Django Unchained (2012)

Kill White People and Get Paid for it? What’s Not to Like?

It’s a heavy spoiler for this review that today’s movie made it into my top films of 2012, but I still feel obligated to give it the full review it never received. Near the end of the year, I was trying so hard to review as many movies from 2012 as I could that I pushed this one off so much that I didn’t feel like the memory was fresh enough to still write the review for it. I knew it was only a matter of time until I got around to reviewing it because there was no way that I wouldn’t be picking it up on BluRay the day it released. Well the time finally came that I could present you with my review of Django Unchained, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, and starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Don Johnson, James Remar, Tom Wopat, Russ Tamblyn, Amber Tamblyn, Bruce Dern, Zoë Bell, and Jonah Hill.

A group of slaves is being driven by the Speck Brothers until they’re stopped by a German dentist named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), who stops them looking to purchase one of their slaves named Django (Jamie Foxx). When the Speck Brothers decline, Schultz guns them down. Schultz reveals himself to be a bounty hunter who needs Django to identify the Brittle Brothers, who Schultz has a bounty for. After dealing with the Brittle Brothers, Django reveals that he’s been separated from his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), and Schultz decides to help reunite them, taking Django on as an apprentice bounty hunter until they get a chance to free Broomhilda from the slave owner Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

This movie is awesome, but I don’t even know how comfortable I’d be in saying that it’s Tarantino’s best movie to date. And that is a huge compliment. When your movie is potentially coming in third to Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds, you know you’re doing alright in your career. And Django does not disappoint Tarantino fans, at least not this one. It’s far more fun than you’d expect a movie about slavery to be. Tarantino takes what could be a really heavy premise and injects it with his particular brand of humor, which you can see all over the place, such as Don Johnson’s character telling one of his slaves to not be so hasty when jumping to the conclusion that she should treat Django like a white man when he suggested to treat him better than she’d treat other slaves. Even though the scene could’ve technically been left out of the movie, I also enjoyed the scene where the racists were preparing to lynch Django and got into a discussion about the eyeholes on their hoods because it was pretty damned funny. Of course, Tarantino usually writes some funny and/or compelling dialogue, my favorite in this movie being between Django and Schultz more often than not. I guess the dialogue did seem a bit off in their unrealistically low use of the N-word for a movie taking place in the South, but I’ll let that slide as well. The only thing I took issue with in the whole story was the plan to rescue Broomhilda. They determined that they couldn’t just offer to buy her, and they also couldn’t offer to buy one of Candie’s fighters unless they came at him with a ridiculous sum of money, so they had to come up with this big ploy to offer the money and ask to take Broomhilda as a signing bonus. I don’t know why they didn’t just offer a crazy sum of money for Broomhilda in the first place. I suppose part of their idea was to only pay $2,000 for her and act like they’d come back with the rest later, but if they’d just offered $5,000, Django would’ve been good for it. It’s not like he didn’t help him raise at least that much money, thusly earning it for himself. And it’s not like he had anything else he wanted, so he could drop all that money to get his wife back. It’s a major point in the story, but a minor qualm from me. I got over it.

The action in this movie was over the top, but always in a fun way. It was like the Expendables in that when someone gets shot, they are sent flying in an explosion of red mist. But unlike the Expendables, this movie was good. And watching Django go into Candieland and fuck shit up was fantastic. The only real problem I had with the look in the movie was having to see someone’s hairy black nutsack, up close and personal.

The biggest sell of this movie had to be the performances. Everyone in this movie put on a clinic for amazing performances. Jamie Foxx started off pretty meek, but quickly turned into a badass. We already knew he had the comedy chops, but I don’t really recall seeing him as a badass action hero that often in the past. He wears it well. Christoph Waltz cannot seem to go wrong when pairing up with Tarantino. Waltz is great in everything I’ve seen him do, but he’s magic with Tarantino. My mom tried to get me to describe what it is about him that makes everyone talk about him with such reverence. I don’t really have the words. After more than 450 reviews, I still don’t know how to put what I think of Waltz into words. But I also can’t tell my mom to watch the movies to see him in action because my mom can’t handle violence, and his two best performances that I’ve seen were in movies lousy with violence. I think you just haveta see him to believe him. Leonardo DiCaprio is also fantastic in this movie, playing Candie as very charming but believably sadistic. Samuel L. Jackson is awesome in this movie as well as the racist asshole slave, and it was also the first time I’ve ever seen Jackson allow himself to look closer to his age. He’s 64 years old! Black don’t crack. Speaking of racist things, Walton Goggins is also in this movie. I’m not saying he’s actually a racist, but he does give good racism. He’s really good at saying the N-word. Speaking of which, I think that must be tough for all non-racist white people in this movie, as I’m sure all of them were. If I were in this movie and I had to sling the N-word around like that, I’d be ruining every take by yelling, “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, everybody! Alright, back into the scene.”

Django Unchained is awesome. Excellent story with great –and often hilarious – dialogue that I’ve come to expect from Tarantino. The action is lots of fun and every performance in the movie is what other actors should study for their own betterment. This movie is easily in Tarantino’s top three best movies, which is the best compliment I can give with an already illustrious career. This is a movie you should’ve seen when it was in theaters, but if that time is passed then you should go buy it right now. Django Unchained gets “Our mutual friend has a flair for the dramatic” out of “I like the way you die, boy.”

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A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (2011)

If You’ll Excuse Me, I Can Feel the Blood Rushing Back Into My Sword

My inspiration for today’s movie was twofold.  First, I knew that at least three of the people that were in the movie were people that I find hilarious.  Second, it arrived from Netflix because I wasn’t paying good attention to my queue.  And, if there were to be a third thing, it would be that the word “orgy” is in the title, and I could watch this without feeling bad, as I do every time I watch porn.  The problem with the first reason is that I find those three people funny, but I’ve also been underwhelmed by the results of their involvement with a movie before.  How did they do this time?  We’ll find out in my review of A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, written and directed by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, and starring Jason Sudeikis, Michelle Borth, Tyler Labine, Lake Bell, Nick Kroll, Lindsay Sloane, Martin Starr, Angela Sarafyan, Leslie Bibb, Will Forte, Lucy Punch, Lin Shaye, David Koechner, and Don Johnson.

Eric (Jason Sudeikis) loves to throw giant elaborate parties at the house of his father, Jerry (Don Johnson).  Most of these parties he throws with his close friends from high school – Sue (Michelle Borth), Mike (Tyler Labine), Alison (Lake Bell), Adam (Nick Kroll), Laura (Lindsay Sloane), Glenn (Will Forte), Glenn’s wife Kate (Lucy Punch), Doug (Martin Starr), and Doug’s girlfriend Willow (Angela Sarafyan).  At Eric’s White Trash Bash, he meets Kelly (Leslie Bibb) and gets her number.  The next morning, Eric’s father tells him that he’s selling the house because he doesn’t need it anymore.  Realtor’s Dody (Lin Shaye) and Kelly are in charge of the sale.  Eric and Mike decide that they need to throw one last party, but it needs to be special.  After some brainstorming, Eric decides that the group’s last party should be an orgy.  Most of the group takes a while to come around to it, but eventually they are all in.

I went into this movie as a fan of Nick Kroll, Tyler Labine, and Jason Sudeikis from some of their other endeavors.  Though this movie did not change that, I found it underwhelming.  It’s not a bad movie, and there are one or two solid laughs in the movie, but that seems like it’s a bit low for something that is exclusively a comedy.  The other jokes were not painful failures at funniness; it just didn’t have anything good enough to make me laugh.  They got a lot of mileage out of uncomfortable situations such as a lady having a heated argument with her boyfriend on opposite sides of the bathroom door while another guy was on the toilet in the bathroom with her, or like having a conversation with a guy while he was preoccupied with having sex with a woman who should’ve stopped appearing naked on camera roughly 20 years ago.  I’ve also noticed an upsetting trend in comedies recently.  Far too many comedies recently are going for the shock value laugh of putting some wang up on screen.  Walk Hard did it, Forgetting Sarah Marshall did it, and this movie does it as well.  My problem with this isn’t just the fact that, as a straight man, I’ve no real interest in seeing dick.  I look at penises all the time … when I’m watching porn.  I don’t like being caught off guard by it.  Also, it just seems too easy.  It makes you shocked and uncomfortable and people tend to laugh as a release for that stuff, but that is not to be mistaken for something that’s actually funny.  Boobs and vagina being on display is rarely used as comedy by itself, so why should it be that just putting a penis on screen is comedy?  The only occasion I can think of that boobs by themselves were the joke was in the movie Airplane!, and that wasn’t the one of the only funny things in the movie.  …Perhaps I’ve talked about penis too much…  The movie does not disappoint with its title.  There is indeed a big orgy at the end of the movie.  It’s much sweeter and nicer than the orgies that I’m accustomed to.  It’s like if a group of friends that were really comfortable with each other decided to get down and dirty.  They would joke around while fucking, so it wasn’t as obscene as someone might expect going into it.  But I ultimately went into the movie looking for laughs, and found them few and far between.  I can find boobs much easier.

I like the people in the cast of this movie, but none of them really succeeded in doing much for me in this movie.  Jason Sudeikis seemed a lot like his character from SNL where he plays one of two assholes, along with Kristen Wiig.  And, though I really like those sketches, I didn’t find much of interest in his character.  He was just kinda douchey.  I’ve ranted over a particular movie that Tyler Labine was in before, playing a sweet and innocent hillbilly in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.  He played it kind of stupid and sweet again in this one, but without the writing quality of the other movie, it never had much effect.  I was also all in for Nick Kroll, having loved his comedy special and his appearances on the Doug Loves Movies podcast, but this role was hardly a stretch for him.  He played a neurotic Jew.  What else is new?  I don’t really blame the cast for this movie not connecting with me, but I also can’t claim that any of them really connected with me.  All of the main cast females were attractive and did their parts, but none stood out.  There were a pretty good amount of nice-lookin’ boobs; I’ll give the movie that much.

Perhaps I expected too much because of my bias towards some of the cast members, but I found myself to be very underwhelmed by A Good Old Fashioned Orgy.  It wasn’t laughably bad, but nothing else was making me laugh either.  I liked the cast; I just didn’t connect with them in any way.  Sadly, I can’t really recommend this movie.  But, with comedy being so subjective, it’s hard to say what different people will find funny.  This movie just wasn’t for me.  A Good Old Fashioned Orgy gets “Endurance training.  For Labor Day” out of “This is the worst orgy ever.”

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