The Revenant (5/5 Stars)

This much is true: In 1823 on Captain Henry’s expedition up the Missouri River, Hugh Glass was attacked by a bear. He was severely wounded. His compatriots could not carry him all the way back to the fort. Two young men, Bridger (18) and Fitzgerald (23) stayed behind to wait for help as the rest went ahead. Bridger and Fitzgerald abandoned Hugh Glass without food or supplies. Hugh Glass crawled and stumbled the some 200 miles back to the fort alone.

This much is also true: Right around the time Director Alejandro Innaritu and Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki were accepting their respective Oscars for Birdman, an on location film shoot was going on in the frigid winter of Wyoming or South America or some other godforsaken place. The conditions were so terrible that they were starting to leak into the press Apocalypse Now style. “The Revenant” was that movie and watching the movie, it looks like hell froze over on the film shoot. I do not know if this movie will join “Apocalypse Now” and “Fitzcarraldo” in the legendary realms of ridiculously hard film shoots but the affect in the theater is akin to those movies. In other words, this movie does the original true story right. It feels like Leonardo Dicaprio (Hugh Glass) was attacked by a bear, abandoned by his compatriots, and ended up crawling two hundred miles to safety through blizzards and Indian attacks. It is an intense awesome movie.

A main star of the movie (and what separates it from all other Westerns) is the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. He is well known for two things. First are his long takes. There are plenty in this movie but I hardly recognized or paid attention to them. When watching his previous movies like Gravity and Birdman, the long takes were part of the excitement. They are less so here as Lubezki uses them plenty but does seem to feel as if he needs to use them exclusively. That is to say when it makes story sense to not keep on the same shot, he doesn’t. Second is simply the look of the movie that seems to only occur in movie shot by him. For the past decade he has perfected this beautiful look in movies such as The New World, The Tree of Life, Gravity, Birdman. It must be hard to do because it looks so great and yet he seems to be the only one doing it. “The Revenant” was shot entirely in winter using only natural light. The result is a movie that does not look like any other movie. It is a ghostly haunted visual effect of denotes the hardness and coldness of life at that time. Lubezki rightly was awarded the Oscar for the past two years. He may very well win again this year and he would deserve it. He is in the prime of a spurt of aritistic genius.

Leonardo Dicaprio may very well win his first Oscar this year and he too would deserve it. This actor I believe has achieved a certain Meryl Streep-ness or Philip Seymour Hoffman-ness that makes it seem that he is perfect for every role he finds himself in. The secret is a full on commitment to the role and if there ever was anyone committed to a role it is Dicaprio here. Here he is wrestling a bear, swimming through icy rivers, eating raw meat, and fighting hand to hand with Indians. His last role was “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It takes a special actor to be the right choice for both roles.

Playing his antagonist, Fitzgerald, is an actor that was made for rugged terrain, the art house muscle man Tom Hardy. The movie does a good job of setting up his villainy. He has worked painstakingly for the last six months only for an Indian attack to steal all of the wealth of the expedition. He was half-scalped earlier in his life (he has a scar that makes him partly bald) and so does not particularly like or more importantly trust Hugh Glass’s half Pawnee son. He is a desperate angry man. Between the two is Captain Henry played by Domnhall Gleeson, who is good looking enough to be a man with money but odd looking enough to belong in the 19^th century. This guy is everywhere this year and impressively pulls off many different characters.

I am playing with the idea of drawing up a syllabus of American History through movies and “The Revenant” is one of those movies I would love to have in it. What makes it better in historical terms that any old western is the unflinching way it shows the elements and the noble/savage way it treats Native Americans. This is particularly important because we have a tendency to look at history in black and white terms. But that is not how this movie treats the Akirawa tribe. It humanizes them and gives them appropriate motivations but it also does not hide the fact that they are extremely dangerous and have their own tribal prejudices. It also portrays them as losers in their struggle as is noted by a scene in which Fitzgerald and Bridger walk through the remnants of a massacre of an Indian village. This too is important.  Lastly, what other movie do you know takes place in 1823. No other movie. Exactly. 

Carol (4/5 Stars)

I suddenly have this strong urge to smoke cigarettes and drink martinis with my girlfriend in some fancy Manhattan restaurant.  

“Carol,” directed by Todd Haynes is based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, “The Price of Salt.” It stars Cate Blanchett as the titular character and Rooney Mara as her significant other Terese Belivet.

They meet in a Manhattan department store. Terese works at the doll store counter. Carol, Christmas shopping for her daughter, asks Terese about what dolls young girls like. Terese says she doesn’t know. As a child she liked trains. Carol orders a train instead. She leaves, “forgetting” her gloves on the counter.

If that sounds like nothing on paper, it is because it is nothing on paper. “Carol” is a movie that lies between the lines. It is a study of glances and body language, costumes, set design, and score. I can only guess that the screenplay by Phyllis Nagy either makes no sense at all or has an absurd amount of writing in parantheticals. And it works the main reason being that the actors are so wonderful to stare at.

First is Cate the Great a case study in Screen Presence. Look at the way she smokes those cigarettes. A certain captivating elegance, grace shall we say, comes to mind. Second is Rooney Mara, whom I’ve described critically before (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) but now with much appreciation as soft all over. Innocence, thoughtfully composed, are some appropriate words. They are wonderful together.

The movie excels in all ways visual. It is aided in that quest by being set in the most glamorous part of the 1950s: Christmas in New York. The costumes are wonderful, the makeup is great, and the art direction is as good as it can be. Director Todd Haynes, like in his earlier great movie Far From Heaven, takes direct inspiration from 1950s melodramas and tries to get the colors and music as close as possible. It is a worthwhile ambition.

The conflict in the story is that they are a homosexual couple in the 1950s. Carol is already married with a child and Terese has a fiancé. Some humor is found when their respective men are confused by their company but not necessarily jealous because they do not understand that they could receive competition via another woman. This subject is hardly risqué at the present time (as opposed to say when Far From Heaven came out in 2002) but it should be noted that this does not hurt the story’s overall impact. It is good enough to the point where it does not need help from political expediency. Perhaps our changing times have even changed the ending. I remember Far From Heaven ending rather tragically. This movie ends with Cate Blanchett’s knowing smile. The movie is comfort food for all lovers.

Footnote: Does one’s sexual identity affect the way an audience member connects with a movie romance? I would submit it does. And for a heterosexual man it may be the case that a lesbian romance can be more affecting than a regular romance between a man and a woman. After all, the man can intuitively grasp why each person would fall in love with the other person. I saw this movie with my girlfriend and I have a feeling I had the advantage in enjoying it. Afterwards she commented on how the score was really loud and obvious. I did not notice the score so much and have little to say about it except to praise the choice of a certain song, “You Belong to Me.”

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (4/5 Stars)

It looks like I won’t be skipping my annual ritual (Godzilla, Abysmal State of Movie Ratings, The Avengers, War Horse) of discussing the idiocy of movie ratings and how they affect onscreen violence. I saw this movie in December so this review counts for 2015.

But first of all, the movie does not suck. It is not great and in a smart and safe way does not particularly try to be. That is all right by me. I felt it put the franchise on solid footing and that (many more) future installments will have the room to be more creative and daring if they feel like it.

The movie looks great in the way it should look great. That is to say that it is has all the best cameras and digital effects of today but stays true to many of the technological tropes of the 1970s that distinguished the original Star Wars films. When characters walk into a bar, the aliens are not digital creations. Like the Mos Eisley Tavern in the original they are composed of real life frabric and costuming. And the 1970s clunky computer graphics that everybody uses in the movie are seamlessly transmitted into a 21^st century blockbuster. It is actually much better than I thought was possible. The movie looks great in the correct way. Good job team J.J. Abrams.

The movie introduces two new lead characters and is so good at doing it that the 30-year gap between movies may turn out to be a blessing year in disguise. The first is Rey (played by Daisy Ridley), a poor orphan on the outpost planet of Jakku. She is a stoic scavenger that hunts for parts in the nearby crash-landed and abandoned Imperial Star Destoyer. The second is Finn (played by John Boyega) a stormtrooper who deserts his post after witnessing the brutality of the Imperial system. On his first mission he is told to kill innocent villagers and chooses not to follow orders. Knowing he will be severely punished for not toeing the line, he rekidnaps the newly captured Rebel pilot, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) to help him escape away.

Rey and Finn are respectively a woman and a black guy. The movie has determined to include everybody. As a white guy I am going to have to be content with Oscar Isaac, who is awesome and I am content with him. Thankfully the movie does not seem to particularly care about Finn being black. However it does insist on several jokes about Rey being a strong woman. These aren’t bad as much as I’ve already heard them before. My favorite though has to be when Rey and Finn are being chased and an explosion near Finn knocks him out. He wakes up and asks Rey, who is standing over him, if she is all right.

 The rest of the new people are a casting director’s dream of interesting people. Adam Driver (of all people) is the new Sith Lord, Kylo Ren. He is a bit of pretty boy and that is one of the relatively more daring twists in this installment. It works by the way. Kylo’s evil counterpart, General Hux, is played by Domhnall Gleeson. Domhnall is my 2015 nominee for Best Year (Ex Machina, Brooklyn, The Force Awakens, The Revenant). Then there is Lupita Nyongo (12 Years a Slave) and Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones) who provide voices for their respective characters. None of these actors are all that famous but if you consistently watch good movies, you know of them, because they have distinct voices and memorable faces. They are not a marketing executive’s generalized lowest common denominator pick of what would appeal to most people at the same time (like say the many superheros played by Chris). Nobody in this movie is like that (well maybe Daisy Ridley if we can safely say that being a woman is no longer a handicap anymore). That is kind of amazing in and of itself and makes the movie (and any future installments) that much more interesting to watch.  

Past castmembers are also back but in supporting roles. Luke Skywalker’s absence is a major plot point. I suspect Mark Hamill will have a much larger role in the next movies. Princess Leia is now General Leia and she too has not so big a part though I suspect she may have a larger part in a future movie as well. (There was some controversy over how Carrie Fisher looks. It is not that she has not aged well. It is that she has had enough work done on her face that she no longer looks like a natural aged progression of Princess Leia. It would not have been a big deal if she had wrinkles. She’s old. She should have wrinkles. It is worth noting this in a review because her appearance is unnatural enough to be distracting.) Of the original cast members this movie belongs to Han Solo (and Chewbacca).

Han Solo’s presence and in particular his cool/frustrated dynamic with the always over his head but optimistic anyway Finn provides much of the movie’s fun. There is a good deal of it and provided many of my favorite parts. At one point several of Han Solo’s aggrieved trade partners come after the smuggler and Finn in an effort to save Solo accidentally releases his cargo of extremely dangerous alien predators. And now everyone might die. That was a hoot.

Also rather fun and the defining characteristic of the Star Wars franchise is the aggrandizement of the individual. Other movies are content enough with having the guy next door achieve superpowers, go on an adventure, and save the day/win the hot girl. In Star Wars, all this happens but on a galactic scale! That is to say instead of just competing with several billion people on Earth for the mantle of most special, the characters in Star Wars are supposedly contending with trillions. And the major players in this extraordinarily multidinous amount of life are somehow related by blood. The scope of Star Wars very very big and the people who actually matter are very very few. Try not to think about it too much or the whole thing may seem rather silly. Just enjoy it like when characters somehow infiltrate a gigantic base and somehow know where everything is and somehow never get caught or seen by the many patrols. It’s like when you were five and you played war games or hide and seek except this is with a budget of several hundred million dollars.

Having said that there was something that really nagged me while watching this movie. Take Finn’s story. The fact that he is a disgraced stormtrooper has the effect of humanizing the storm troopers. But, that does not stop him (or anyone else) from killing a lot of stormtroopers in this movie with very little hesitation. And that is just the death you see outright. This movie destroys planets. Not a planet like the original Star Wars. The mean General Hux destroys five planets with his Planet Death Star thingy. That is an extraordinary amount of death right? I mean that is like tens of billions of people. But what is the reaction to this? In the first Star Wars, Ben Kenobi felt a tremor in the force and had to sit down or whatever. In this movie, there does not seem to be any grieving period at all. The planets are not named, no main characters die, and so it is not that big of a deal. As far as I can tell J.J. Abrams with his penchant for destroying entire planets (he has done so before, see Star Trek) must have officially surpassed Roland Emmerich for the motion picture director with the most blood on his hands.

And all of this in a PG-13 movie. How can tens of billions of people die in a movie and it retain its PG-13 status? Counterintuitively the reason it can is because nobody cares about these people. The deaths happen out in the distance of space to nameless people we do not know who have no connection to the people in the story we do know. This is counterintuitive because movie ratings are supposedly about morality and it is pretty universal in all systems of morals that human life is important and equivalent to all other human life. But this is not how it is in movies. In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we are prompted to care far more about the death of a main character than we are for the tens of billions of people who have died during the course of the film. And anybody who has a mask or helmet on? Thier life isn’t worth shit and their untimely deaths at various times are occasions for laughs or thrills. The MPAA gives a movie an R rating on the basis of blood not death or injury. But what is the ultimate effect of this? Basically any death that isn’t taken seriously (because all violent death requires blood) is okay to show to children. But should children not be aware that violence causes men to suffer and bleed? Should they be told that if they don’t see a person’s face than that person’s death is trivial? And if a person or very many people died in some far off place, should it be related as no big deal?

Such are the idiocies of the present policy and whatever it’s supposed ambitions to promote morality are, I argue that they do the opposite. And I expect I will make the same argument again sometime in the next year.

The Big Short (5/5 Stars)

This movie is an achievement on several fronts. First it achieves clarity in its subject. Second it achieves humor throughout. Third it has a strong moral. It takes considerable skill to do this given that the subject, the secondary mortgage market, is complicated and obscure and I can only hope my review is organized well enough to capture everything that needs to be praised.

The story comes from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book, “The Big Short.” That book tells three completely separate stories about who profited from the subprime meltdown that cratered the global economy in 2008. Given that almost nobody figured out (or wanted to figure out) that everything was terrible before it was, the people that did are very interesting outsiders. The movie was adapted by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay. It was directed by Adam McKay.

One is Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an ex-brain surgeon hedge fund manager, who did something nobody else did. He read the underlying mortgage bonds. He spent a couple weeks doing so while barefoot in his office listening to deafness-inducing death metal. Then he did an extraordinarily audacious thing. In 2005, he invested 100 million dollars of his client’s money (against their wishes) in a financial instrument he requested the banks invent that bet against these bonds. It was a ballsy move given his own calculations had the bonds failing in the second quarter of 2007. How the movie treats this character is illuminating. They could have easily gone down the Benedict Cumberbatch route of making him arrogant and dismissive of all the ordinary people of the world. But as Michael Burry points out to his angry clients, “I don’t know how to be sarcastic. I can’t tell a joke. I know numbers.” He corresponds with the incredulous bankers he works with in a humble unassuming way. Everybody is either making fun of him or angry with him for the next couple years.

Second is Mark Baum (Steve Carell). We are introduced to him in an anger management support group. A troubled man is talking about how the world makes him angry. Mark Baum walks in late and immediately starts talking about himself. He is angry with Wall Street bankers and all the big guys beating up the small people. He casually pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down completely oblivious to the fact that he has interrupted the meeting. Then his phone rings. “I have to take this,” he remarks and leaves the room to take the call. Fucking Brilliant. The man is an asshole, but given that he hates Wall Street and spends the entire movie railing against corruption and fraud, he is our asshole. He has a team of angry people working for him including Danny Moses (Rafe Spall), Porter Collins (Hamish Linklater), and my favorite Vinnie Daniel (Jeremy Strong). This quartet form an angry hedge fund that is propositioned by an oily banker named Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling). Vennett has heard of Michael Burry’s bet and wants to sell somebody else the same thing. Unfortunately nobody wants in on this bet. Except the Baum hedge fund guys who don’t trust bankers. There is a lot of yelling amongst these guys, most of it hilarious. And that is a very important thing as what Vennett is explaining to Baum and (also to us) is the secondary mortgage market, which is an absurdly obfuscated and complicated thing. The movie pulls out all the stops and breaks a lot of rules in order to explain how it works. Jared Vennett, the chief explainer, also serves as the movie’s narrator. At other times people just turn to the camera and make it a little clearer to the audience what exactly is happening on the screen. Then at other other times the movie employs Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, Selena Gomez at a blackjack table, and Anthony Bourdain making a Monday morning stew of old fish to explain the different tranches of a Collateralized Debt Obligation. It also helps that McKay sometimes substitutes for different financial terms the word “dogshit,” as in “these loans are dogshit,” as opposed to “non-performing." All of this saves a lot of time, which as McKay should know and amply demonstrates is the friend of comedy.

Third is the twenty-something partnership of Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Witrock). They specialize in betting that bad things will happen (natural disasters and the like) given the theory that most people do not plan on terrible things to happen to them. They are introduced (about 45 minutes into the film) in a very endearing way. They want to go work for JP Morgan and have an interview that does not get past the lobby of the building. An intern (or at least a very young associate) meets them downstairs and points out that they have one billion (or something) less money than it takes to get an ISDA (described as the ticket to get to the big boys table). They feel stupid and rejected. So let us do a tally. We have our bullied nerd, our asshole, and our young nobody underdogs.

There is one more character but I’m going to intterupt my own review to talk about the ingenious way Adam McKay brings all of these characters together. They never meet each other, but they know about each other. Jared hears about Michael Burry’s bet at an afterwork bar. Charlie and Jamie pick up Jared’s prospectus in the lobby of JP Morgan. Except that is not how it happened. We see this happen but then Jared turns to the camera at the afterwork bar and tells us that he does not hang out with these people. He has fashion friends. Actually, Charlie tells us, he did not pick up the prospectus in the lobby. He heard it through a friend and Jamie found out about some other not very cinematic way. This is halfway brilliant by Adam McKay. First, how these characters hear about the other deals is not important to the story. In many nonfiction adaptations moviemakers do this sort of efficient blurring of the truth all the time. It saves time for the audience, this is understood, so it does not take away from anything for the characters to turn to us and let us know that we are seeing a movie convention. But only that would not be brilliant. It is brilliant because McKay takes this convention and admission and turns it into a setup for one of the greatest, hilarious, and cathartic payoffs in the movie. During a seminar Mark Baum interrupts a speaker on a stage (not during a Q and A session) with a question. The speaker answers and Mark interrupts him again to contradict him angrily. Then Mark’s phone rings, he answers it, announces to everyone that he has to take this and leaves the room. Then Jared, who is also in the room, turns to the camera and states, “That actually happened. Mark did that.” This joke would not have been possible if McKay had not been breaking the rules all the while. He needed to break the rules in order to tell the story efficiently. What makes this movie’s screenplay brilliant is how he uses all the broken rules (that are rules generally because they are distracting and take the audience out of the story) to do things that bring home jokes and cathartic points. The techniques that break the rules do not distract, they reinforce and make scenes better. Adam McKay and Charles Randolph deserve the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

So Charlie and Jamie are rejected but they have a trick card. They have befriended an ex-banker in their hometown named Ben Rickart (Brad Pitt with a beartd). Underscoring how bullshit the system is, this guy uses his connections with a big bank to get the necessary ISDA that they would not have been able to get based on their underlying merit.

So now everything is set up and explained and the rest of the movie is payoff. It is generally funny up until a point and then the movie hits us with several very moral scenes. My favorite (and there are plenty to pick from) comes at a point where Charlie and Jamie make several great bets and are very excited about it. They are dancing in the lobby of a Las Vegas convention center and Ben Rickart angrily tells them to stop. “Do you realize what you just did? You bet against the U.S. economy. If it turns out well for you it hurts everybody else. One tick upward in the unemployment rate is a hundred thousand people out of work. This is what I hate about banking. It takes human beings and turns them into numbers in a spreadsheet. Just don’t fucking dance.”

There are several moments like this in the movie and they all work very well. It may come as some surprise that this is the first dramatic movie Adam McKay has ever made. He is known for the best of the Will Ferrell comedies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step-Brothers, and The Other Guys). It is fun now to watch other movie critic revise what they think of the guy now that he has made a truly great movie that is not a comedy. (Not me. I have always thought Talladega Nights was a perfect movie). I hope McKay makes other movies that are not completely comedies. He obviously cares deeply about people and has the skill and talent to take complicated problems and break them down in digestible parts. He also has a comedic director's skill in caricature. This comes into play most readily in his satirical treatment of secondary characters. I especially love how the woman at the ratings agency (a fine Melissa Leo) has come back from an eye exam and is wearing thick sunglasses. And the coup de grace has to be the SEC girl who is in Vegas at the secondary mortgage market convention with the sole purpose of shacking up with a guy with Goldman Sachs in order to get on the ground floor of that bank once her couple years at the agency are up.

I have studied this subject quite a bit and have only this to add. Everything this movie shows about the banking industry is correct and their angry attitude is entirely called for. Having said that, it does not follow that the homeowners (who this movie does not hold under their satirical light) are entirely blameless. Many took out loans for houses they could not afford. Some people took out two or three mortgages and a line of credit on their property. These people deserved to lose their homes. I bring this up not to contradict this movie but to impress upon the reader that one does not need to take sides between ordinary people and banks in this crisis. It is entirely possible and I would posit that it is completely true that everybody is guilty and the true injustice is not that ordinary people suffered but that the big banks and the people who worked for them did not. Of course if one had to decide who is guiltier, it would tip towards the banks. After all, they were professionals who told everyone that they knew what they were doing.

One of my favorite scenes is when Charlie and Jamie sneak into Lehman Brothers after it has collapsed. And they walk around the deserted trading floor with its infantile Red Bull can pyramids. It was not how Charlie imagined it would be. “What did you expect?” asks Jamie. Charlie reflects a moment before adding, “I thought adults worked here.”

The Hateful Eight (3/5 Stars)

Given the huge deal Quentin Tarantino, the writer/director of The Hateful Eight, made about his once-in-a-lifetime roadshow, particular aspects are decidedly underwhelming. Take for instance the promise of the movie being shot in Panavision Super 70 mm filmstock. Tarantino gushed about how it was the largest widescreen format that ever existed and that it had not been in use since the 1950’s and 1960’s for such epics like “Ben Hur” and “Cleopatra.” Well, that is wonderful if the vast majority of The Hateful Eight’s three hour run time had not taken place within a single room. This movie is no epic. So I guess its cool that he used that obsolete film stock but he sure did not need to. Or take for instance the presence of additional footage in the movie. Given that the movie is almost entirely composed of people talking in rooms, I’m not sure this movie needed more of that. In fact it probably would have been better with less. It had a new Ennio Morricone score and that’s cool because Morricone made the best Western scores of the 1960s, but this score is not as good as those old scores. The program was pretty cool except that the movie was not a timeless masterpiece so I doubt it will be a piece of memorabilia in great demand.

“The Hateful Eight” for all its grandiose presentation is decidedly a small movie. A bounty hunter named John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is taking a prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang in the near town of Red Rock. His carriage picks up two more passengers, another bounty hunter named the Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and the supposed new sheriff of Red Rock, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). There is a blizzard that will intercept them on their journey so they decide to wait it out at Minnie’s Haberdashery. They do not find Minnie at the Haberdashery. Instead they find Senor Bob (Demian Bichir) looking after the place, Oswaldo Mobray the supposed hangman (Tim Roth), General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) an ex-Confederate officer searching for his son, and Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) who is in town to visit his mother. John Ruth makes the splendid observation that one of these men is not who they say they are. Minnie’s Haberdashery is composed of a bar, a kitchen, a general store, several beds and a place to sit by the fire, but it is all one room. The blizzard sets in and everybody waits for shit to start happening.

It takes awhile. By my count it takes about an hour and a half, which in my humble opinion is too long. Most of that time is exposition, that is to say it is people talking about what other people have done in the past. Something along the lines of one character saying to another, “Don’t you know who this so-and-so is, they did some crazy shit during the war.” I wrote about this sort of thing earlier in my “Steve Jobs” review. Movies are a show not tell medium. Lots of scenes where people talk about what happened in the past are more appropriate in the play medium where it is necessitated by the lack of ability to go all over the place but rendered harmless by the immediacy of the action. “The Hateful Eight” would probably make a great play. Very little would have to be changed. As a movie it can be, from time to time, <ahem> boring. There I said it. Boring, especially during the first half. It also does not help that Tarantino, though admittedly funny and cool, is not as funny and cool as he thinks he is. Some of the look at me funny and cool lines fell flat because the movie had not yet become cool or funny enough for them.

In the meantime and through to the end there is plenty of use of the word nigger and a lot of punching the woman in the face. We can take these one at a time because Tarantino does interesting things with the first one and not so interesting things with the second.

It is fair to say that the cinematic relationship between Samuel L. Jackson and Quentin Tarantino is a special one that does something more than simply transcend the race line. For other white writer/directors it is simply enough to make a sympathetic black character that has a rounded personality and isn’t merely an appendage to the white people. Jackson and Tarantino do more than that. They create black characters in the midst of terrible racism that are also complicated to the point of being bad men themselves. It is tough to be a despicable black character when everybody else in the movie is calling nigger. In this movie, we are drawn preternaturally to Major Marquis Warren’s side because he is the ultimate underdog, the one black guy in Wyoming. We judge the goodness and badness of the other characters by how they treat him. If they have respect for him, like John Ruth, he is a good guy. If they do not, like everybody else, they are not good guys. The most interesting thing about this movie is that by the mid way point, the audience may start wondering whether Major Marquis Warren is somebody to cheer for at all. Samuel L. Jackson has I believe only been nominated for one Oscar (Pulp Fiction). I believed he should have won for Django Unchained. If he is nominated for this movie, it can be said it was deserved. He is the reason why the movie should be watched at all.

Now for the gratuitous violence done towards the woman in the story, Daisy Domergue. She is a course rude bitch with a mouth on her. In the past she has murdered people and she deserves to be hanged. For as much insight Tarantino has had about the history of race relations, he shows a general lack of knowledge about the history of women. I have not yet heard of a 19^th century (or before) story about a woman like Daisy Domergue. Nor am I likely too because no such woman or very few of them have ever existed. Tarantino has this false notion that feminism in movies consists of giving a woman a weapon (gun or sword or kung fu) and having them kick ass. It does not work that way. You see women are physically weaker than men. At some point it does not matter how good at kung fu they are. They will generally lose battles to guys who have 50 or 100 pounds on them. The astute feminist screenwriter will then give their female characters what historical women have always had, shrewdness and wiles. They will not simply make them another man. When Tarantino made “Django Unchained” he paid attention to the psychology of a slave. Jamie Foxx did not just start out badass and plucky. He had to be rehabilitated from a society that would inflict physical and psychological harm on him if he did anything out of line. When making a historical period piece about a woman it should be required that their respective psychology is taken into account because women were subject to societal pressures as well. Tarantino ignores this and his reason for doing so is to make it okay for this particular woman to be punched in the face a bunch. That is to say he has made this particular woman more of a rotten bitch than she historically has any sense in being and he did it in order to make it okay for terrible things to be done to her.

I remember there was a time when Tarantino’s movies were violent but not as violent as people thought they were. When I watched the DVD extras of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, a big deal was made by how the violence merely felt gratuitously violent because of superior moviemaking. Like in Reservoir Dogs you don’t actually see the ear being cut off, or in Pulp Fiction the samurai cut is below the screen. Contrast that with Tarantino’s last several films where the blood being spilt is generally more extreme than what it would be in real life. One could reasonably question whether if say someone blew off someone else’s head three or four feet away from Jennifer Jason Leigh would she really be splattered with that much blood and brains? I doubt it and I’m pretty sure it is in there less for realism and more because Tarantino wanted to see a woman’s face splattered with blood and brains. It sure makes one question about early Tarantino’s professions of not being as violent as people said he was. As soon as he got a decent budget to splatter blood all over the screen he went whole hog.