Tag: Tim Roth

The Hateful Eight

Quentin Tarantino’s 8th film is an overwritten slog.

HatefulEightPosterQuentin Tarantino, a truly favorite director of mine, can be called a lot of unsavory adjectives, but I never thought “boring” could be one of them.

“The Hateful Eight,” his eighth film as he proudly boasts, is an overwritten slog. At three hours and filmed in 70mm Panavision, Tarantino has the audacity to take those cinematic tools reserved for epics and apply them to a cozy, claustrophobic character drama set in a cabin in the woods. Tarantino bottles all his despicable characters and ideas about race and gender into a room and takes forever for them to explode, then even longer to clean up his mess.

The film involves bounty hunter John “Hangman” Ruth’s intentions to collect $10,000 reward by bringing in Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) alive, a principle of his to personally see all his victims hang. Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) is a former black officer in the Union Army and now full-time bounty hunter who still enjoys killing white boys who would rather see him dead. Warren hitches a ride with Ruth and former marauder, now Sherriff, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) to a haberdashery where they’ll wait out a blizzard.

This set up consumes the film’s first of three hours, a drawn out procession of formalities and mistrust in on the nose period dialogue. It’s theatrical play-acting, and Tarantino still confines all their conversation to the two walls of a cramped stagecoach. Tarantino leaves very little to subtext, with Warren, Ruth and Mannix each speaking detailed personal histories despite how much they seem to know about each other already. This is conversation for the audience, a way for Tarantino to show these allies are still at odds with one another, Mannix just a little racist and Ruth very much on edge. The mystery is Domergue, who spends the stagecoach ride with a black eye and a streak of blood down her cheek from Ruth’s blow to the head. She’s a monster, not a lady, we’re told. How much of her abuse can we endure? Tarantino is goading us, and the movie has barely started.

Waiting for them are four other travelers, each an Old West stereotype more likely drawn from cinema than from reality, as is Tarantino’s penchant. Tim Roth plays Oswaldo Mobray, complete with a thick and eloquent British accent that suggests Christoph Waltz could’ve been in mind for the part, as could’ve “Unforgiven’s” English Bob. Demian Bichir as the Mexican keeper of the haberdashery is Bob, easily a surrogate of Eli Wallach in “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Bruce Dern is a grizzled and apathetic Confederate General made enraged by Warren’s taunting. And Michael Madsen is the reserved, anonymous cowboy Joe Gage, just off to visit his mother. Of course Tarantino takes the time to have Ruth and Warren reintroduce themselves to all four individually.

No one can be trusted, and Ruth warns that one or some of the remaining four could be in cahoots with Domergue. But to what degree are we invested in seeing whether this woman gets to the rope or not? We have more doubt as to whether they are innocent rather than whether they are guilty. It’s just a matter of how long Tarantino takes to arrive there, and how much we choose to tolerate along the journey. His cards are all on the table.

Or maybe not. Tarantino back tracks in a clunky, narrated aside to fill in the gaps that we didn’t see, rather than allow those twists to emerge through character or dialogue. It’s too contrived to not be exactly as Tarantino intended. We’re made to realize that this genre setting, this overly theatrical dramatizing, this will they/won’t they scenario is in service of how much he can get away with and how hateful he can make his eighth film.

Violence here serves as an exclamation point and punch line rather than a consequence or for stylish entertainment value. The Ennio Morricone score is fascinating, operatic and lovely but staged over extended sequences of Ruth’s driver walking out into the cold to use the bathroom. The N-word rankled some feathers when Tarantino used it as coloring in “Django Unchained,” but here it seems notably superfluous. And there’s not much more to be said for measured storytelling nuance when your characters start projectile vomiting blood onto a woman’s face.

“The Hateful Eight” isn’t just hateful, it’s depressing and a drag. Tarantino has used his time to say everything despicable and nothing in particular.

1 star

Selma

Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” is the rare biopic that feels modern, raw and yet still powerfully emotional and rousing.

SelmaPosterThe marches at Selma, Alabama, the boycotting of buses in Montgomery, the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, the protests in New York: these aren’t just part of a “cause”. All this isn’t just “activism”. These are people’s lives at stake, and regardless of which side of the line you stand, blood has been shed both then and now.

Lyndon B. Johnson called Martin Luther King Jr. just an “activist”, as it is depicted in Ava DuVernay’s “Selma”, saying he has one cause while the Presidential administration has 101. Much unnecessary controversy has been made over the accuracy of President Johnson’s relationship with Dr. King, but LBJ as he is seen here serves as a powerful symbol for why racial unrest in this country persists and why change continues to drag its feet.

“Selma” is a raw, emotional, and most of all modern drama that with modesty and dignity proclaims that injustice can’t be treated as just another issue on the table. Unlike other prestige biopics, DuVernay doesn’t for a minute allow melodrama into her film that would pretend that racism and violence are gone from this world. Her film is a poignant reminder of what was and how these people’s influences, both noble and ugly, still linger.

“Selma” focuses in on a small portion of Dr. King’s life work and is all the greater for it. DuVernay is able to dig into the thorny nuance of this particular event and draw modern parallels that ripple throughout the film. King (David Oyelowo) opens the film receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, and after a meeting with President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), determines that help from the White House will not come soon enough. Their plan is to organize a rally in Selma and march all the way to the capital of Montgomery, nearly 50 miles away, in order to protest voting rights in the state.

King delivers a modest, yet powerful explanation of why voting rights for African Americans is so critical. Through fear and corruption of the courts, only two percent of blacks in Selma are registered to vote. Hundreds are then killed by the brutality of white cops and racist white residents, and all white juries led by a white judge fail to convict the killers of crimes because blacks cannot vote for the judge nor serve on the juries because they are not registered. This train of logic is crucial because a lack of convictions will certainly strike a chord with modern audiences.

And on the other side of the coin, we see repulsive logic that has most definitely carried its way through to 2015. George Wallace (Tim Roth), the then Governor of Alabama, explains to President Johnson that if blacks got the right to vote, they’d then want jobs, then schools, “then it’s distribution of wealth without work.” “Moochers” was not a term likely used in 1964, but DuVernay subtly makes her point about the way blacks are perceived today through this shocking lens to the past.

Civil Rights movies from period pieces (“The Help”) to the contemporary (“The Blind Side”) have framed their discussion of race through white people evolving, and it breeds melodrama and an assumption that things are for the better now. DuVernay doesn’t presuppose anything, and the politicking from King, Johnson and Wallace all remind of Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and the long, joint effort that went into creating change. She dodges the melodrama, keeps the film modest in scope and doesn’t lose any of King’s rousing words or messages.

DuVernay comes from the indie realm of filmmaking, and even “Selma’s” many moments of violence are visceral, in your face, raw, aggressive and all beautifully lensed by DP Bradford Young. There are fewer shots or moments of the movie dwelling on truly monstrous racists, and instead the bursts of violence throughout the film make all of “Selma” feel volatile. You can feel the tension as Dr. King begins to march thousands over Selma’s bridge out of town, and you can feel it as he or his cohorts sit in their homes, always in some form of danger from the hatred that surrounds them.

2014 was a year of great conflict, and of the movies the Academy Awards sought to recognize this year, many were biopics that focused on the heroics and struggles of the historians at the center. Of all of them, only “Selma” has captured the pulse of the nation yesterday and today.

4 stars

Arbitrage

“What’s an Applebees?” Hedge fund CEO Robert Miller is so out of touch with the world and with himself that he can deliver a hilarious line like this and still be snidely condescending. He’s the anti-hero of “Arbitrage,” a character drama about a scummy guy with a lot of money and nothing to do with it.

Robert’s (Richard Gere) company Miller Capital is currently involved in a multi-million dollar fraud scheme as he tries to arrange a merger and avoid bankruptcy. It’s clear he has to get this merger, but the dialogue is strictly jargon, and at the end of the day, his need to get money and meet the bottom line seems self-serving.

But he’s also a fraud at home. Upon coming in late to his own birthday party, he grabs a stuffed animal and a package from a servant to hand to his grandkids as he walks in the door. When his family brings out the cake, he acts humble and surprised but has a speech in his back pocket.

And that’s not the worst of it. Robert is cheating on his wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon) with a young artist named Julie (Laetitia Casta). After missing her art show and upsetting her, he proposes the two of them drive off and vacation for a few days. But behind the wheel, Robert falls asleep and gets into a wreck that kills Julie. Fearing that he’ll be revealed for having an affair, he leaves the scene and peculiarly uses a payphone to call Jimmy (Nate Parker), a young black man from Harlem, to pick him up. The detective assigned to the accident (Tim Roth) then tries to pin obstruction of justice to Jimmy as a way of getting to Robert, and his resolve as a person is tested in his effort to stay clean.

The assumption would be that by the end of this mess, Robert will either be punished, learn the error of his ways or we as an audience will come away with more fodder for the class warfare argument. But writer/director Nicholas Jarecki has made a character drama first and a thriller second. “Arbitrage” is not a message movie. It observes how a man who for so long has been operating on earning more and more and staying that way can ultimately think no differently.

Gere is on fire in one scene where he talks about a copper mine that is such a sure thing that it is practically printing money. He comes across as so effortlessly indoctrinated by the idea that he can’t even begin to question the consequences. Gere is so cool and charming that he makes it hard for us to accept how heartless his character is. We want him to succeed, and we’re wrapped up in what will happen.

“Arbitrage” loses some points for not fully developing Robert’s wife as a tragic figure in this household, and it potentially has so much to say about these one percenters but holds its tongue beyond a few comments by Roth’s detective.

And yet there’s a beautiful shot where Robert steps into an elevator and lights flicker red like a devilish halo just above his head. “Arbitrage” distances itself from this besmirched man, but it’s riveting as if we’re drawn in at the sight of the Almighty Dollar.

3 stars

Rapid Response: Reservoir Dogs

As far as debuts from notable directors go, Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” is up there with the finest. For other famous American directors today, Scorsese, the Coens, Coppola, Malick, Nolan, Spielberg and many more, may have had good if not great first films, but “Reservoir Dogs” is so dripping in the style that would govern all of Tarantino’s future films that is impossible to forget “Reservoir Dogs” in a discussion of them.

From his opening scene of an ultimately mundane and irrelevant conversation about Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and the merits of tipping, we still get a good sense of the kind of dialogue Tarantino is keen on, but more importantly a sense for the characters. Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) is a very good example of this in the opening scene. He doesn’t throw in a buck. He has principles that go against the norm. But let someone tougher, like Joe (Lawrence Tierney), pressure him a bit, and he’ll bend his position and hide.

If you knew ahead of time that “Reservoir Dogs” was a sort of gangster Shakespearean drama, you probably could’ve guessed Mr. Pink would be the one to survive at the end. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Reservoir Dogs”