More movies
Apr. 18th, 2014 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficNo actual spoilers in either.
Jackie Brown
Looking for another Tarantino film to watch, I landed on Jackie Brown as the least likely to be too violent. This film is violent, but, like, five minutes worth out of two and a half hours. And three quarters of that is off screen and implied. For all that, the violence there is is disturbing.
Setting that aside though, it's a solid movie. Tense. I was mostly surprised because I'd never heard of it, and I'd heard of everything else Tarantino has made. It's an adaptation of Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, and has the distinction of being the only film I can think of where the film took a white main character from the book and cast them as black. In this case, a middle aged black woman as the title character. Possibly leading to why I'd never heard of this movie.
Course, Tarantino did that because he, in his genre vampiric way, wanted to make a blaxploitation homage, in the way that Pulp Fiction is a pulp fiction homage and Kill Bill is a kung fu homage.
The movie caused some controversy because of the number of n-words Samuel L. Jackson drops (it's a lot). Tarantino said in defense of writing that dialogue that it was true to the character. Okay... He then went on to say that if a black writer can write it, he can write it, too. Which. Just. Argh.
So what I'm saying is, this film still has some of the -xploitation in it, but none the less is worth a watch. Especially for the absolutely solid performance by Pam Grier. It also has Robert DeNiro actually acting rather than playing himself, and he hasn't done much of that in the last twenty years.
The Brothers Bloom
I am a fan of Rian Johnson. I am. But he's never quite gotten a movie to hang together as well as Brick.
The Brothers Bloom should have worked, and I should have liked it, but it wears you out. At a certain point, the con gets so far up its own ass it's not even fun trying to figure it out anymore. There are so many Chekov's gun pieces of dialogue that the last half hour feels less like an unfolding revelation and more like running down a checklist. Did we pay this off? Check. How bout this?
I'm being harsh about this, cause the fact is that it features solid performances, especially by Mark Ruffalo. I think my disappointment is mostly that it is a tender, emotional, character driven story at the start, but somewhere the focus shifts from the brothers' relationship to the con, and it stops being so tender. It also doesn't actually answer all the questions it raises, and not in the fun ambiguous way--in the, the writers thought everything is tied up but they forgot some stuff way.
So The Brothers Bloom goes in the same bin as Looper--both with some really brilliant ideas but variously flawed execution. And I'll just hold out hope that Johnson's next project is more like Brick than either of its successors.
Jackie Brown
Looking for another Tarantino film to watch, I landed on Jackie Brown as the least likely to be too violent. This film is violent, but, like, five minutes worth out of two and a half hours. And three quarters of that is off screen and implied. For all that, the violence there is is disturbing.
Setting that aside though, it's a solid movie. Tense. I was mostly surprised because I'd never heard of it, and I'd heard of everything else Tarantino has made. It's an adaptation of Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, and has the distinction of being the only film I can think of where the film took a white main character from the book and cast them as black. In this case, a middle aged black woman as the title character. Possibly leading to why I'd never heard of this movie.
Course, Tarantino did that because he, in his genre vampiric way, wanted to make a blaxploitation homage, in the way that Pulp Fiction is a pulp fiction homage and Kill Bill is a kung fu homage.
The movie caused some controversy because of the number of n-words Samuel L. Jackson drops (it's a lot). Tarantino said in defense of writing that dialogue that it was true to the character. Okay... He then went on to say that if a black writer can write it, he can write it, too. Which. Just. Argh.
So what I'm saying is, this film still has some of the -xploitation in it, but none the less is worth a watch. Especially for the absolutely solid performance by Pam Grier. It also has Robert DeNiro actually acting rather than playing himself, and he hasn't done much of that in the last twenty years.
The Brothers Bloom
I am a fan of Rian Johnson. I am. But he's never quite gotten a movie to hang together as well as Brick.
The Brothers Bloom should have worked, and I should have liked it, but it wears you out. At a certain point, the con gets so far up its own ass it's not even fun trying to figure it out anymore. There are so many Chekov's gun pieces of dialogue that the last half hour feels less like an unfolding revelation and more like running down a checklist. Did we pay this off? Check. How bout this?
I'm being harsh about this, cause the fact is that it features solid performances, especially by Mark Ruffalo. I think my disappointment is mostly that it is a tender, emotional, character driven story at the start, but somewhere the focus shifts from the brothers' relationship to the con, and it stops being so tender. It also doesn't actually answer all the questions it raises, and not in the fun ambiguous way--in the, the writers thought everything is tied up but they forgot some stuff way.
So The Brothers Bloom goes in the same bin as Looper--both with some really brilliant ideas but variously flawed execution. And I'll just hold out hope that Johnson's next project is more like Brick than either of its successors.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-19 03:08 am (UTC)Look up Burglar, starring Whoopi Goldberg. Or, on second thought, don't, because it was awful and it also took a lesbian bff character and cast the part with Bobcat Goldthwait (who played the part as straight, IIRC), so anything it gained by adding POC representation, it lost by taking away LGBTQ representation.