Knives Out (5/5 Stars)

The Trope (aka Movie Cliché) abounds for a practical reason. They represent to the unimaginative a kind of shortcut in the creative process. Instead of going through the rigamorale of producing from scratch a totally original plot, they reuse tried and tested plot devices gleaned from genre and tradition. Like jokes told more than once, these tropes lose some of their effect each time they are employed, but this should not cover up their inherent truth: They are used so often because they work.

Perhaps the most used plot is the murder mystery. Agatha Christie at one point would churn these stories out annually making her the most best-selling author behind The Bible and William Shakespeare. Someone gets killed: Big Deal. The killer is still out there: Present Danger! Who is it? Suspense! The most used trope within the murder mystery plot is the locked room. That is, all the characters are in the same locked room with the dead body. We don’t know who the killer is but they must be someone in the room.

This story has been told many times over. As stated before, such retelling lowers the effectiveness of the trope. That is unless the writer reemploys creativity to the trope, subverting the audience’s already held expectations. In this way, the plot’s dull edged are resharpened and, once again employ their original effectiveness. Such is “Knives Out” an ingenious locked room murder mystery written and directed by Rian Johnson (Brick, Looper)

The setting is an old mansion isolated in the New England woods. Therein Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), best-selling author of murder mysteries, is holding his 85^th birthday party. All his family is in attendance, a colorful privileged lot of bigoted conservatives and insufferable liberals. Harlan does many things that night to give a colorable argument for each of his family members to seek his death. And then Harlan commits suicide by slitting his own throat. The police are pretty sure it’s a suicide but then the great private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) shows up, hired by an unknown someone who suspects foul play.

Benoit Blanc is himself a mystery. He is played by an Englishman (James Bond no less), has a decidedly French name, and employs a southern accent. This is not explained. Without giving too much away, and I can’t because what I am about to reveal happens in the first twenty minutes, the story is not necessarily a whodunit, but more of a how did a particular character didn’t do it?

We are shown in the first twenty minutes that Harlan’s in-house nurse Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas) mixes up his medication, giving him an overdose of morphine. In order to spare her a criminal conviction, Harlan instructs her how to escape the house without attracting suspicion and then kills himself. But is that all to this story? And who hired Benoit Blanc to investigate? And why?

The family of Harlan Drysdale is a cabinet of unique caricatures and good casting. The more important ones are: Linda Drysdale, daughter of Harlan (Jamie Lee Curtis), her husband Richard Drysdale (Don Johnson), and their playboy son Ransom Drysdale (Chris Evans); Walt Thrombey, son of Harlan (Michael Shannon); Joni Thrombey (Toni Collete), daughter-in-law of Harlan. It is to the credit of Rian Johnson, that they are not all terrible people. They have their faults, and some are worse than others. Others, like Walt Thrombey, are not so bad, well, most of the time. In this way, the writer throws the audience leads and red herrings and makes us thinks very hard about how much we trust everyone.

There is one character that Rian Johnson wants us to trust completely and that is the in-house nurse Marta Cabrera. Marta has a medical disorder that causes her to vomit every time she tells a lie. But she is also the one who gave Harlan a fatal dose of morphine and last saw him before he died. How did she not do it? Well, watch the movie and see if you can figure it out before the cliché everyone-in-the same room as the great detective makes his speech scene. The reveal is highly effective.

Django Unchained (5/5 Stars)

Adult Supervision is Required

Somewhere in Texas. 1958. A Craggly Ridge of Large Bare Rocks. And then a women’s chorus of tenor voices: DJANGO! and then the low baritone of some old crooner DJANGO! And then up on the screen in bold red print, the words DJANGO UNCHAINED. The camera pans down to find a row of slaves in chains shuffling through the wilderness led by two slave traders on horses. The crooner continues his bouyant country ballad, about this man named Django, his lost love, and striving on. And with that first thirty seconds, writer/director Quentin Tarantino announces that you are going to see something you have never seen before.

Well perhaps you have seen parts of it before in different places. Perhaps you have seen solemn dramas about slavery like Roots, or Amistad, or Beloved. Or perhaps you have seen a Spaghetti Western, maybe an unserious action flick starring a stoic man-with-no-name in the company of bad men, fast women, and violent humor.

But I doubt you have seen both, a movie that portrays slavery without being racist or insensitive and at the same time is a helluva lot of fun to watch. Slavery is this nation’s great shame, a national embarrassment of epic proportions. The movies as culture or cultural reflection have had a terrible time talking about it. Early masterpieces of cinema were explicitly racist. The first blockbuster, 1915’s Birth of a Nation, claimed that ex-slaves provoked by northern carpetbaggers bullied and disenfranchised southern whites until the Ku Klux Klan saved the day. Other great American movies that took place during slavery like 1939’s Gone With the Wind white-washed slavery omitting anything but the tamest versions of it. More recent movies about the antebellum South, being race-conscious, sometimes omit black people all together. Think Cold Mountain. When it is talked about, there is a tendency for some pundits to claim the discussion would actually cause racial violence. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing premiered to claims that it would start race riots in 1989. Then, pathetically, you have Fox News and its insistence that a black guy in a black panther cap standing outside a polling booth is somehow intimidating to white people, in 2012 for chrissakes! (By the way that news story eerily parallels a scene in Birth of a Nation). It is my hope that Django Unchained represents a sort of The Producers watershed moment in our culture that allows us to shed our century long cowardly approach to slavery in movies. 

Do you know what I mean by a The Producers moment? I don’t mean the recent movie or the broadway revival. I mean Mel Brook’s original 1967 movie about two Jewish play producers who purposely put on a sure-fire flop, Springtime for Hitler, in order to cheat little old lady investors. Think about that date: 1967. That’s twenty-two years after World War II and a genocide that murdered 6 million Jews. It must have taken a lot of chutzpah to make that movie, which purposely made light of WWII and portrayed Hitler as a kind of gay flower-loving hippy. But it was the correct thing to do both culturally and comedically because it took this huge evil and made it okay to laugh at. That’s important because one of the main tools of assholes in general and these assholes in particular was fear. Good people do not stand up before it is too late because of fear. (Btw I’m not counting Charlie Chaplin’s The Dictator because it was made before the Final Solution was fully known). But when you flood your culture with Hitler jokes the fear dissipates. We aren’t afraid of Nazis anymore. Hell, they make for great entertainment. They are Hollywood’s best villains and most frequent losers. They haven’t won in a movie since Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

It is to Tarantino’s great credit that he has pulled a Mel Brooks’ and exploited a long dormant treasure trove of national psychosis and fear that is just screaming to be tamed and used for entertainment purposes. So what are we afraid of that this movie is making us confront and not just confront but also enjoy confronting. Well, counter-intuitively, it is most likely our fear of black people. America, unlike say Nazi Germany, is a winner of history (at least so far). Now it is much easier to make fun of a power structure like the Nazis when they are already defeated, but there has not been a race revolution in this country in which white people were deposed. White guys are actually still in charge around here (for the most part). And because we are still in charge, we tend to be rather defensive (or at least as silent as possible) about whom we inherited the power, even if some were downright evil, lest….well, what? Just what do you think is going to happen if we stop being defensive about our past?

What this movie can hopefully do is show just how absurd those fears are by taking them head on. Django, played by Jamie Foxx, is bought by a German immigrant/dentist/bounty hunter named Dr. King Schulz, played by Christoph Waltz. Dr. Schulz does not believe in slavery but needs Django because he is trailing some wanted fugitives named the Brittle Brothers. Dr. Schulz does not know what they look like but Django does because he was a field slave at the latest plantation the Brittle Brothers ran. Django tried to run away with his wife, Broomhilda, but was unsuccessful. Both were whipped and sold separately. Schulz makes a deal with Django. If Django helps him find the Brittle Brothers, Schulz will set Django free. After showing his worth as a fellow bounty hunter, Schulz has another proposition for Django. Continue on with him, as his partner for a year and Schulz will then help Django find and free his wife. This takes them to the Plantation of one Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, who is a repulsive indulgent Francophile that does not speak French and is a connoisseur of Mandingo fighting. Mandingo fighting consists of making black slaves fight against each other to the death and punishing them with death if they refuse to do so, both of which we see in this movie. Things come to head at the Candieland plantation after unsuccessful negotiations of buying Broomhilda fall through. Django kills a lot of white slaveowners.

Tarantino has unsuccessfully mixed the right amount of dialogue and action in his movies before (Kill Bill too little substantive talk, Inglourious Basterd way too much talk) but he hits exactly the right notes here. Django Unchained is an almost three hour movie, feels like an hour and a half, could have gone longer and I would not have cared. The dialogue is deliciously revolting and actually reminded me of some great Shakespeare villains like Richard II or Iago. Rarely is evil so articulate. Take one scene with Calvin Candie: After he learns from his house slave Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson, that he is being tricked by Schulz and Django, he decides to turn the tables with a basic class in racist phrenology. The psychology of why he chooses to do this is pretty perverted. His black house slave has just educated him that Django, another black man, has tricked him. So Candie produces a skull of a former house slave named Ben, saws a portion of it off, and points out the subservient dimples. Basically he is using pseudoscience to explain why he is in charge even though it has just been objectively proven he is the stupidest person in the room. But the psychological twistedness of Candie pales in comparison to that of the house slave, Stephen, and this is where Django Unchained starts to enter into the realm of masterpiece. The character that Samuel L. Jackson plays is a literate educated wise old man who raised Candie and probably runs the plantation whenever Candie is gone. An obviously capable person, he instead spends all his time hobbling, shuffling, shucking, and jiving. And you won’t find any other person on the plantation willing to treat the other slaves worse than Stephen. He is so totally aware that his power derives solely from his ability to stroke egos, stamp out dissent, and pretend he is not smart enough to know what he’s doing. I believe the term is HNIC. There can only be one, Django be warned. When I think of the regular Samuel L Jackson character type I think of a strong, authoritative, wise person. I can’t think of another role that could be so against this type and at the same time be so right. If you wanted a great example of how slavery strips away all the nobility in a person, think of how you have seen Sam Jackson in any other movie and then watch him in this one. I can imagine him heading off stage and washing his mouth out with soap after every take. The ridiculous thing though is that even while you are watching the performance of subservient stupidity in Jackson’s performance you still get a sense of how subversively smart Stephen really is. To pull that off, I believe is top-notch acting and I think if anyone we’re nominated for an Oscar from this movie, it should be Sam Jackson.

Now going back: To be afraid of this movie, you would have to hold onto two absurd notions. One: you would have to believe that slavery was somehow justifiable. Perhaps if you just saw Gone with the Wind you wouldn’t understand the big deal. But here we have most of it: You have the absolute poverty of slaves (Django starts the movie shuffling through a wilderness with no shoes, shackles scraping up his ankles, no shirt or coat); you have the cruel and unusual violence inflicted upon slaves without due process (whippings, mandingo fighting, hotboxes, being torn apart by dogs, etc.), and you have the utterly disrespectful attitude of slave-owners that treats slaves as disposable property at worst and children at best. Are we not at a point in this country where all the above is universally rejected? Surely it is enjoyable to everyone, regardless of race, when the hero of the story (Django obviously) rescues his lost love and the villains (the slave-owners obviously) get their comeuppance.

Two: you would have to believe that black people today might resort to racial violence against white people. This is probably the bigger problem. The reason why it is offensive for Fox News to show that one black panther guy at the polling booth is that it infers black people cannot tell the difference between antebellum slave-owners and modern day white Americans, a lack of trust between fellow citizens that can be nothing but insulting. I believe you could show Django Unchained in most anywhere in America and audiences everywhere would have basically the same reactions. They would laugh at the same spots, they would cringe at the same spots, and they would applause at the same spots. Our attitudes toward this subject matter are the same and I’m glad this movie can come along to prove it.

I just want to mention one more thing and that is Tarantino’s cameo and the epilogue to this movie. Tarantino is no fool I’m sure. He knows that audiences will be able to recognize him when he gets on the screen. For this very reason Hitchcock put his cameo towards the front of his movies in his later career. He noticed that when everyone saw him they were distracted from the story. But Tarantino is incredibly noticeable in his cameo so I have to suspect he knows he is noticeable, in a say deux ex machina sort of way. The epilogue of Django Unchained is the most unbelievable part of the movie and Tarantino’s appearance and the way his character (An Australian?) enables the epilogue to happen is an admission that the movie’s end is less about practical realism and more about fantastical indulgence. As a critic, I have a pretty simple rule about this sort of thing. If I liked the movie, go ahead. If I didn’t like the movie, you are an egotistical indulgent sonofabitch who is insulting my intelligence. That at least is how I felt about the last line of Inglourious Basterds. I, however, loved this movie. So this ending is just fine with me. The movie earned it and I would not have it any other way.

I’m sure there will be many movies imitating Django Unchained pretty soon. I suggest you see it while it is still original. 

Machete (4/5 Stars) September 6, 2010

He knows the score. He gets the women. He kills the bad guys. 

Above all things, “Machete” is a joke. It first appeared as a fake movie trailer shown before writer/director Robert Rodriguez’s classic zombie movie “Planet Terror.” It was perhaps one of the best trailers I’ve ever seen. Among other ridiculous things the trailer promised, was the first starring role for iconic badass Danny Trejo as a Mexican day laborer who is setup and betrayed by anti-immigrant bad guys, a gun toting priest played by Cheech Marin, a threesome romp with the head bad guy’s wife and daughter, and a hell of lot of fatal revenge by machete. It ended with Trejo installing a machine gun turret on a motorcycle, jumping it off a ramp while something very explosive goes off in the background, and unloading a massive hail of bullets at the bad guys. Then the voiceover helpfully informed us that “They Just Fucked with the wrong Mexican!” Apparently I wasn’t the only one who really wanted to see that movie because here we are, two years later, with the feature length version. 



The genre of Machete is Grindhouse. It’s the kind of cheap movie that used to be shown in run down theaters and drive-ins and proudly offered little more than sex and violence (or as they say in the business, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.) Most of these movies really sucked, but the attitude of them was inspiring to several now prominent filmmakers like Tarantino and Rodriguez. Because Grindhouse movies were cheap to make and the audience was content as long as there was fighting and nudity, directors and writers (if there were any) were very free to be, let’s say, provocative. No suit from the studio was there to tell them they couldn’t do something. Thus, there are no rules of decorum in a Grindhouse movie. And this movie, Machete, is no different. The prologue consists of Machete, as a Federale in Mexico, breaking into a drug lord’s house in order to rescue a kidnapped woman. The guards are dispatched by machete. It’s a credit to Rodriguez imagination that every single one is killed in a different way. The woman, when Machete finds her, is completely naked because “it’s too hot out for clothes.” No matter, he throws her over his shoulder and proceeds to make his escape by killing more bad guys. But then the woman double-crosses Machete and shoots him. As Machete is writhing on the floor she takes a very small cell phone out of the only place you can hide something when you’re naked and relays her success. The drug lord played by Steven Seagal shows up. He chides Machete for being a righteous troublemaker, shoots the naked lady for some reason, and then brings out Machete’s wife whom he decapitates with a katana. He explains that the only honorable way for Machete to die is if he cut off his head also (because apparently this Mexican drug lord also moonlights as a samurai) but that Machete has no honor. So what Steven Seagal does is light the house on fire (remember this is the drug lord’s house). Presumably Machete escaped because three years later he is an illegal immigrant in America looking for gardening work. The movie never explains exactly how. The rest of the plot is just as ridiculous.

Almost by definition a Grindhouse movie can’t be a good movie in the ordinary sense (i.e. realistic action, believable characters, decent editing, production value) but they can succeed, and often do, in never being boring and this is what Machete, by and large, accomplishes. There are plenty of funny one-liners, gratuitous nudity, and violence which is often and outrageous. The high point of gruesomeness occurs when Machete escapes from a hospital by cutting open a bad guy’s stomach, grabbing his intestine, and using it like a rope to lower himself out a window. (Machete is not the type of guy who bothers to open windows before going out them.) When a scene is that unbelievable I don’t think it can possibly be scary. The correct reaction is WTF and lots of nervous laughter. I had the good fortune of being in an audience that appreciated the audaciousness of such a moment. They applauded and cheered. Quite frankly, I liked it too. And I must admit I also enjoyed watching incredibly hot scantily clad women striking fierce poses and shooting semiautomatic machine guns. This movie has more of that than any I’ve ever seen. We’ve got Jessica Alba, Michele Rodriguez, the Crazy Babysitter Twins, and Lindsay Lohan doing exactly that at regular intervals. A bad movie? Sure you can definitely argue that. Boring? I don’t think so. 

There are also huge political overtones in this movie. Whether it is serious or not is anyone’s guess but either way but it does do a great job of illustrating the old maxim that the best way to make somebody feel foolish is to zealously agree with them. There is a rabid anti-immigrant senator played by Robert De Niro, his corrupt corporate backer played by Jeff Fahey, and a border vigilante played by Don Johnson. Illegal aliens are compared to cockroaches and terrorists. There is a plan to build an electric fence. The Senator is afraid that Illegals will try to take over his country, and then goes on to clarify that term as Texas. And you know what? The Senator is right. The Mexicans in this movie really are organized and have been hoarding arms and munitions in preparation of a race war. At the climax of the movie, a “code” is sent out to “The Network” and every single dishwasher, gardener, and maid in the state stops working and forms an army to confront the vigilantes. They parade down the street in hysterically stereotypical tricked-out cars with hydraulics. They’re armed with guns and gardening tools. Loud Mariachi music is trumpeted in the background. Is this what were afraid of when we talk about an illegal invasion? Because that would be ridiculous. Your enjoyment of this movie will probably depend on your view of Mexican immigration in general. I tend to be more liberal when it comes to that thing. I can't say I know enough about the subject to give a truly educated argument, but on a gut level I'm at least convinced that this summer’s “anchor baby” debate was purely idiotic. Surely any woman who has the courage and spirit to hike 100 miles across a dangerous desert while pregnant should be granted citizenship on the spot. That type of backbone is what this country needs. Besides they make good tacos. 

My enjoyment of this movie was also greatly enhanced by the fact that I am a huge fan of Robert Rodriguez and am familiar with most of the actors. I loved the fact that Danny Trejo finally got a starring role. This will probably be the only one he ever gets. I fondly remember Tom Savini, the Crazy Babysitter Sisters, and the Doctor from Planet Terror and am glad they all showed up again. Cheech Marin is consistently funny as a gun-toting priest that tapes confessions and drinks communal wine. And it’s about time somebody put an eye-patch on Michele Rodriguez, dressed her in black leather, and gave her a big fucking gun. What I missed however was a cameo by Quentin Tarantino. Ever since his stand-out role in “Planet Terror” as Rapist #1 I’ve had a renewed appreciation for his acting ability, at least in roles where he’s a psycho villain. It would have been cool if say, he played the Mexican/Samurai drug lord instead of Steven Segal, who didn’t do that hot of a job in this movie. Jessica Alba wasn’t very impressive either although she did have this one great line where she climbed a jalopy and proclaimed to a crowd of Mexican day laborers, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” Does that line make sense? Could this possibly be considered “good” writing? Maybe, maybe not. But she shouted it with such fervor and gusto that it was certainly entertaining to watch. It wasn’t boring.