dying words of "chuck-a-luck" are all Vern has to go on - but his determination carries him on.  Finding out the name of Altar Keane and her connection to "chuck-a-luck" (an old time saloon game similar to roulette that Keane has made a fortune on and has in turn given the name to the ranch she now runs), Vern tracks down one of her colleagues, a gunslinger named Frenchy Fairmont and befriends him in order to get close to Altar and find out what she knows.

What Vern finds out is that Altar runs a ranch for thieves and bandits and killers who come there to lay low from the law for a while - always of course giving Altar her fair share of whatever robbery they have perpetrated.  He also finds out that in order to get close enough to get answers he may have to join these criminals and thus become one of them.  This is where the story becomes more than mere western and turns into an almost revisionist film noir type of oddity.  This is where the movie becomes more than mere movie and turns into the subversive classic it damn well should be heralded as.  This is where it becomes Lang's best American film - hands down and no holds barred and all that jazz.

The big story though is of course Marlene Dietrich.  The 51 year old actress, nay, make that icon, played the plump role of Altar Keane, godmother to this den of thieves and lover to its most charismatic rapscallion Frenchy Fairmont who is played with all kinds of cocksure bravura and fanciful aplomb by Mel Ferrer.  Actually it is Ferrer who steals every scene he is in - even when it is opposite that aforementioned cinematic icon - so I suppose I should say the big story here is of course Mel Ferrer.  But then again let's face it, it is Dietrich, all Dietrich - and she gets to play the diva offscreen as well as on.

Supposedly bringing cinematographer Hal Mohr (who photographed everything from Captain Blood to The Wild One to Dietrich herself in Destry Rides Again) to the brink of resigning, the diva demanded he film her in a way that would make her appear younger than she actually was - and younger than Mohr thought possible.  This better-youth-through-lighting aspect aside, Dietrich does look close to her own age and in a way that makes the film seem a bit on shaky ground since she is meant to me a much younger woman.  Joan Crawford had the same dilemma in John Guitar out a few years later, but her insistence she be filmed only in certain lighting and never never never outside a studio when it came to her close-ups, made for a better result.  

Still though, this concept of an older woman and a younger man (Ferrer was just 35 at the time) should not have been a big deal.- it went the opposite way on many a movie, just ask Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn or John Wayne and Angie Dickinson - but the fact they tried to hide it gave it a kinda creepy, sad look.  In fact much of the film is done in a rather creepy manner.  From Frenchy's snarky, slick, somewhat salacious scalawag to Dietrich's bravura black market bully, Lang populates his noir western with questionable characterizations and a dark, almost macabre undercurrent.   

Of course this just adds to the kitschy charm that was, is and always will be Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious.  And speaking of that great title (one of the best as far as kitschy titles go) it was not Lang's idea.  The grand auteur wanted to call his film Chuck-a-Luck but the studio balked.  According to the story, the studio was under the impression no one would know what Chuck-a-Luck meant and therefore would not understand the movie.  There solution was to call the movie Rancho Notorious.  Lang had just one comment - "Well, it's a good thing that they all know what Rancho Notorious, which has nothing to do with anything in the film, means!"  Whatever the case, I do love the end result in names.  Sorry Fritz.

Many claim Rancho Notorious to be one of Lang's lesser works, or at least one of his less respectable works.  Bosley Crowther, divisive outspoken (some may say blowhard) critic of the New York Times said of the film, "In the department of western action, the show has its interesting points, including a couple of fist-and-gun fights that have been racily staged by Fritz Lang. Anyone who will settle for stick-ups and slug fests and pistol duels, all in Technicolor, may find enough in this picture to satiate his lust. Hungry-looking actors swagger and snarl in the outlaw roles. But anyone who expects a western picture to match the character of its able female star had better look in another direction. This one is run-of-the-mill."  But it is this very (and I will say it again) kitschy charm that turns Lang's film into a camp masterpiece.

The Cinematheque Reviews: Meek's Cutoff

Some say Kelly Reichardt's fourth film, Meek's Cutoff (starring the love of my cinematic life, Michelle Williams) is a hard film to watch.  Now mostly these are your typical Plebeian moviegoers who would not know a Tarkovsky from a Jodorowsky so it should not come as any real surprise.  If they cannot handle a film such as this (this is the same crowd that had no emotional reckoning over the ending of Wendy and Lucy) then fuck 'em I say.  I on the other hand (as if you couldn't already have guessed) found the film, as harrowing in storyline as it may very well be, just a thrill to watch, not difficult in the slightest - which is a very good thing since I have been anticipating seeing it ever since missing the press screening at last year's NYFF.  My review of said film is up and running over at The Cinematheque.

Read my review of Meek's Cutoff at The Cinematheque.

Some Initial Random Thoughts Upon Finally Seeing Meek's Cutoff

Well it took me long enough didn't it!?  Missing out on the screenings at last year's NYFF and unable to procure a screener from the fine folks over at Oscilloscope (my own fault really with my stupid procrastination) I finally got the chance to see Kelly Reichardt's newest film, Meek's Cutoff.  Here are a few rambling thoughts I decided to jot down for your perusal.  A full-length review will be coming in the next few days sometime.  Until then, chew on the following.

• I love the director's artistic choice to go all old school as it were and film the movie in 1:33 aspect ratio.  Reichardt says she chose this format to make the space seem more closed in and therefore more narrowly viewed like her female character's truncated views of the trail.
• The always incredible Michelle Williams (and yes, I do have the biggest cinematic crush on the lady and therefore am more than a bit biased) does for the desperate frontier woman what she did for the equally desperate but quite proud lost youth of Wendy and Lucy.  A brilliant actor (and not the sexist term actress either) who can show myriad emotion with just a look through the trees.
• The cinematography, though physically truncated by modern standards is some of the most gorgeous this critic has seen in a long while.  The bright, unsympathetic sun of an unknown territory to the dark, barely visible scenes by fire or lamp light.  It seems very reminiscent (and probably purposely so) of the westerns of Mann and Hawks.
• As the final fade comes and the credits (beautifully done as well - what a complete cinematic experience this film is) roll, there came a collective groan amongst the twenty or so patrons around me (behind me actually since I was front and center).  This, like the equally remarkable Wendy and Lucy before it, is far from what one could a movie for the masses.  It is sad but true - the modern moviegoer wants action and adventure and if anything gets even a little off-center, they run for the exits in droves.
• An all-but unrecognizable Bruce Greenwood as the titular guide with delusions of grandeur should be a candidate for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar come the end of the year (and of course Michelle my Belle should be up for lead, but that is a given) but probably will not even be in the running due to Meek's inevitable obscurity - even though it is critically acclaimed.
• The methodical, determined pacing, which has become Reichardt's auteurial signature, makes the growing anguish of these three families of wouldbe settlers - almost in a crescendo format - all the more palpable - and all the more inevitably harrowing.
• To sound like a gushing schoolgirl: I fucking loved this film - and apparently a rather foul-mouthed schoolgirl at that.  The first truly great film of 2011 (which exactly repeats my initial FB status update immediately following the screening and should be used by the filmmakers as a poster blurb), Meek's Cutoff is the first film this year that I have no doubt whatsoever will be amongst my favourites come year's end and my annual best of.

Like I said, a full review (and knowing me, I will have a lot to say) is on the horizon for this week-end, so look out for that (it will be posted here so you don't have to look very far).  Enough said for now though.  Goodnight sweet readers.

My Quest To See the 1000 Greatest: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is #582 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films

Screened 02/12/11 on DVD at Midtown Cinema

Ranked #576 on TSPDT

*this is one in a series of catch-up reviews in my aforementioned quest (which should explain the rather old screening date above).

Step 1: Hire Sam Peckinpah, the most notorious, the bloodiest (and most difficult to work with) filmmaker of his day (sorry Sam Fuller) and give him free reign with the equally notorious and equally bloody (and probably equally difficult to work with) legend of Billy the Kid.

Step 2: Design the entire mood of the movie around a soundtrack written specifically for the film by a certain musical creative genius (and possible prophet incarnate according to a good friend of mine) by the name of Bob Dylan, nee Robert Zimmerman - and give the singer/songwriter a part in the movie as a knife-wielding outlaw named Alias. 

Step 3: Release Hell.

Granted, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is not the balls-out blood-letting that The Wild Bunch is, nor is it as subversively wicked as Straw Dogs but it is still pure Peckinpah from start to finish - well, at least it was until MGM (in the manner of many a tragic studio story of yesteryear) recut the film without the director's knowledge (in other words, brutalized the filmmaker's vision!) and released this decidedly inferior version to inevitably derisive reviews.  The film would later be restored to its supposed original glory, but even the version known as the director's cut, due to it being restored after the director's death, may be lacking in what Peckinpah had wanted his movie to be.  Both versions are available on a double disc DVD set.

But this post-production hanky-panky aside, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a Hell of a fun movie to watch.  The film stars James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson, respectively as the titular friends turned enemies.  The fact that the thirty-seven year old Kristofferson is playing a character that died at twenty-one and the forty-five year old Coburn is playing a man who in reality was just thirty when he killed the Kid, is really nothing more than a quaint anecdote once one turns on their suspension of disbelief and just lets the movie wash over them in the semi-mystical way it is meant to.  Kristofferson and Coburn are great in their roles (rumour has it James Taylor was originally set to play the part of Billy) and the film is filled to the veritable brim with great character actors of the then-present and the past.  In smaller roles, we get to see Jason Robards, Harry Dean Stanton, Dub Tayler, Chill Wills, Charlie Martin Smith, Jack Elam, Slim Pickens, Richard Jaeckel, Luke Askew and Elisha Cook Jr.  Singer Rita Coolidge, Kristofferson's wife at the time, also plays a small part.

Of course the most fun character to watch is that of Alias.  After hearing that Peckinpah wanted to get Roger Miller to do a title song for the movie, Kristofferson brought in Bob Dylan who immediately wowed the at first unconvinced Peckinpah.  The ensuing soundtrack was as unsuccessful as the studio recut film although it did have one song, Knockin' on Heaven's Door, that would become a big hit.  My personal favourite track though (in terms of just its musical style), is the title track - a sweetly melancholic ballad in the tradition of Dylan's more troubadour style of John Wesley Harding.  Yet, the scene in which Knockin' on Heaven's Door plays (where Slim Pickens' character is dying) is not only the finest scene in the film but one of the most emotionally jarring scenes I have ever watched on screen.  The scene is simply devastating.  It is in this manner that Dylan's music helps to make Peckinpah's revisionist western an even more powerful motion picture than even the director (could do.

The movie has the typically heightened sense of self-awareness that many American films had during this period of seventies cinema (think the films of Altman, Scorsese and Bogdanovich) which adds to the storytelling aspect of such a legendary (and oft historically inaccurate) tale.   In my opinion, not only does this film deserve to be included on such a list as is being counting down with these posts (and there are many on the list I feel do not deserve such an honour) but it is one of the best films of the time period.  With an almost counter-culture feel about it (The Vietnam War was still wallowing about and Watergate was a hot topic) Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a prime example of how movies were being made in Hollywood (a surprisingly much freer Hollywood at the time) from the late sixties to around 1981 or 1982.

The Cinematheque Reviews: Rango

What do you get when you mix a cinephiliac freak like Johnny Depp, a boys-will-be-boys director like Gore Verbinski, the down-and-dirty Spaghetti West of yesteryear, a story blatantly stolen/homaged from Chinatown, the services of the epic Roger Deakins as visual go-to guy, a menagerie of gorgeously animated critters of the desert and an iconic Gonzoesque Hawaiian shirt?  Well, you get just pretty much the gosh-darnedest best movie this side of the Pecos (read: Best damned film of 2011, so far).  Seriously, Rango is a surprisingly well-conceived work of animated art-cum-cinematic homage - and this from a noted Pixar-hater (or at least a noted Pixar-indiferencer!?) and self-admitted fuddy-duddy fan of hand-drawn animation (call me a relic, call me what you will, say I'm old-fashioned, say I'm over the hill).  I surprised even myself with my instant love for this film.

Read my review of Rango at The Cinematheque.

My Quest To See the 1000 Greatest: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (1966)

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly is #573 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films 

Screened 09/04/10 on Blu-Ray at Midtown Cinema

Ranked #165 on TSPDT

*this is one in a series of catch-up reviews in my aforementioned quest (which should explain the rather old screening date above).

Quentin Tarantino, one of my favourite directors working in modern Hollywood, claims The Good, the Bad & the Ugly as his all-time favourite movie, proving so by "stealing" several scenes for both his Kill Bill, Volume II and Inglourious Basterds.  Sergio Leone, the director of the same, is one of the greatest visual filmmakers of all-time.  The score of the film, by Ennio Morricone, is one of the most vividly rousing works of filmic music I have ever heard (I even have the main theme as my ringtone).  The Western, as a standard-bearer is one of my favourite genres, and the revisionist and/or Spaghetti style just adds to the revelry.  All this and still it took me until well after my forty-third birthday to finally sit down and watch the damned thing.  But it was well worth the wait, as they say.

Long and weaving, Leone takes his camera everywhere, even right into the sun-beaten faces of Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach, and then takes it even further.  I believe this surpasses what Leone would eventually do a few years later in the still fantastic Once Upon a Time in the West, even if many consider the latter to be the better film (except for me and QT).  From the opening credits, Morricone's score blaring behind, beside, in front of and all around them (supposedly designed in places to mimic the sound of crying hyenas), to the once excised, now put back where it belongs Civil War battle scene, torpedoing his camera and his cast through the trenches of warfare (even if perhaps there was never any actual trench warfare in said war), to the seemingly endless three-way shot out finale, with Tuco's frantic penultimate race around the cemetery, The Good, the Bad & the Ugly is a true blue masterpiece of cinema.  And masterpiece is not a word I toss around all willy-nilly like many others - it means something where I come from. 

Sure, the title may be something of a misnomer - there really is no good person involved here. Eastwood's "good" man-with-no-name is only good in comparison to Van Cleef and Wallach's Bad and Ugly respectively.  Still, that aside, Leone's film is a remarkable thing to watch - especially up on the big screen and in hi-def, with the sound system at screaming capacity, and me in the front row, sitting beside my lovely wife (also seeing the film for the first time).  It was a glourious (sic) time had by all.

The Cinematheque Reviews: True Grit

I don't want to call the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit a disappointment, for that would make one think I did not like it - and I most certainly did.  Yet, when one thinks of the high level of anticipation that comes with such a film as this, and then having said film not live up to that (perhaps) unfair expectation, one surely must come to grips with using the term disappointed, no matter how misleading such a term may end up being.  Let us just say that the new True Grit did not live up to what this critic was hoping it would be, but it still ended up being a rather good film in this very same critic's eyes.

Read my review of True Grit at The Cinematheque.

An Anthony Mann Double Feature: The Man From Laramie (1955) & Man of the West (1958)

Man of the West is #571 and The Man From Laramie is #572 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films 

Screened 07/03/10 on 35mm at Film Forum in NYC 
as part of Film Forum's Anthony Mann Retrospective

Man of the West is Ranked #612 on TSPDT
The Man From Laramie is Ranked #730 on TSPDT 

*this is part of a series of catch-up reviews in my aforementioned quest (which should explain the rather old screening date above). 

So it was my 43rd birthday and I decided to give myself the gift of an Anthony Mann double feature in that city that never sleeps - so up to NYC we went.  Amy (that would be the little missus for those who are new to this whole thing) was to meet a few friends while I took in the aforementioned double feature that was just one tiny part of Film Forum's expansive Anthony Mann Retrospective.  

Now I must confess to a rather glaring gap in my film knowledge at this point in our story.  That enormous hole rearing its all-too-ugly head being that before this trip to Film Forum I had only seen one (yeah, I said one) Anthony Mann film (that film being The Furies, starring the spectacular Stanwyck).  Well, it was about time to (at least in a small part) remedy such an ugly admission, so into Film Forum I went and I took my seat, second row center, and waited for the lights to go down and the celluloid to begin to flicker.  First up (in non-chronological order) was Mann's 1958 film, Man of the West.

Considered Mann's masterpiece by many (out of the five Mann films on TSPDT's 1000 Greatest List, it is ranked the highest) and one of star Gary Cooper's best performances, Man of the West is both typical of the psychologically dark kind of western the director is known and remembered for, and, in being the auteur's final film in the genre, a sort of be-all-end-all culmination of that very same Freudian oeuvre - much in the same way Eastwood's supremely dark Unforgiven was the capper to his own sordid western past. 

Man of the West is the story of a former outlaw, now trying to do good in the world, who gets ensnared back with his old bloodthirsty gang and the psychotic leader who was at one time a father figure to this now reformed aging outlaw.  Much like Eastwood's film later on (and there is no doubt Eastwood was deeply influenced by this film) Mann's final western is a somber affair, full of anger and bitterness and false hope (though, in the end, a real hope does exist).

Claustrophobic in many ways when compared to other films of the genre, Man of the West shows the cold hard facts of life in a cold hard way - including allusions to the brutality of man through the obvious, yet unspoken (the Hays Code was still hanging on in 1958) rape of its leading lady.  Yet, as claustrophobic as Mann's Man may seem, more figuratively than literally, we still get the wide-open spaces so associated with the genre.  Mann once said, "When you're filming a western, people don't want to see the inside of a cabin." and he is certainly right about that.  Dark or light,

Second (again, not chronologically), came Mann's 1955 film, The Man From Laramie, the last of five westerns Mann did with actor James Stewart.  These were a series of films that helped to take the genre into a whole other direction - a psychologically dark and winding direction that even John Ford would succumb to (and make some of his best films within) and would eventually lead to the revisionist westerns of the sixties and seventies.  

Stewart plays a tortured soul (as was his forte in the Mann films) in search of the man who was responsible for killing his brother and nobody does tortured better than Jimmy Stewart - just ask Hitchcock.  An archetype story (a subplot in the 1936 Cecil B. DeMille film The Plainsman, has Gary Cooper obsessing about much the same thing Stewart's character is obsessed about here) The Man From Laramie may not be as dark as Man of the West, but it's psychologically obsessive narrative is just as powerful a treatise on that old chestnut of man's inhumanity to man that Robbie Burns first spoke of lo those many years ago.

Much of what Mann was doing at this time was pretty much ignored in the US (his films w/ Stewart were hits, but non critically well-received for the most part) but thanks to the good folks across the pond at Cahiers du Cinema (you know, Godard, Truffaut, Bazin, Rivette et al) and their brilliant Auteur Theory (I myself am I diehard Auteurist - sorry Pauline, I still love your prose) Mann has become the rousing success he was always meant to be. 

So I would say my birthday went rather well.  After my Anthony Mann double bill at Film Forum I walked uptown to meet my lovely wife and our friends to have dinner at an Indian restaurant somewhere around Herald Sq. (don't remember the name of the place, sorry).  Now I suppose it is time to delve deeper into the Anthony Mann woods - and not just his westerns, but his early noir works too (ed. note: I have since had the opportunity to see The Great Flamarion, Mann's 1945 film featuring Erich von Stroheim and have several others queued up to watch).

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

This review, in all its gushing glory (I really did not have anything bad to say about this film - an oddity for someone as critical as I), was originally published on 01/28/08 at The Cinematheque and is being reprinted here (with a few slight tweaks) as my contribution to the Paul Thomas Anderson Blogathon over at Jeremy Richey's great film blog, Moon in the Gutter.

Beginning with a buzzing disturbance straight out of a Kubrickian nightmare (or is it a Lynchian nightmare?) and ending in a Brechtian feast of gruesome delight that one has to see to believe, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a monster of a movie - more monstrous than anything King Kong could ever dream of serving up. It is some sort of Orson Welles, John Ford, D.W. Griffith, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Erich von Stroheim monstrosity of a motion picture. A cinematic amalgamation of the whole of film history, with arms and legs and heads and horns of all those auteurs that came before him, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a billion-eyed beast of a movie that goes far beyond anything any of us thought Anderson was ever capable of - or pretty much anyone was capable of. Movie y mano, Anderson venomously concocts a near perfect mixture of madness and mise-en-scene to create a motion picture of undeniable cinematic bravura.

Taking Upton Sinclair's Oil! (or at least the first few chapters and epilogue) and transposing it into a postmodern Citizen Kane, Anderson has perfected the very art of auteur filmmaking. Taking what he did with the essence of Scorsese in Boogie Nights and the spirit of Altman in Magnolia, Anderson has multiplied it a million fold with the biblical monster movie There Will Be Blood, and going beyond mere imitation or homage like De Palma or Tarantino, he has entered a magical realm of honest loving cinematic genuflection the likes of which we have not seen from an American director, with the lone blazing exception of David Lynch and his Mulholland Dr., since the days of the director driven cinema of the 1970's American New Wave. This is a bold new American cinema being born, Phoenix-like, from the bloody ashes of all that came and went before. As iconically American as Kane or Chinatown or Taxi Driver or Greed - and just as caustic - this motion picture is something truly incredible. This is something that cannot be missed. This is something superhuman, something supercinematic. To sound quite genuflectory myself - and I cannot help but do so (sounding more like a studio adman or perhaps Anderson's own press agent than the hard-nosed film critic I claim to be) - this is not only the best film of 2007, this may very well be, no make that this is one of the greatest films ever made. Ever.

As far as the story goes, it is a tale of old testament fire and brimstone - literally and figuratively. As pertinent today as it was when Sinclair wrote it in 1927, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a staggering monster movie pitting God vs. Greed, and in the end, as is always the case, Greed wins. This is the story of the deceptively named Daniel Plainview, who we first meet in the dark numbing silence of a makeshift silver mine, then crawling on his back, shattered leg in tow, across miles of rocky terrain just to make his claim and finally as the explosively charged self-proclaimed oil man offering up his services to the throngs of genuflecting would be oil barons, all the time growing richer and richer upon the backs of these naive cash cattle with each successive bursting oil well exploding from the dry dusty ground as if trying to escape the very Devil himself, only to find an even worst beast above the surface. 

Although blatantly modeled after Charles Foster Kane, from humble beginnings to self-exiled madness, Daniel Plainview, without the crutch of any sort of rosebud-esque sentimentality, is 100% pure monster, from top to bottom, from beginning to end. At one point, in a cinematic moment of Hellish Nirvana, as one of Daniel's wells explodes into an inferno straight out of revelations (his water is oil and it runs with the blood of all those around him) and his adoptive son, who is nothing more than a cherub-faced pawn, is nearly killed and left for deaf, we see Daniel silhouetted against the raging fire, covered in a skein of bloody oil, lording over his "creation" as if he truly were the King of Hellfire. As one watches this scene unfold, one surely begins to realize that perhaps this man, this Daniel Plainview is indeed the very Devil himself.

Played with a ferocity that surpasses even Gangs of New York's Bill the Butcher, Daniel Day-Lewis is an ever-simmering, constantly bubbling, potentially explosive demon of a human being as Daniel Plainview - Moloch devouring all that lies before him. Channeling John Huston's Noah Cross with each and every deep long breath and every hulking purposeful step (as I said before, his water is oil and it turns to blood in his own private 'Chinatown') Daniel Day-Lewis proves once again that he is the most intensely superhuman actor working today - and probably the most powerful since the early days of Brando. Full of spleen for the whole of humanity, Day-Lewis/Plainview (for the method actor and the demonic character become one entity throughout), with each demonstratively bold step, keeps his evil mostly in check, with only brief shocks of madness, until his full out direptitious mega explosion come the undeniably full-throttled bestial finale that will take everyone completely and utterly off guard with its absurd madness. In short, Day-Lewis/Plainview will drink your milkshake. He'll drink it up! (trust me, once you have seen this film, that reference will make sense to you, albeit in the most senseless way).

Meanwhile, playing the antithesis to Daniel's fire demon is Paul Dano as the meek-willed young evangelist Eli, who wants his upstart church to be able to cash in on Daniel's oil boom. Stomped at as if a tiny bug by the giant shoes of Daniel, never able to defend himself against this goliath, Eli seems to be the very embodiment of sanctimony itself, but do not let that fool you, as with a glint in his eye, Eli is also the embodiment of the church, a church that wants its lion's share of the gold (or oil in this case) making it (the Church, organized religion, supposed Christian values) play out as just as evil as Daniel and his insatiable thirst for power and money. Using each other for their own cause, trying to prove which is master, God or Greed, Daniel and Eli are the crux of a battle between good and evil, right and wrong, God and Man. A war which has been raging since before time began and will be burning throughout eternity - long after Daniel's oil wells dry up and long after Eli's congregation dies off. The only question remaining is, which side is good and which side is evil - or is there even a difference? 

And then there is the ending. Analyzed and theorized to death, Anderson's final twenty minutes of There Will Be Blood is so reelingly absurd, so dangerously deranged, so batshitcrazy that we may think we are imagining what we are seeing. That somewhere during the buzzing madness that underlies the entire film, we were seduced, hypnotized, poisoned or drugged and what we now are watching is some sort of fever-induced nightmare born of the mad blood that is Anderson's movie. We must be thinking to ourselves that this is not real, that Anderson would not end his film in such a preposterous manner. Yet it is just this ending, this Grand Guignol monster ripped from the death grip of Luis Buñuel, that turns this already brilliant thesis on religion, humanity (and cinema) into a work of mad art that will never be forgotten in the annals of film history. Just as Anderson has stripped bare such films as Citizen Kane, 2001, The Shining, The Searchers, Once Upon a Time in the West, Birth of a Nation, Greed, Chinatown, Taxi Driver McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane (yes I said Citizen Kane twice!), fifty, a hundred years from now, filmmakers not even born yet, not even thought of yet, will strip bare the bloody bones of Anderson's film and in turn will create a new American cinema of their very own - and the phoenix shall be reborn - again.

In sum, while many of Anderson's critics have called him and his film pretentious (probably the most oft-mentioned criticism about Anderson throughout his still young career) one must take that as cop out criticism by those who know not how to take this brave film. Beneath the mantle of a different kind of filmmaker - a lesser filmmaker if you will - pretension can easily take down even the best of intentions, but in the hands of certain auteurs - Welles and Kubrick come to mind immediately - pretension, or more aptly that which one perceives as pretension, can be the very backbone of a great film. In the hands of Paul Thomas Anderson (the heir apparent to Welles and Kubrick perhaps?) it is spun as if gold from the guts and groin of Rumpelstiltskin. To paraphrase Truffaut when writing about Johnny Guitar back in his Cahiers days, if one does not like Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood then they should never go to the movies again, for they know nothing of cinema. 

With that already brazen statement, allow me to make an even bolder, brasher one now. I shall take a word that is tossed about so willy-nilly by studio admen all across the Hollywood hills and mainstream movie critics hoping to see their name in lights (aka as poster blurbs) that it has nearly lost all meaning, all sincerity, and I shall place this word where it should have been all along, upon the most revered pedestal of honour, only to be used in the most extreme cases of canonization. Taking this word - a word I have not used in describing a new film since Lars von Trier's Dogville four years ago, and Lynch's Mulholland Dr. two years before that (and capitalizing it for added impact) - I proudly proclaim at the very top of my lungs and from the very acme of cinematic worship, and with no shame at all in my voice, that Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a Masterpiece!!  Nothing else need be said.

366 Weird Movies Guest Review: Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 54)

Well, it would seem that I am branching out.  I have begun what hopefully will be a long and fruitful guest reviewing gig over at 366 Weird Movies.  It is a site dedicated to (obviously) weird movies.  From the slightly odd to the downright freakish - and everything in between.  My first piece for the site is on Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar.  Perhaps not the strangest film around, but its verging on camp ideals make it at least in the honourable mention category.

Read my review of Johnny Guitar at 366 Weird Movies.

Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)

"There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforward there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray." - Jean-Luc Godard

I watched Johnny Guitar last night and all I have to say is - let the gushing begin.  Seriously, Johnny Guitar is what cinema was and still should be.  Combining Ray's unique talent for visually luscious filmmaking with a genre redefining of the western - Ray's film can be quite ambiguous when it comes to who is wearing the white hat and who the black - dialogue that is beautifully over the top and a not-so-veiled stand against McCarthyism and Hollywood blacklisting.  And on top of all that - Joan Freakin' Crawford!

The film that Truffaut once called "Hallucinatory Cinema", Johnny Guitar is almost magical in its approach to what film is (and again, still should be).   Watching it on the big screen (as I finally did after years of adoring it sitting on my couch in my living room) one is mesmerized by each and every frame of this sexy, delicious, ravenous piece of film history.  Nary a false note is heard - a thing that can be said of only about six or seven films of the thousands and thousands and thousands ever made.  And on top of all that - Joan Freakin' Crawford!

Derek Malcolm of The Guardian said of the film, "This baroque and deliriously stylised Western, along with Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious and Raoul Walsh's Pursued, proves it is possible to lift the genre into the realms of Freudian analysis, political polemic and even Greek tragedy."  Amen brother.

Other westerns of the time delve deeper than the typical genre-specific Hopalong Cassidy territory of the earlier mode - The Searchers is a Freudian masterpiece for sure and the films of Anthony Mann (and to a lesser degree Budd Boetticher) have stretched the ideas of right and wrong to whole other ballparks - but it was/is Johnny Guitar that puts them all to shame, not only in its sheer gorgeousness of set, costume and photography, its brilliantly subversive screenplay ("written" by Philip Yordan as a front for blacklisted writer Ben Maddow) and/or its richly textured (and verging on camp) performances but also in its power to transcend even the very cinema Godard spoke of and become one with the gods so to speak.  Hey, I told you I was going to gush!

And on top of all that - Joan Freakin' Crawford!  A comeback of sorts, Johnny Guitar, no matter how masculine the western genre typically is, is whole heartedly Joan's picture to win or lose.  The film's tagline reads: "Gun-Queen of the Arizona Frontier ! . . . and her kind of men !!!"   The auteur theory aside for a moment - after all this is really Nick Ray's picture to win or lose - it was Crawford who bought the rights to the novel by Roy Chanslor and put the whole kit and kaboodle in motion in the first place and it was Crawford who was taking a chance on reinventing herself.

Derek Malcolm (again) said of Crawford, "What she does in the film transcends either camp or melodrama. It's like watching a legend at work throwing off her previous baggage and gaining a new acting skin."  Perhaps this was the last of her great pictures (though her bloody duet with gal pal Bette Davis a few years later may beg to differ) but nonetheless, Malcolm's words ring true.  We won't even bother going into her on set feud with costar Mercedes McCambridge (wasn't there always one of these?) or the divaesque insistence on having all her close-ups filmed in studio where the lighting could be better staged.  After all, it's Joan Freakin' Crawford - what would one expect?

Sure, there may be flaws (you didn't think I could really be uncritical did you?) but someone once said (it may have been Truffaut, not sure) that every movie has flaws and it is in these flaws that is born something special.  Okay, I may have made that up, who knows, but it is something to believe in. Film lovers are sick people (Truffaut really did say that!) and that can be proven in the fact that we, the aforementioned sick film lovers, can love a film not in spite of its flaws and blemishes but because of them.  Sick.

But for now, let's forget all the critical and analytical mumbo jumbo and end on a much simpler note.  To quote Johnny Guitar himself (see, it's not all about Joan after all) - "There`s only two things in this world that a real man needs.  A cup of coffee and a good smoke."  Fin.