Brief thoughts on Django Unchained

Warning: Spoilers abound throughout Quentin Tarantino is always up to more than mere aping. Yes, he’s a filmmaker that speaks to the film geek inside all of us (how many of us check off the references in our head while we watch his films?), but his best films have always been about more than the thing he’s referencing. Jackie Brown (more than a love letter to the Blaxpoitation film), Kill Bill  (has depths that reach beyond simple homage to his favorite of subgenres, the kung-fu...

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Catching up with 2012: Magic Mike

Steven Soderbergh once again makes a film that is about the body as commodity. Magic Mike ties in nicely with his 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience.  Even though I thought the unconventional casting of then-porn star Sasha Grey in a legitimate movie was more interesting than Channing Tatum/Matthew McConaughey in a movie about male strippers, there’s a lot to admire about Magic Mike even if it sometimes delves into oft-trodden territory. I didn’t care much about the whole A Star is Born...

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Sydney Pollack: Sabrina

Coming out in the same year as the Rob Reiner/Aaron Sorkin fairy tale The American President, Sydney Pollack released his own fairy tale, Sabrina, a remake of the Billy Wilder classic starring Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, and Audrey Hepburn. Reiner and Pollack’s sought to make films that stood out as a stark contrast in an era of cynicism and conglomerates; they are escapist films about characters that escape themselves into fantasy worlds. They are both great examples of films that elicit...

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Sydney Pollack: The Firm

The sins Pollack committed with his previous film Havana, he more than atones for with his adaptation of John Grisham’s massively popular novel The Firm. Oh, sure, the length of the film is still unnecessarily close to the three hour mark, but here, unlike in his previous film, he doesn’t waste opportunities with his large cast of characters (played by great character actors) by making sure that he gives them all more than enough time to showcase their skills in an interesting enough way that...

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Catching up with 2012: Lawless

I really wanted to love Lawless. Everything is in place for me to be gushing over this movie: John Hillcoat, Nick Cave script and music, Benoît Delhomme’s cinematography, a great cast headlined by Tom Hardy, and, of course, Jessica Chastain. However, it never coalesces into a cohesive film. I admire the craft, but there’s not a whole lot here to give a damn about. It’s a bunch of interesting, violent vignettes (it almost feels like Cave wrote the songs first and then he and Hillcoat decided...

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Catching up with 2012: Safety Not Guaranteed

I was not expecting much from Safety Not Guaranteed. In fact, I was downright wary of it (as I mostly am now with Sundance fodder). It looked like nothing more than one of those quirky indie comedies filled with cynicism/snark masking as charm that wins over Sundance audiences. But oh no, this tale of time travel plays it straight. Like, it's both Sundance-y in its rom-com sensibilities but also a science-fiction film about time travel. Not once is the time travel aspect of the film...

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Catching up with 2012: The Dark Knight Rises

So yesterday I wrote that I had finally seen The Avengers, and how it probably didn’t matter what I said about it – comic book movies will go on, make money, and have its fans regardless of what I convey in a two paragraph blurb. So whether I think Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises – the final installment in his ambitious Dark Knight trilogy – is good or not probably doesn’t matter at this point. The fact that I am going to convey an opinion five months after the film’s release seems...

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Catching up with 2012: The Avengers

“A movie like "Marvel's The Avengers" doesn't need critics and critics don't need it.”  “[T]he movie has some of the easygoing charm of "Rio Bravo," Howard Hawks's great, late western in which John Wayne, Angie Dickinson, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson did a lot of talking on their way to a big and not-all-that-interesting shootout. The difference is that, in keeping with the imperatives of global franchise entertainment, the big shootout in "The Avengers" must be enormous, of...

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Sydney Pollack: Havana

Sydney Pollack doesn’t instill fervency within one to go back and look at his films with fresh eyes in the way many have recently been passionately singing the praises of damned-upon-released films like Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate (the latter, especially, has seemed to be piquing interest in the blogosphere, thanks to its recent Criterion release, with many claiming that the film is some kind of misunderstood masterpiece). I don’t sense the urgency for bloggers and critics to run out and say,...

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Sydney Pollack: Out of Africa

Out of Africa is one of those “sweeping epics” the Academy loves so much, so it’s no wonder that it – and not better films like Three Days of the Condor or Tootsie – won Pollack his Oscars for directing and producing. I put "sweeping epic" in scare quotes because Out of Africa, although decent at times, is painfully ordinary in how it tries to win the audience over as a big, 'ol fashioned epic. It wants to be big in scope and sprawling in its love story; however, Out of Africa is not even close...

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