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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Twin Peaks: Season 1 (1990)

Who’s The Lady With the Log?

I feel like I’ve heard so much more about this television show than I ever knew.  Hell, even after watching the first season, I can’t say I really understand it too much.  I know I had heard the name a long time ago, but never really felt the need to research it.  I had heard about the show again when I played the game Alan Wake, as many things I read about Alan Wake drew comparisons between the game and this show.  Finally, when Kevin Smith was recalling parts of the show on his podcast, I decided it was time for me to watch it.  This show is part drama, part comedy, part thriller, but pretty much all surreal.  Let’s see how well a very confused person reviews the TV show Twin Peaks, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, and starring Sheryl Lee, Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Eric Da Re, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, James Marshall, Dana Ashbrook, Madchen Amick, Richard Beymer, Michael Horse, Ray Wise, Grace Zabriskie, Russ Tamblyn, Joan Chen, Piper Laurie, Jack Nance, Warren Frost, Peggy Lipton, Kimmy Robertson, Harry Goaz, Everett McGill, Wendy Robie, David Patrick Kelly, Walter Olkewicz, Victoria Catlin, Don S. Davis, Charlotte Stewart, Mary Jo Deschanel, Chris Mulkey, Catherine E. Coulson, and Miguel Ferrer.

The base story of the entire first season gets kicked off right in the pilot.  Pete Martell (Jack Nance) discovers the naked corpse of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) by a river.  Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) and Dr. Will Hayward (Warren Frost).  Her death becomes big news around the tiny town of Twin Peaks, especially at the high school she once attended.  FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) comes down to aid in the investigation.  Over the course of the first season, they unravel hidden motivations involving sex, drugs, but a distinctive lack of rock and/or roll.  Laura’s parents, Leland (Ray Wise) and Sarah (Grace Zabriskie), suffer nervous breakdowns, but they take turns being crazy.  There’s a small group of people in the town, but they’re practically all cheating on each other.  A guy named Leo (Eric Da Re) is dealing drugs and beating his wife, Shelly (Madchen Amick).  Some of Laura’s friends, Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and James (James Marshall), start their own investigation into Laura’s death, eventually using Laura’s identical twin cousin, Maddy Ferguson (Sheryl Lee), to get at Laura’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn).  Cooper starts investigating leads based on a dream he has.  Also, this sexy 18-year-old falls in love with Cooper.  By the end, they narrowed in a bit on who killed Laura, but I was nowhere close to understanding anything.

I was almost as confused by the show as I was in my feelings about the show.  For a while, I was just put off by how weird it all was.  Let me give you some examples.  For one thing, there’s a lady that carries around a log that she claims has seen something that will help the police solve the murder, but they must ask the log for the information.  A dude sends his ex-wife a picture of a domino from in prison.  Someone assassinates a bird.  Suspects are decided based on how close to hitting milk bottles Agent Cooper can get with some rocks.  Cooper has an entire dream that’s really off-putting.  Everyone speaks weirdly because they all delivered their lines backwards and then had them played forward, a midget got up and started dancing, and Laura was saying something about her arms bending backwards.  It seemed that each episode took me one step closer to figuring it out, but then two big steps back in the same episode.  But, as time went on in the show, I started realizing that I was still really interested in it.  It was strange, but oddly engrossing.  It was confusing in the small scale, but I feel like I was beginning to understand the big picture.  They used some really cool and intriguing ideas too.  That dream, for instance.  It really did have a strange, otherworldly feel to it because of something as simple as recording their lines backwards and playing it forward.  You could kind of make out what they were saying, but it definitely wasn’t normal.  I did get vaguely annoyed at the end of the whole season because they just had to have the whole cliffhanger thing.  I get annoyed when shows do that at the end of their seasons because, typically, that would mean we’d have to wait a number of months to figure out what happened and, sometimes, we would never find out what happened because they show got cancelled before they could end it.  I was only able to get vaguely annoyed by this because I was streaming the first season on Netflix, where the second season was available as well.  This time the cliff is hung because I had a review to write.  I am so pro!

It’s kind of hard to judge some of the performances here, because pretty much everyone was acting so weird.  I was beginning to feel bad for Sheryl Lee because she, as Laura, was the driving force of the entire show, but she was dead before it began.  She got to pop in for some flashbacks for a minute or two, but it seemed like a bummer.  Then they threw her a bone and she got to come back … as her cousin that looks just like her with dark hair.  I don’t know.  I guess that could be a thing.  Kyle MacLachlan was good, and pretty close to normal until the dream started to make him weirder.  Also, he turned down naked Sherilyn Fenn, and it don’t get much weirder than that.  She was smokin’ hot.  I enjoyed the performance of Miguel Ferrer as the forensics expert that Cooper brought in, but mainly ’cause he was an ultra dick to everyone in the town for no reason.  Until Michael Ontkean punched him in the face.  There was something that was constantly off about Eric Da Re’s performance, but I could never tell if he did it on purpose or was just a strange actor.  Madchen Amick – who played his wife – was pretty hot though.  I also found Kimmy Robertson oddly cute.  Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie confused me.  They played Laura’s parents and, for obvious reasons, were a little distraught about the loss of their daughter.  What bothered me is that one of them would be having the nervous breakdown in one episode while the other was being strong, and then next time their roles would be reversed.  In or out, people.  It was also interesting to me that Lara Flynn Boyle was in this.  For one thing, she was very cute.  For another thing, she was in Men in Black 2.  But I never really understood her character either.  It seemed like she was trying, with James Marshall, to find out what happened to Laura, but I think they intended to cover it up for some reason.  I’m fairly convinced they weren’t the killers.  They seemed to be really good friends with Laura, pre-mortem.  Maybe the whole “three different semens and drugs” thing would’ve ruined her image or something.  Kobe seemed to get past it, though.

I’m really not sure what to tell you about this show.  It’s very interesting, but also very confusing.  I feel compelled to continue on to season 2, and possibly even to watch the movie that most people hated, but I’m also afraid that doing so will not only fail to clear anything up, but will only heap on more questions.  One thing’s for certain: Laura Palmer’s dead, and she isn’t coming back.  If you have Netflix streaming, and think you might be down with a confusing cult hit TV show, give it a look.  Hopefully season 2 will make more sense.  In the meantime, Twin Peaks: Season 1 gets “Fire walk with me” out of “She’s dead.  Wrapped in plastic.”

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