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Tag Archives: Jamie Foxx
White House Down (2013)
Special Agent Todd Keeps Making Those Sounds, I’m Gonna Start Looking at Him.
I decided that I needed something to watch, and my response to that whimsy is ever to check with my old friend RedBox. The movie I was most excited about is one we’ll get to later, but I also saw today’s movie and decided it needed to be done as well. Some people might argue that I’ve already reviewed this movie when I reviewed a movie called Olympus Has Fallen. Many have argued that this is the exact same movie. And I’m always excited by the proposition of reusing old reviews. It makes my life so much easier. Well we’ll find out if that’s a possibility as I review White House Down, written by James Vanderbilt, directed by Roland Emmerich, and starring Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Joey King, Richard Jenkins, James Woods, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Jimmi Simpson, Michael Murphy, Nicolas Wright, and Rachelle Lefevre.
John Cale (Channing Tatum) tries to repair his damaged relationship with his daughter Emily (Joey King) by getting the job that she would think is the coolest job in the world: Secret Service to the President of the United States, James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx). He interviews with a former college acquaintance who heads the Secret Service, Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and even gets a pass for Emily to come with him into the White House, but Carol decides that he’s unqualified for the job because of his tendency to show a lack of respect for authority and lack of follow-through as mentioned in his military record. While on the tour, John and Emily get separated when the Head of the Presidential Martin Walker (James Woods) leads a raid on the White House with ex-Delta Force operative Emil Stenz (Jason Clarke) and hacker Skip Tyler (Jimmi Simpson). John must try to save Emily AND the President before all Hell breaks loose.
Sure, this wasn’t that great of a movie, but I would say I found it preferable to Olympus Has Fallen. They are basically the same movie, but this is the more fun version of that movie. Sure, it was dumb, but Rolland Emmerich has a great gift for winning me over with plenty enough fun to overcome the potentially crippling stupidity in the scripts that he chooses. I’m even able to ignore the super-obvious moments in the scripts. Like this whole played out “Daughter calling her father by his first name until the time is right for an emotional moment to call you Dad” thing. That’s been done to death, and the second I heard her call him John I started a mental stopwatch for my smug satisfaction at being right yet again. The same could have been said about the part where the President is talking about the pocket watch he carries next to his heart that was a gift from his wife. The only reason I didn’t realize how that would turn out at the end of the movie is because it had been so long since they initially introduced the watch that I had forgotten that I had already predicted the result of it.
Most of the performances in this movie were decent. They got some great actors to be in the movie, and most of them seemed like they were giving at least 50%. Good enough! Channing Tatum manages to be funny and charming enough. I don’t get some of his character’s choices though. What does John have against picking up guns from the people he’s killed? He’s always running out of ammo. Those guns probably have bullets. Those dead bodies probably have extra ammo on them as well. Is it a moral thing? I think most people would be okay with this particular form of theft. Jamie Foxx is usually entertaining, but I felt he was a little tuned down for this. Also, he got bitch-smacked unconscious by an old ass James Woods. When Jamie had the drop on him! Thug shit, homie! I found myself entirely unconvinced by Joey King as Tatum’s daughter. She just didn’t do a good job, and I tried to give her a pass. But every time she tried to emotionally yell, “DAD!” I just wasn’t buying it. It’s never good to be able to see someone trying to act when they just should be acting. Also there was that flag-waving thing she did at the end of the movie. That shit was cheesier than Mac and Cheese commercials act like their product is. And that is the cheesiest. I did like that girl Jackie Geary, who played the assistant to the VP, but her negotiation skills need work. She said her payment for getting Tatum an interview for the Secret Service was a date where Tatum had to at least attempt to get to second base. When he upped that favor, it is only fair that you up your compensation to at least a finger blasting.
White House Down (much as almost everything Rolland Emmerich does) was stupid, but it was enjoyable in how aware of its stupidity it was. Emmerich is gifted at overcoming stupid with fun, which sets this movie above Olympus Has Fallen, where the director did not possess such gifts. The story is predictable, but most of the performances are decent, and I had enough fun watching it. I could at least recommend this movie for a RedBoxing, but just barely that. White House Down gets “I lost the rocket launcher” out of “As the President of the United States, this comes with the full weight, power and authority of my office. Fuck you.”
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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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Rio (2011)
Upon returning my last RedBox movies, I found 2 new movies I wanted to watch. Both are computer animated movies about birds. One I expected to be decent, the other I expect to be crap. You’ll have to wait for the crap one, because I first decided to watch Rio, with the voices of Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, will.i.am, Jamie Foxx, George Lopez, Tracy Morgan, and Leslie Mann.
Rio starts off in Rio de Janeiro, with overly adorable baby Blu (Jesse Eisenberg) watching a bunch of colorful birds singing and dancing, as birds are prone to do in Rio de Janeiro. Then they all start disappearing as smugglers snatch all of them and put them into cages, grabbing baby Blu as well. In the process of being driven through Minnesota, one cage falls out of the truck, this cage of course containing Blu. Blu is found by young Linda (Leslie Mann) and taken in as her pet. The movie jumps to many years later where Linda owns a book store and Blu gets to run around it freely (I say “run around” because Blu never learned how to fly). One day an Ornithologist from Brazil sees Blu in the window and rushes in to speak to Linda about him. He informs Linda that Blu may be the only male Macaw like him left in the world, and back in Brazil they have possibly the only female and they want Blu to knock her up. Linda begrudgingly goes to Rio to pimp out her bird. They leave Blu in a habitat with Jewel (Anne Hathaway) to try to get them to get freaky. But Jewel does not take kindly to this here city bird and wants only to escape captivity. While the Ornithologist and Linda go to enjoy Rio, smugglers break in to the bird habitat and steal all the birds, including Blu and Jewel. They get … claw-cuffed … together, soon escape, and have to figure out how to free themselves of of their shackles with the help of the native animals, played by will.i.am, Jamie Foxx, George Lopez, and an English Bulldog played by Tracy Morgan, who finds out his puppy is gay and has it put down. Okay, that part didn’t happen.
There’s some good and some bad to this movie. To start off with the good: the animation is pretty spectacular, unlike earlier reviewed Alpha and Omega. I love it when an animated movie is able to give the animals life and humor in the way they behave. The animation is also very colorful, as I imagine Rio de Janeiro itself is. The Bulldog, strangely, was the only animation problem I have, but I’ve had a bulldog for many years, and even though they are a lot of face and can occasionally have a slobbering problem, this movie overdid the slobbering and did not capitalize on the adorableness of the breed as well as they could. But that’s probably a flaw you’d only notice if you had a bulldog. As for the story, it’s a classic, cliche, but enjoyable type of a pet separated from his owner and trying to return to them. Along the way, as should come as no great surprise, Blu and Jewel start crushing on each other, and the opposites attract idea is hardly a new one either, but it’s fine. The movie is not what I’d call funny, though it does seem to attempt it often. I think this is an animated movie that is more meant for kids and not quite up to the level of your usual Pixar movie that tends to be as enjoyable for kids as it is for adults, but most of it is enjoyable enough for both.
The biggest bad thing, for me, is something that happens about 4 or 5 times in this movie: Musical numbers. I friggin hate musicals, with a vengeance. I had to tolerate them so much in childhood, between getting dragged to plays often, and of course the early Disney musicals. I don’t always hate the entire movie because it’s a musical, and I didn’t hate Rio because it was a musical, but the musical numbers slow the movie down and are not very good anyway. They always seem so out of place. I assume it’s somebody’s cup of tea, but I don’t want my movies to break into song for no reason. Again, it only happens a few times, so it’s not that big of a deal, but I feel I would’ve enjoyed the movie much more if they had not gone that route. Also, I was not entirely a fan of the voice acting. For some reason, most of the cast didn’t click for me. It wasn’t until Blu created Facebook that he finally came into his own. I may see too many movies. I get so confused. They weren’t awful at it, they just didn’t do it for me for some reason.
All that being said, you probably won’t hate this movie. I didn’t. There were good parts of comedy, romance, action, … musical (shudder) … and a story you won’t hate sitting through with your kids, and probably not even by yourself. I give Rio a “Solidly okay” out of “Wicked Pisser”.
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