Tag Archives: english

Some slant their glasses as they pour out their beer. Some pour it straight but fastidiously slow. Some others like their brew topped with foam. And then there are those — like a German dentist working as a highly efficient bounty hunter in the American South — fill their mugs to the top and then slice off the foam by the neck: in one swift motion, Dr King Schultz beheads his beer.

Routinely fascinating, every little thing Schultz does is magic: theatrically flamboyant and effectively surprising. Played marvellously by Christoph Waltz, Schultz uses loquacious language to flummox and to wheedle, to sneak and to stun. His gestures are deliberate and confounding in equal measure: he takes a fair while to wear his glasses and peer at the written word; he takes significantly less time to cave to temptation and shoot a man down. With a gun hidden, as it were, up his sleeve.

And as Quentin Tarantino’s extraordinary new movie begins in the year 1858, the good doctor buys a slave called Django. As fortune (and filmmakers that believe all too gladly in legend) would have it, Django has a wife with a German name, her horrible story echoing the German folk tale of Brunhilde and Siegfried. Schultz says it isn’t every day that a German gets to help a real-life Siegfried, and feeling as he does some awkward guilt and misplaced responsibility towards Django, partners up with him to help him bring back his wife, his “Broomhilda” from her living hell, the worst slave plantation there is. The fireworks are obvious.

Yet Tarantino’s concoction is so much more than spaghetti, with an awful lot of red sauce and a far more enduring aftertaste. His explosive, inflammatory anti-bigotry crusade takes no prisoners as it shockingly and plainly tears away genteel notions of the antebellum south and presents it to us in all its grotesquerie. (Gone With The Wind, for one, can never feel the same again.) We are made to laugh at the ridiculousness of hooded racists on horses and savagely shown how slaves are treated while white men sit in their parlours musing on superiority. And looming above all is the grand villain of the piece, the monstrously silken Calvin Candie. With bowls of jellybeans for him in each room, the amusement-park name for his plantation — Candyland — not softening the sting of the whip on the backs of his slaves.

This is a brutally violent movie, yes. Men are ripped apart by rabid dogs, women are baked naked in sundrenched coffins, and the wealthy make spectacle — like in the 1975 movie Mandingo — by pitting slaves against each other in bouts of bloodsport. That said, the words are sharper, crueller, stormier still. A black maid is told to treat Django like a free man, but not, indeed not, like she would treat a white man. Broomhilda is “wheeled out” for Dr Schultz because she can speak German, and when she speaks a line of the language, the hostess’ eyes widen with disbelief. (“Astonishing”, Schultz remarks, his sarcasm uncharacteristically unhidden.) “Talented as they are in the kitchen,” Candie says icily, “from time to time, adult supervision is required.”

It is a wildly entertaining but bitterly sobering film, a film reflecting on past shame while stabbing at the remnants of racism that remain within. Tarantino’s last film, the revisionist-history masterpiece Inglorious Basterds (where Hitler is burned down by Jews in a movie theatre) was a far sexier and more stylised film; Django Unchained is cruder and less finessed, feeling more like a chokeslam than an elegant uppercut. There is style, certainly — and cinematographer Robert Richardson is quite the master, especially when photographing blood splattering onto unplucked cotton — but this is, above all else, an angry film. (An older character from the Tarantino Universe given to Bible quoting might have called the new film, quite simply, “righteous.”)

The performances are all larger than life, and universally thrilling. Jamie Foxx smoulders as Django, saving his swagger for when he finally deems himself deserving, all the while playing a more subdued character while everyone around him is wallowing in flash. Schultz hands him a beer and Django sips at it incredulously, trying to keep it together but unable to help curling his lips up into a half-smile: it is quite likely his first drink, and he nods with approval. His character — named after the hero from 1966’s Django, with that hero Franco Nero in a flawless cameo here — has to act as a black slaver, the sort of man he loathes more than anything, and this he does with a natural alacrity that borders on the frightening. At one point, establishing his authority, he calls a white cowboy ‘Moonlight’ and barks the words “that means you” to put him in his place, moments after big boss Calvin Candie has used the same words to one of his strongmen.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in turn, is magnificently mercurial as Candie, a blustery slave-owner, an articulate and slimily, devastatingly decorous Francophile who holds court with a chilling discourse on the misled ‘science’ of phrenology while sawing into a skull. As with Django but for purposes much shallower and self-gratifying, much of Candie’s behaviour — from his exaggerated bellows professing love for his sister to his meticulously chosen words — is an act, an attempt to create character and stay in it. He even snarls the word “splendid.” And when he holds a hammer in a bloodied hand, he makes the shivers come.

The only man who has the measure of Candie is his head slave, Stephen. Laying it on nightmarishly thick, Samuel L Jackson conjures up a truly fearsome character, the film’s most hideous takeaway. It is a sickeningly good performance, one that blurs the lines as effectively as Tarantino likes. Stephen controls the slaves with an iron grip while enjoying an unparalleled friendship with Candie, sipping brandy with him in his library, at least in private. In public, he stands by the master with dogged loyalty but never gives an inch more than he must: he might not know what the word ’panache’ means but grasps it swiftly and uses it perfectly soon enough.

As with all of Tarantino’s films, so much of Django Unchained is about words, words perfectly used and perfectly picked, words that actors like Waltz and Jackson take to a different level and words that, once used, can’t be replaced. Words that result in a couple of immaculate lines about d’Artagnan and Dumas, the single best bit of dialogue on screen in years.

And Django suffers only from the filmmaker not letting in enough of his own words.

Tarantino has spoken of his film scripts as novels in their own right, as scripts he works on till they are so good they should be able to stand alone and tempt him into not making them into movies. And they truly are: reading Tarantino is a very special pleasure, and I urge fans to look up the lushly-detailed screenplays he leaks regularly onto the Internet. And by that measure — because Tarantino is a genre onto himself — I find Django Unchained a far better script than it is a film.

And this isn’t merely a question of slavish loyalty (though the Basterds adaptation barely left out two scripted scenes while Django omits massive and vital chunks) but one of storytelling. Kerry Washington’s character Broomhilda suffers massively from losing her entire, wonderful backstory, for example. There are some positively frightening but stunning Candie moments in there that I hate to see unfilmed and while the argument can obviously be made about length, this is the man who made two Kill Bill movies. The format bows to the master and it must not be the other way around.

Most vitally though, Django stumbles in its final act because — unlike in the script — Django’s heroics are already showcased in the film well before the finale, and also because there is a gratuitous pre-climactic action flurry that — in terms of gallons of blood used — outsplatters the eventual climax and renders it less effective. Lighting the same powder-keg twice never works quite as well. (Oh, and then there’s a far-too-casual cameo from the director himself, using a peculiarly comical Australian accent. Tsk.)

But that, in terms of the big bloody picture, is nitpicking. Despite that final fanboy caveat, Django Unchained provides more entertainment than most genre films can dream of, and more of a wallop than the most ambitious of dramas. It is a vulgar, gorgeous, wild piece of untameable poetry (which mostly doesn’t rhyme, except when Schultz gleefully says “Candieee” like “whee!”) and there is, quite simply, no other film in the world like it. Drink up.

Rating: 4.5 stars

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First published Rediff, March 22, 2013

God bless grown men who make swooshy laser sounds with their mouths. Wonderment is the cornerstone of the Hollywood we know and love (and are frequently exasperated by). The magical escape cinema allows, the willingness with which we surrender to surreality and to nonsense, the way we — gladly, gratefully even — believe in what we choose to, regardless of plausibility or reason. Sometimes what we are made to buy into is pure lunacy. And sometimes it’s even madder: the real thing.

Ben Affleck’s Argo, set during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1981, is a loosely, dramatically retold true story, one blurring the line between fact and farce which such mastery that the actual recorded facts seem nearly inconsequential. Near the finish of this film, one character quotes Karl Marx, another asks if he meant Groucho, and, after the laugh, I left the theatre wondering that — when all is indeed done and dusted — which of those two namesakes mattered more, struck at genuinely weightier truths. But I digress; Argo is a masterpiece.

The Iranian revolutionaries, the Komiteh, storm the US Embassy in Teheran. The Americans are genuinely outnumbered, their marines helpless, as the revolutionist take over the building, taking nearly 50 Americans hostage. Six, however, escape. And it is up to the CIA and its exfiltration experts to figure a way to smuggle them out before they are caught and beheaded. The doomed ideas tossed around the table sound awful, amateurish, worthy of slapstick: one of them involves smuggling in bicycles. It is here that exfil specialist Tony Mendez (Affleck), the shaggy-haired hero of this feature, suggests what is referred to as “the best bad idea” American Intelligence has: faking a movie.

‘Argo,’ short presumably for argonaut, is a hackneyed blockbuster script that involves, among disrobed princess and attacked citadels, chases through an exotically Eastern bazaar. It fits the bill concocted by Mendez and Oscar-winning prosthetics expert John Chambers (John Goodman), and is cunningly co-opted by producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), a poster is made, advertisements placed in Variety. Despite the broken down sign, Hollywood is still the best manufacturer of falsehood in the world, and Mendez and his fake film crew go about lying to the press to help them spread the fib farther. The idea is that Mendez enter Iran, help the diplomats in hiding to pretend they are indeed a crew scouting for locations, and leave Iran before the Komiteh can piece things together — and piecing things they are, very sinisterly indeed.

It is an urgently told film, one that recreates in macabre detail the situation as seen in file-footage and news photos: one where bodies are hung in the town square and where gentle folk leave their wine and scurry into crawlspaces. Rodrigo Pieto’s cinematography is mostly claustrophobic and occasionally expansive, and goes brilliantly with Affleck’s frantic but unhurried style which takes its own time to built up to a climax of relentless breathlessness. And the timebomb ticks on with excruciating, exquisite inevitability.

It is an incredible account, and Affleck runs magnificently with it, allowing Chris Terrio’s mostly restrained screenplay the breathing space it deserves for some killer dialogue — Arkin has the film’s most quotable lines, about how the Iranian revolutionaries would like CIA blood with their breakfast cereal, about the Ayatollah and the Writers Guild of America, about how he must be an unplanned part of a film — and crafting, in the process, a film that goes from a Sorkinesque walk-and-talk to a ruthlessly rat-a-tat trot and, finally, a full blooded gallop. The dramatic escalation at the film’s finale is unbelievably, spectacularly rousing, but made so only by the smaller details that precede it.

For Argo is a film of superb, fastidious nuance. The nods to diplomats out on assignment compelled to make wives into fellow staffers. The sneer with which an immigration official crosses out the word Kingdom from Iran while granting a visa. The way even a revolutionary pauses at images of Rocky Balboa and Ted Kramer in a magazine. The importance of being allowed a mid-air drink.

Affleck alternates between soft and harsh beats, starting with a historically grounded assault and then expertly flipping back and forth: deadly news reportage is spliced alongside a line-reading of the B-movie, bad dialogues of crushing gravitational fields contrasted with hostages forced into the ground. And then there’s the hilarious, rallying war cry for the renegade team: one involving the film’s title and one that, reassuringly enough, makes its way from reality to the script and not the other way around.

Peopled by a striking ensemble — Bryan Cranston, Victor Garber, Philip Baker Hall, Clea DuVall, Chris Messina are all there and in fine form, especially Cranston — Argo tells a staggeringly peculiar story, and tells it with violent tension and extreme cleverness. Affleck’s direction is emphatic, self-assured, manipulative in the most effective of ways, and crucially tinted with irony. It is as the film’s music winks, midway through: it isn’t enough merely to Swing for the fences, unless you back yourself to be the Sultans.

Rating: 5 stars

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First published Rediff, October 19, 2012

I love the word blunderbuss. Born out of the Dutch for thunder-box, it describes an antiquated shotgun making up for limited range with tremendous brain-splattering force. It is a word of another time, one of manybeautifully asynchronous touches in Rian Johnson’s Looper, a fantastic film set three (and six) decades into the future, where an assassin fetishises pocket-watches and has a thing for record players. As scripts about dystopian futures go, Looper also feels old-timey solid, much more Soylent Green than In Time, a film with an irresistible Christopher Nolan premise but crafted ingeniously and tightly enough to earn Stanley Kubrick’s stamp of approval.

It is also fiendishly hard to describe, not least because knowing too much about the plot would be a shame. Here, then, are the barest of bones: We are in Kansas, 2044. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a coldly efficient hitman who stands in a field picking off bodies delivered to him from the future — time-travel is invented thirty years later, in 2074, and outlawed instantly. Which means only the best-connected mobsters use it, using the past as current criminals use the East Hudson river or the Mumbai Local tracks: as a wastebin for corpses.

Joe, a pragmatic junkie saving up to someday move to France, works smoothly enough till one day — in a routine, inevitable act of imposed ‘retirement’ called ‘closing the loop’ — Joe from 2074 shows up as his victim. Its the bosses making sure these killers, these loopers, are as cleanly disposed as can be, and killing your future self comes with a big gold payday. So after thirty years of spending, you’re captured, trussed and thrown into a time machine (looking decidedly Jules Verne in its steampunkiness) and sent to be killed by your own bullet. It’s a magnificent concept, and I do hope this film gets the graphic novel spinoffs it deserves.

Future Joe (or, to keep things slightly sane, Old Joe) is played by Bruce Willis, a bit of casting that automatically implies he doesn’t just roll over and die. Old Joe’s here on a mission but Young Joe isn’t ready for a metaphysically defiant tag-team: he knows how gristly it can get to ‘let your loop run’, how much the mob is baying for his blood, a situation he plans to rectify by killing Old Joe and kicking off his thirty-year hourglass. And lest this seem like a mere actioner — with odds somewhat evened by the fact that Young Joe is out to kill Old Joe but Old Joe can’t, for obvious reasons, attack Young Joe in any serious capacity — let me assure you it isn’t, and ask instead that you buckle your brain up for a genuinely unpredictable ride.

A remarkably written film, it poses the biggest time-travel questions — Would you go back in time and kill, say, Hitler? What if he was an adorable young boy at the time? Also, if you were told what part of your future you will regret most, could you just sidestep it and walk away? — and tackles them inventively, brilliantly and non-squeamishly.

Importantly, it is also not an obsessively technical film, and once you wrap your head around that exquisite basic concept, Looper relies more on its characters and narrative than on — as Old Joe dismissively and memorably says — time-travel diagrams made out of straws. The result is a frequently surprising ride that refreshingly (and impressively) eschews twists as narrative gimmicks and stays consistently crackling.

The spectacularly talented Gordon-Levitt pushes himself over the line yet again, uncannily capturing the seamiest of Moonlighting-era Bruce and not just because of his Willis-ised face. Young Joe is a self-centered and morally hollow killer, and yet the amazing JGL turns him, character warts and all, into a hero. Willis, meanwhile, as the recently-redeemed Old Joe now looking to do the unforgivable with his eye on the bigger picture, brings immense vulnerability to the part — outside of bloody grit, of course. There is some yippee-ki-yay motherlooper business, of course, but gunning down goons has little to do with why this is one of the actor’s boldest career decisions.

Emily Blunt and Jeff Daniels feature as fascinatingly hard-to-read characters, while the young Pierce Gagnon — in a devastatingly tricky role — is both excellent and adorable. Steve Yedlin’s cinematography is strikingly fluid and, like the screenplay, graphic-novelly in nature as it pulls in (closing up on a turquoise heel to signal arrival at a club, for example) and zooms out, here showing the bleak 2044 scene with telekinetic idiots trying to impress girls with levitated coins. And then, thanks to Joe being wise enough to heed future advice about picking China as a destination over France, we see some lovely, lovely Future Shanghai. Helluva sexy, this film.

Looper has a mixed bag of influences — as diverse as Memento, The Terminator and The Omen — but proves to be sharper, smarter and more ambitious than even those unforgettable ones. There are minor plotholes, but the film bounds over them with swift, self-assured grace, climaxing ultimately with a finely foreshadowed finale that ties everything up shrewdly and masterfully: a rarity for the science-fiction genre, and a tremendous narrative achievement that makes me long to watch it again right now. Rian Johnson’s terrific debut Brick and whimsical Brothers Bloom appear to be but warm-ups: Looper is one for the ages.

Rating: 5 stars

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First published Rediff, October 12, 2012

Sometimes, all you need is a song.

Woody Allen’s latest film opens and closes with the classic Volare, most apropos considering just how dreamy a song To Rome With Love itself proves to be. A work of unashamed whimsy thoroughly drenched in sunlight — and maybe a drop or three of moonshine — this is a lark, a terrifically enjoyable and vibrant motion picture that buoys the spirits and refreshes our jaded-jangled nerves. I, for one, must confess that I feared Woody may well have lost the vim needed to concoct this merry a film, saving his odder ideas for his prose excursions. But no fear. To Rome With Love is the cinematic equivalent of a superlative jug of sangria.

There are four streams of story at play, four incredibly different tales that do not deign to intersect, but work alongside regardless — like serendipitously stuck pages from an idea-crammed notebook — because of the director’s marvellously breezy touch. The rivulets themselves are no more than skits, four kooky what-if analogues, but the mastery lies in the way Allen stirs them — these stories that don’t even share the same time-frame; one takes place over a long summer, one over a singular afternoon — seamlessly into and across each other, making for a delightful mood piece that remains constantly enchanting, thanks in no small measure to its immaculately picked cast.

An architect finds a younger echo of himself, torn between a stable relationship and the tumultuous potential of infidelity. A man ordinary in every way wakes up famouser than Mussolini. One of the greatest voices in the world only works when moistened enough. A newlywed pair needs severe loosening up; and the Romans are only too glad to oblige. As concepts, these may well involve thinko subjects like hindsight and fame, reticence and infidelity, but instead of aggressively tackling ‘em, Allen chooses to tickle. And this he does with consummate skill, peopling his strands with fascinating characters and filling their mouths with the kind of dialogue only he can conjure.

There is much joy to be found in watching the stories unravel in their wonderfully unpredictable ways, so I’ll ruin not the plots but concentrate instead on the spells cast between the lines: on the way a brassy wife with the best lines in the film (Judy Davis) stays relentlessly hard to her opera-destroying husband, while offhandedly and constantly shielding him from highly coherent newspaper criticism; on a young wife (Alessandra Mastronardi) making peace with everlasting regret for want of the stories she may gather for her grandchildren; on the poser we can entirely see through (Ellen Page) and are allured by nonetheless; and on how being photographed is mostly worth the bother.

There is tremendous magic afoot, but Allen sprinkles it about judiciously, in very varied measure: One architect conjures another up entirely, but the events resulting from this quirky setup are the realest of them all. Meanwhile, the story of the young couple stays almost entirely plausible, but is sculpted from utter happenstance. The other two stories involve a man singing about a great clown and a man proving himself to be one. It’s a hard film, as you might imagine, to not constantly smile at. It is also a gorgeous one, with cinematographer Darius Khondji vividly painting a hallucinatory, hauntingly beguiling Rome.

The cast, as said, is excellent. Mastronardi, as the somewhat naive wife, gives the film’s finest, most vulnerable performance, while Penelope Cruz turns effortlessly and smoulderingly into a human Jessica Rabbit. Page’s artist-craving ingenue is one of Allen’s great female characters, and Alec Baldwin comes across stronger, and more evocative, than he’s been on the big screen in years. Famed tenor Fabio Armiliato sportingly provides both great vocal chords and a very likeable character, and Roberto Benigni, paddling down his story nearly solo, gives us something very special. The wonderful Jesse Eisenberg turns out to be an inspired choice for an Allen-substitute, and then there’s Woody himself, having a whale of a time: at lunch, forced to back off a touchy topic of conversation, the Allen character miraculously walks the rope between polite and pushy, shutting up agreeably but unable to bottle up his enthusiasm, eventually miming for emphasis. Vintage Woody, this.

The master is now 76, and may he never cork that loony imagination. He might merely want to amble around Rome whistling to himself, but, even done as casually, the results are often symphonic. You just need to listen right. If he now feels like cutting up some fruit into chunks and tossing it into an iced jug of not-topshelf wine, those of us complaining and comparing are the ones losing out. Drink up.

Rating: 4 stars

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First published Rediff, September 7, 2012

We’ve seen it before, of course. We know he gets bitten by accident, yahoos about his powers, learns tragically about power and responsibility, and is surprisingly adept at sewing himself a spandex costume with significant embellishment. The beats aren’t new, and — this is crucial — they shouldn’t be. Watching a superhero origin story is like watching yet another cinematic troupe play out a Shakespearean saga, an analogy that Stan Lee, with his faux-Bard posturing, might like. There are liberties taken, certainly, but the essence of it all — whether the movie is directed by the fortunately named Marc Webb or Sam Raimi or by us, with a phalanx of action figures duking it out in bed — is the same.

And the reason Spider-Man stands at the very top of the increasingly cluttered superhero heap — a heap made up of aliens and mutants and shadowy vigilantes and men with really long fingernails — is because there’s a real man underneath that mask. Other heroes veer wildly in personality and character and scope based on writers and artists working on them, but there is only one Peter Parker. One who is as much about saving the day as he is about the frustration of not having done it more seamlessly; one who is as much about the utter inability to ask a girl out as he is about being a genius scientist; as much about heart, then, as he is about heroics. And, given he’s a high schooler, the mask is all about acting out.

Webb’s film starts with a knee-high Peter Parker, playing hide and seek with wily parents who elaborately balance hats on broomsticks to confuse the child. He isn’t the only one hunting for them, even though that hunt becomes a way of life as he grows up and continues to wonder where — and why — they hid. Relentlessly, recklessly he fumbles his way toward answers… But while the film begins with the boy, it only genuinely kicks off with the girl. Making Parker’s jaw drop with her go-go boots and the Vonnegut novel in her hand, Gwen Stacy is a confident, striking platinum blonde heroine who melts our boy right through. It is this impulsive, heady romance that gives a vitally thumping bassline to The Amazing Spider-Man. Even as a slithering foe (compared, in the script, to Godzilla) raises the story’s stakes and lends it hihat reptilian chills.

Dr Curt Connors, while lacking of limb, is anything but ‘armless. (Sorry, couldn’t resist. Spidey’d get it.) A scientist trying to harness the regenerative power of lizards, he grows back his right arm but, in the process, turns into the long-tongued Lizard, a monster who wants to create an equally scaly army. Cue action sequences, each amplified by how genuinely formidable this foe looks. For a film shot in 3D, this doesn’t take gimmicky advantage of the format as often, but when things roll, they really roll. The action is lucid, urgent and importantly imaginative — Spidey seems to be improvising, desperately, on the fly — and the bits when Webb lets us look through those friendly neighbourhood eyes as he careens dramatically around the city, putting us right in the middle of a rollercoaster ride, are worth the IMAX prices. 3D this one, true believers.

Strangely for a superhero blockbuster, however, the sentiments overwhelm the setpieces. For one, the cast is smashing. Andrew Garfield brings a wiry jumpiness to Parker, a constant nervous energy that keeps the character constantly unpredictable. Emma Stone is a treat as Gwen Stacy, ebullient and fresh enough to make up for decades of poorly-cast love interests in superhero movies. Martin Sheen is a very solid Uncle Ben (though it does occasionally seem like the President’s turned into a handyman) while Sally Field’s Aunt May doesn’t click at all, forever seeming like a presence too far from Peter’s centre. Rhys Ifans is a great Connors and a fine Lizard, further made fearsome by the humanity he brings to the part. And James Horner hasn’t sounded this good in decades.

Webb’s strength as a director lies in just how smoothly he flips genres, switching between gears with immaculate ease. Snap, it’s a coming of age story, snap, it’s about boy meets girl, snap, it’s Jurassic Park, snap, it’s the best darned Stan Lee cameo in the Marvel universe, snap, it’s a blockbuster, snap, snap, snap. And despite maniacal gearshifting — and some initial sluggishness — he keeps slowing down to close in on the nuances: on a boy who’d rather use a strand of webbing than reveal intent or identity, on a superhero learning on the job, on a girl falling head-first in love knowing she’s in trouble, on promises made and promises broken.

And on Spider-Man, who scuttles. His movements aren’t immediately graceful, often a flailing, akimbo mess. Garfield gives the character stammering nerves and Webb visually jerks him like a whimsical puppeteer, moving his limbs before the rest of him. It’s a dynamic new way to see Spidey on screen, and as he gets better — both at his job and at realising just what his job is — this new Spider-Man soars. And Webb lets us tag along for the ride.

Rating: 4 stars

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First published Rediff, June 29, 2012