Five Films Series: “Django Unchained”

Editor's (that's me!) Note: This article was written for the website HalftimeHennessy.com; you can check it out there as well....

In 1994, the preeminent black filmmaker Spike Lee had a good question for Hollywood. Who does this white guy Quentin Tarantino think he is, using the N-word a half a hundred times in his movies?  Tarantino shot back that he was first and foremost a writer before he was a white man and this granted him the right to have his characters speak like real people spoke, period. Looking back, he was probably right, I mean, when is the last time someone saw “Pulp Fiction,” and thought it was racist. But at the time, it was rather new to have the word said at all, and especially to have the phrase "dead n***** storage," said so frequently. It was definitely something that would not have been okay twenty years before that.

Well, have you heard what Tarantino’s next movie is about? It is a “Southern,” starring Jamie Foxx as an ex-slave on a mission to free his slave wife from an evil plantation owner, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Samuel L. Jackson co-stars as the complicit head house slave. This is kind of revolutionary. Every movie in the past that came even remotely close to American slavery always treated it in this very serious and dramatic way. In contrast, this will be a Tarantino film. That is, it will probably be rather enjoyable to watch. In preparation for some great cocktail party discussions this winter when the movie comes out, here are five films that will make you an expert in race relations, at least where movies are concerned.

  1. Birth of a Nation (1915), Director D.W. Griffith

 Every discussion about race in movies must start with “Birth of a Nation,” a movie that revolutionized movie storytelling in both technique and technology, broke box office records, and is arguably the most virulently racist movie ever made. The first hour and a half is a civil war movie. The action sequences were great back then but by today’s standards, kind of suck. I suggest skipping ahead to 1 hour twenty minutes when Lincoln is shot in the head. The really astonishing stuff gets into gear right afterwards during Reconstruction, a time in which the North occupied the South with an army and freed blacks gained citizenship and the rights that went with it for a brief period of time.

 “Birth of a Nation,” tells an alternate history. One in which The Ku Klux Klan was started as a measure of self-defense when ex-slaves started bullying white people at the voting booth and making unjust rulings against whites via all black juries. The irony is overwhelming and may suspect the viewer to awful pain-inducing laughter. Others play like some sort of bizarre hallucination, like the surreal scene of a session of congress composed of all black senators with their bare feet upon their desks eating chicken and drinking whiskey. My favorite though has to be the hurt look on whitey’s face when a black guy has the audacity to walk past him on a public sidewalk. Oh the injustice!

 Perhaps the most ridiculous thing about this movie is that apparently the makers didn’t think they were being racist. D.W. Griffith actually testified to that belief. But that’s like saying it’s okay to say the sky is green because you really believe that it is green. At some point self-delusion becomes unforgivable. For instance, it is this movie’s argument that the ex-slaves were content with slavery and that they were basically tricked and goaded into wanting rights by northern carpetbaggers. There are even some (loyal) ex-slave characters in this movie that think having these rights is really stupid and a truly unforgettable scene near the end of the movie when they actually fight back against their fellow African Americans on behalf of the really nice white folk.

 Now let’s talk about sex. One of the more peculiar things about “Birth of a Nation” is its lack of black actors. Quite a few of the black characters are actually played by white people in blackface. But not just any blackface. It is poor blackface so the audience can easily tell that it is not actually black people playing the black roles. Well, that’s odd? Why would they do that? Well, for one thing, the plot calls for black men making sexual advances on white women (at one point a white woman actually commits suicide by jumping off a cliff to get away from a black pursuer). Apparently it would have been way too outrageous to have an actual black person to leer at a white woman, even if it was only a movie. 

Since it is now public domain I am including the movie in its entirety here. I consider it a must-see movie first as a cultural education on insidious effects of racism and second as a baleful of incredulous laughs. It certainly wouldn’t be in good taste, but if you structured a drinking game around taking a shot whenever something astonishingly false or disgustingly offensive happens, you would probably get pretty wasted pretty quick.

 

 2. Gone with the Wind (1939) Directed by Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Sam Wood 

 In 1939, the epic Civil War blockbuster “Gone With the Wind” became the highest grossing movie ever made, a title it still holds when one accounts for inflation. It also has several things in common with “A Birth of a Nation.”

 It should be noted first of all that unlike “A Birth of a Nation,” “Gone With the Wind” is still a movie worth seeing simply as a movie. Whereas the action sequences in “Birth” are piss-poor by today’s standards, the set pieces in “Gone With the Wind,” are still effective and at least one, the zoom out of the battlefield wounded, is as masterful as ever. The character development and story arc are helped as well by ditching the ludicrous excesses of historical inaccuracy that plague “Birth.” But in terms of race, one aspect of “Birth” is still very present in “Gone With the Wind,” and that is a complete omission of anything negative about slavery and several black characters that are weirdly loyal to the main characters. This is represented in an idyllic representation of the slave plantation known as Tara. It is an unquestioned good place in the antebellum part of the movie, and when it is destroyed during the war, it is no doubt a very tragic thing. The slaves in this movie just might agree if anyone bothered to ask them or cared what they thought about it.

 But even so, for its time, the movie could be considered a step in the right direction. The character of Mammy, at least in the way Hattie McDaniel plays her, is a strong no-nonsense woman and generally speaking the smartest person in the room. None of the other characters seem to notice of course, that is except the societal outcast, Rhett Butler. At first look, the character may seem rather one-dimensional given that she spends the entire movie cranky and cantankerous, but I don’t know, if you were a slave, maybe you’d be pissed off all the time too.

 In 1939, Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to be nominated and win an Oscar, beating out her fellow white cast-mate Olivia De Haviland in the same category. The Academy recognized as the best supporting actress of the year and then made her sit apart from everybody else in the cast and crew at a segregated table.

 

 3. In the Heat of the Night (1967), Directed by Norman Jewison 

 “In the Heat of the Night,” may not be widely seen today but its influence is still felt in cineplexes every year. Have you ever seen that movie where an odd couple of police officers are assigned to the same case? Maybe at first they do not even like each other, but over time they gain each other’s respect and by the end catch the bad guy on equal terms. Well, “In the Heat of the Night,” was the first of such movies and literally invented the sub-genre. It went over so well, in fact, that it won the Best Picture Oscar in 1968.

 Sociologists will confirm that the working together of people on an equal level is what breaks down prejudice, whereas if you had a master-servant or boss-employee relationship, it would only reinforce notions of superiority/inferiority. Here is a very entertaining example of exactly that happening.

 The black man is played by none other than Sidney Poiter, who in the sixties basically was at the center of his own subgenre of movies that were expressly aimed at breaking down racial prejudice. Sidney was just the black man to do it. He was handsome, well dressed, well spoken, educated, polite, and had the whitest freaking name in the world. Basically he was everything society said the ideal white man should be except he was black. So either you liked him or you admitted you were a racist. Sidney Poiter starred in several of these kinds of movies, but “In the Heat of the Night,” is the most entertaining of them as it has both sex and violence. If you want to be bored by a movie of great cultural importance, you can watch “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”

 

 4. Do the Right Thing (1989), Directed by Spike Lee 

 Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” is a landmark for racial-conscious movies not just because it was the first written and directed by a black person, but for also who the primary audience was for it. In other words, the previous movies on this list were all aimed at white people, whether or not it was to reinforce their views or to change them. “In the Heat of the Night,” is about a white racist sheriff. He is the one that changes in that movie. Sidney Poitier is a supporting character in that arc as far as I’m concerned. (I argue that you can say the same thing about the black characters in such recent movies as “The Blind Side” and “The Help.”)

In contrast, “Do the Right Thing,” is not about white people. It is about a black community that is confronted with racism both personally (for example, the N word) and more importantly institutionally (for example there isn’t a single black-owned business in a neighborhood that is 90% black). Racism in “Do the Right Thing,” is a given. The question presented for discussion is what should black people do about it?

 Spike Lee makes such a question deliberately hard to answer. The story takes place during the hottest day of the year, encompasses an entire neighborhood’s worth of colorful characters, and draws out a domino chain of cause and effects from little slights (why does a pizza place in a almost entirely black neighborhood have an exclusively Italian hall of fame) to grievous errors (a police officer’s use of a very controversial type of chokehold hold on an arrested subject), that slowly but surely accumulate into a night of racial violence prompted by the action of a character that has good reasons not to do and to do what he eventually does.

 One other thing to notice: When white people make race-conscious movies in a non-racist way, it tends to bring out the Sidney Poitier in black people. One example is comeuppance, a sort of comedic affirmative action. It is a technique whereby a racist joke is generally followed by the minority scoring a little victory or the offender looking foolish in some way. Another technique is balancing. Say you were to have a really stupid black character (like say Tracy Jordan on “30 Rock”) In order to not be racist, you can include a really smart black character in the story as well (like say the Harvard man Twofer on “30 Rock”). Or you can have true plausible deniability by being racist to every race in your movie (South Park, Harold and Kumar, the list here is pretty large). Or finally if you were really pathetic and your name was Michael Bay, you would lazily have non-white minorities make stupid racist jokes at each other to create the thin illusion that no white people were actually involved (Bad Boys II).

 But since “Do the Right Thing,” is made by a black person it allows the black characters a greater license to be flawed three-dimensional humans. There isn’t any fear that a viewer would mistake the character’s personality to be the black writer’s view of all black people. For example, perhaps a white writer (who isn't Tarantino) would have hesitated before making the character of “Buggin’ Out,” such an asshole.
 

 5. Crash (2005) directed by Paul Haggis

 I end this essay with “Crash,” the best picture winner from 2005. Watching this movie alongside the other four I think really demonstrates just racism has changed the last 100 hears. In many ways “Crash” can be seen as sort of a post-racial movie in that every single character in “Crash,” is aware of racism and knows that it is a bad thing. Politicians even wheel and deal with the knowledge that people are judging their actions in terms of race. Weirdly enough this provokes them to make decision explicitly based on race, like for instance giving a police promotion to a black man in order to not look racist when they are arresting a disproportionate amount of black people.

 Just for fun, “Crash” expands the race dialogue into a more culturally diverse realm where everybody on earth is involved and it is not merely just a black and white thing. And as a hyperlink movie, we get about 15 main characters which intersect each other’s stories whether by purpose or coincidence or by crashing into each other’s cars. In the meantime they all take turns being racist in that relatively benign way that we are nowadays (and by that, all I mean is that I’ve watched “Birth of a Nation.”)

 “Crash” is a special movie for me because it actually changed my thinking about certain things. In particular, there was this one scene where this non-racist character (who I of course identified with the entire movie) makes a snap judgment about another character and ends up shooting him. In that scene, there had been an argument and the non-racist character thought the other person was reaching for a gun, when in reality he had been reaching for something predictably innocent. Thing is, in the moment I was watching the movie, I thought that the other guy was reaching for a gun too. And if I were to be totally honest, I probably would have shot him too. Shows what I know about not being racist.

 

John Carter of Mars (2/5 Stars)

Really expensive nonsense

“Only enormously talented people could have made "Death to Smoochy." Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.”

-       Roger Ebert

The explanation of why "John Carter of Mars" exists is better than the movie itself. It’s director Andrew Stanton is best known as one of the great creative forces behind the golden age of Pixar. He was a cowriter for all three Toy Story movies and directed both “Finding Nemo,” and “Wall-E.” To a movie lover like me he is arguably one of the greatest living directors and I would put “Wall-E” on a list of the 100 best movies ever made. To studios he represents enormous profits, both “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” having broken box office records for animated movies. So when Andrew Stanton came to the producers at Disney with an idea for a science fiction/comic book movie with lots of violence and exotic locations, who in their right mind would say no. They granted Stanton full access to the Disney playground. $250 million dollars later in production value and $100 million dollars later in marketing produced the movie that last week grossed only $30 million and is destined to be one of the biggest flops of the year. What went wrong? Well, for one thing, the movie isn’t any good. But how could that happen? (See above). There are two main problems both of which could have been solved by a cigar-chomping asshole producer with only dollars for eyeballs. Those people are good for something.

The first big problem is way too much faithfulness to the source material. This movie is based on more than a century old comic book series. In this book we are introduced to made up weapons, made up languages, made up peoples, made up places, made up cultural customs, made up powers, made up gods and goddesses. Everything is nothing I had ever heard of before. When a character dramatically intones that they have to find the ninth ring of iths from the gates of Barsoon before the tharks release the giant white ape and the thurns shapeshift for the red man blue man widget marraige at Helium, my reaction is like, “Huh? What?” And this sort of thing goes on for much of the movie. They keep throwing in new shit, giving no explanation or time for it to sink in, and then expecting big dramatic payoffs. A very big problem has to do with the story’s technology. People in flying warships are fighting with swords while big green men on the ground have calvary and guns. Then there are these other dudes that have the ability to shapeshift and vaporize anything within a few seconds using a blue widget thingy. I haven’t the slightest idea what that thingy is or why nobody else has it or why it was not used in the battles far more often. This movie could have been a lot shorter if the blue vaporizer thingy had not been used so sparingly. Then there is John Carter himself, a civil war veteran from Earth, transported to Mars via a little thingy, to find that his Earth muscles provide him with superior abilities on Mars’ lower gravity. Basically, he is super strong and can jump really high. But how high can he jump? The movie is very very unclear about that. At points it is just a few meters, but at other times it could very well be a football field. It is this critics opinion that for action sequences to be effective, the laws of physics must be followed, even when it is on Mars, or if they are to be bent they are bent in a clear and predictable manner (See “The Matrix.” Do not see “Matrix Reloaded” or “Matrix Revolutions.”) Otherwise nothing makes sense and the story’s momentum and suspense deflates. The suspension of disbelief gone we are merely witnessing an actor in a weird costume skipping around a room with a green screen.

That actor would be Taylor Kitsch a remarkably bad choice in casting whose responsibility for the failure of the movie is only somewhat alleviated by the even worse choice of Lynn Collins, as the Martian princess. Put these two together and you have some of the most horribly acted scenes I have seen in a long time. And you cannot merely just say that the material was arcane and stilted. Sure they are speaking about weird lore and strange happenings but that still doesn’t forgive the utter lack of excitement or range in the performances. Let’s say a horde of green Martian barbarians was descending upon you for the express purpose of killing you. Perhaps your facial expression and body language should suggest you were doing anything other than posing for the Mars version of GQ magazine. Or consider John Carter’s reaction to learning that he is on Mars for the first time. That Taylor Kitsch reminded me of a young Keanu Reeves, and that is about the worst compliment you can give an actor. One of the producers of this movie should have required that Andrew Stanton cast a well-known action star as the lead in his $250 million dollar epic. This is not simply a cynical attempt at more dollars via a better marketing platform. “John Carter of Mars,” is Stanton’s first live-action movie. He had never worked with actors before. If the director casts unknowns who do not know what they are doing, guess who has the responsibility to teach them what to do: the director. And if the director does not know how to direct actors and the actors do not know how to act, what you get is this silly drivel, made even sillier as it is being performed against a backdrop of a ridiculously expensive, intricate, and extensive amount of costume, makeup, CGI work, set design, and production value. What a colossal fuck-up this was.

I keep thinking back to that other live action foray by an acclaimed Pixar director, Brad Bird’s “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.” Whatever similar problems Bird may have had were alleviated by a familiar and franchised story that took place in present day and was anchored by Tom Cruise, who is, private weirdness aside, quite frankly one of the best actors in the business, and may very well be the best action actor. For future studio reference, the next time a great director wants to spend an extremely large amount of money on something he has never done before with a bunch of inexperienced collaborators, it might be a good idea to sign him up for two movies and make the first one a much less expensive test run.  

Wanderlust (4/5 Stars)

This can't be the place

“There is a reason that human beings long for a sense of permanence. This longing is not limited to children, for it touches the profoundest aspects of our existence: that life is short, fraught with uncertainty, and sometimes tragic. We know not where we come from, still less where we are going, and to keep from going crazy while we are here, we want to feel that we truly belong to a specific part of the world.”

-       James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

The ending of “Wanderlust” is a cliffhanger, although I suspect most people (and perhaps even the filmmakers) will not realize how. The story itself follows a married couple named George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) as they search for a home that is “real,” for lack of a better word. They start out in Manhattan, a place that demands endless toil to make barely enough money for a sizable mortgage on a very small studio apartment. When George loses his job during a massive corporate layoff, the city unceremoniously ships them out in favor of richer people.

George and Linda move down to Atlanta to live with Rudd’s boorish brother Rick, played by co-writer Ken Marino. Rick is the CEO of a port-o-potty company and lives in a McMansion out in a suburban nowhere. The house may be huge and filled to the brim with really expensive stuff, but the desperate housewife Marissa, played by Michaela Watkins, soon reveals that she spends most of her day alone and drinking margaritas. She has a theory that if she smiles enough it can brainwash her mind into feeling happy.

George and Linda escape to stumble upon a commune out in the middle of the woods. It is filled with colorful characters that smoke pot, grow organic vegetables, and share everything. At first this lifestyle is infatuating but it soon wears off because of the complete lack of privacy (there are no doors to the bedrooms or bathrooms), the annoying veganism, and the free love atmosphere that basically acts as a masquerade for Seth, the leader of the commune, played here by Justin Theroux, to hit on all the women that move in.

So that place does not really work out either. But the movie does end on a happy note with the characters getting new jobs and moving into a new place with happy music all over the background. The place is bigger and friendlier than the Manhattan studio, not as fake and isolated as the McMansion, and has actual doors. But where is this “real” place? We are never actually told. Is it anywhere in America? Because seriously, I think most of us would like to live there. It does exist somewhere, right?

The ambiguity of the ending of “Wanderlust,” is what stops the movie from achieving great movie status like director David Wain’s last Paul Rudd movie, “Role Models.” The special thing about “Role Models” is that behind all the jokes about the nerdiness and weirdness of the Dungeons and Dragons community known as LAIRE, there was a sincerity that held up the group as very creative and really fun to be in. Taking part in that community redeemed the cynical Paul Rudd character in the end. That cannot be said about the bohemian commune in “Wanderlust,” as they are shown to fall into the same hypocritical and selfish habits of all people no matter how vehemently they claim that it is not allowed there. The ending is a bit of a deux ex machina, a miracle that basically saves everyone from dealing with the main problem of the movie by making them all too rich and successful to care anymore. So this is not as satisfying as “Role Models.” But it is basically just as funny and employs just as large an ensemble of great comedic characters.

You’ve seen these actors before if you saw “Role Models.” Coming back in supporting roles are Kerri Kenney and Jordan Peele as the some of the hippies. The incomparable Joe Lo Truglio once again performs the feat of creating a complete character within thirty seconds of screen time. He is the commune’s nudist/winemaker/novelist. I suspect the reason why I found the ending forgivable is because it is this guy’s miracle. Joe Lo Truglio seems to be the kind of guy who could pull that off.

(It should be noted that creative freedom for full male frontal nudity has finally been achieved in this movie. When I saw this sort of thing in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” it still seemed like they were still trying to hide it by quickly cutting away. In this one, there are no quick cuts, and for some weird reason the fact that the movie does not seem to be afraid to have little Joe Lo Truglio just hanging out there for extended periods of time actually makes the whole thing less distracting.)

Then finally there is Ken Marino who reprises his role as a very funny asshole. He is joined this time by Michaela Watkins, an old (she’s 40) newcomer on the comedy scene. The comedic dynamic that these two create is the sort of thing that makes you wish the movie visited the McMansion more often. Watkins in particular is very very funny. You may remember her brief one year tenure as a featured played on Saturday Night Live, where she was funny in basically every scene she was in and then was inexplicably fired the next summer. I am glad she is now popping up in feature movies, but really, someone who cares about comedy ought to see this movie and start granting her more screen time doing anything in any other movie. She is the real thing and talent is a-being wasted while Eddie Murphy still gets to make a horrible movie every single year.

As far as Paul Rudd is concerned, he continues his now five year string of anchoring at least one good comedy in a year. (Wanderlust, Our Idiot Brother, Dinner for Schmucks, I Love You Man, Role Models.) That’s a good streak and he is a very good leading man for comedies. His humor is nice, subtle, and normal. This enables the plenty of wacky other characters around him to be crazy and all he has to do is twitch his face the correct way to round out the scene.

I still do not know what to make of Jennifer Aniston as a comedian. She has been in some great comedies and done some very good work (Office Space, The Good Girl, and Horrible Bosses), but she has also been in a string of really bad not funny movies. Oftentimes her characters lack the eccentricity needed to be funny and spend most of their time looking out of place while everybody else gets laughs. There is a part in this movie where the movie stops being a story about a couple and starts being a movie about Paul Rudd. Were missing something here. There has got to be a better way to make Aniston interesting besides having her take her top off, especially since it is blurred out anyway. Back to the drawing board on that one. Learn a thing or two from Michaela Watkins and Kristin Wiig on how to make women funny. Here is a link to one of their SNL skits for educational purposes.  http://www.hulu.com/watch/56640/saturday-night-live-today-show