Movie Reviews: The Sad-Off

[browngirl]

Title taken from this delightfully profane competition between Samuel L. Jackson and Anne Hathaway. Both reviews will be incidentally spoilery.

First up,

When WD and I went to see Django Unchained I was the only Black person either of us noticed in the threater. I'm still thinking about that.

The movie left me with a lot to think about. If I had only one sentence to convey my thoughts, I would say, "I'm glad it was made but I wish someone else had made it." That second clause is for several reasons, including that the plot was in places more a White guy's idea of a Black ex-slave's revenge than a revenge I found believable (but then, I'm only one Black girl). Also, there's Quentin Tarantino's usual ridiculousness (no foot fetish scene that I recall, at least, and at least two places he could have stuck one in), but well, he's always himself.

I should be more organized, really. There are layers to this movie. There's QT's narrative and directorial choices: the movie had three distinct acts, of which one was a fun short movie, one was a suspenseful short movie, and one was a gratuitous half hour of cartoonishly over-the-top violence (which is not to say that all the gratuitous violence was in the last half hour, but one person's gratuitous is another's trenchantly necessary). There are the main subjects, slavery and revenge quest. There's the setting and its portrayal. There's the mentor-mentee relationship (one of my favorite aspects). And there's the interruption that took me from writing this for an hour -- where was I going?

I guess I'll sum up. There was a lot I enjoyed and/or agreed with, from the revenge quest to the portrayals of heroes and villains to the way the movie depicted slavery (including not confusing individual slaves who managed to do well under bondage with slavery being whatsoever beneficial or excusable). I know a lot of people would have liked The Love Interest to have been an asskicker, but I didn't mind her characterization -- it was nice to see a Black woman be the striven-for princess. There's at least one deeply horrifying scene which I don't find gratuitous at all. But it left a weird aftertaste, and I wonder what my viewing dollar will encourage QT to do next now that he has two successful revenge fantasies set during historical atrocities. I've seen some annoyingly congratulatory reviews (Mr. Tarantino hasn't solved racism any more than the makers of The Help did), so I want to be clear that I'm not going as far as they did, but in the end I enjoyed Django Unchained more than I didn't. Everything else aside, it was a gluttingly bloody revenge fantasy, and every so often I like one of those.

I may finally be able to talk about Les Miserables with some kind of coherence. Maybe.

When we all came back from winter break, many of my coworkers and several of the students, on hearing that I went to see it, asked my opinion because of the mixed reviews and the many negative ones. I have not conducted a formal survey, of course, but most of the negative reviews I've seen have been from people who say they don't like musicals, which is a bit like making a vegetarian review a steakhouse. So that's what I said.

As someone who loves musicals, and adores Les Miserables, I found it immense, immersive, and gorgeous. Not unimpeachable -- there are cinematic and blocking choices I might have made differently if I were the director, such as the presentation of "Bring Him Home". But it was gorgeously realistic and yet utterly surrealistic, a loving recreation of a 19th-century France where everyone sang all the time, which is just how I like my musicals. I thought the singing-during-the-takes worked beautifully, but then I enjoyed the slight roughness, the aim at presenting the musical as a series of lived-in moments rather than as a series of performances. I am, after all, a filker (or used to be) and, if I must choose, will choose emotion over polish.

I could babble on; I'm still pretty full of ALL THE FEELS when it comes to this musical. To attempt a summation, I feel that the conversion from stage musical to movie was largely successful, and the result was larger-than-life and true to human emotional life at the same time, and all the more beautiful for all the realistically ugly touches of verisimilitude.

... that's not very coherent. *laugh at myself*

Comments

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

n.b., i haven't seen either film. (though i'd like to!)

just thought i'd mention that i'd heard one of mr tarantino's upcoming films is another alternate-history revenge plot, this one about native americans.

i also kinda want to see the one about the american jews and hitler, and i kinda want my dad to see it. but i know my dad can never stay awake through a film and i'm worried i'll find it too traumatic. (though i've loved say "pulp fiction", his violence is cartoony enough that it doesn't actually bother me....)

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

just thought i'd mention that i'd heard one of mr tarantino's upcoming films is another alternate-history revenge plot, this one about native americans.

Brb, I need to facepalm for an hour or three. I appreciate his earnestness, but oh, dear.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

*lol* i think he's just found a formula he digs, & is going to mine it for all he's worth. which sounds like a very tarantino thing to do, to me :)

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

My parents adore Les Miz, which they saw on PBS. I hadn't even heard of it the first time I went to their house and they were rhapsodizing about it.

That may be why I don't like Les Miz -- because my parents introduced me to it and stood over me while I watched it, saying, "Isn't it wonderful" roughly every five minutes. My parents like George Bush, Mitt Romney, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and other things I find anywhere from distasteful to evil, so anything they praise is automatically suspect.

I went to see a stage performance of it a few years later with a group of friends, and still didn't like it. It seemed so nakedly emotionally manipulative that I just wanted to laugh at it. I mean, sure, any book or movie or play is supposed to manipulate your emotions; that's part of the job description of stories. But Les Miz did it in a way that seemed so overt and so over-the-top as to be clumsy.

I'm writing this comment NOT to try to tarnish your love for Les Miz but in the hopes that you can talk me out of my dislike of it, since you love it so very much. If that sounds like something you'd rather not try to do, that's fine; I can live with disliking Les Miz. :-)

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I am not the kind of person who can talk people into emotions, but I can say this:

Les Miserables is about tragedy, hope, and love, and I don't find it manipulative because I give myself over to it gladly, wallow in catharsis, and emerge with a renewed sense that "even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise". So that's some of why I love it, I guess. But that's me -- I can't make anyone else feel that way.

[sethg]

It sounds to me that you are classifying Django as what I would call “a good B-movie”. (Good B-movies are not to be confused with bad A-movies, any more than good genre fiction should be confused with bad literary fiction.)

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

...mmm. To a first approximation, maybe. It had two good B movies in it, and then big lumps of unnecessary violence and ridiculousness.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen either movie yet, but OMG THE SAD-OFF. *dies*

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I know! I hurt myself giggling!

[claudia603.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the QT movie (I often feel like I go cautiously into his movies because of all the violence), but the premise looks intriguing, I might admit. I like that idea of the Black princess being the one sought after!

And Les Miz -- I haven't been able to put my thoughts into coherent thoughts. I just loved it. I've always loved the music. I know the singing wasn't perfect in all places, but it all sucked me into another world, which I loved.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Into another world! Yes, exactly!

[caitri.livejournal.com]

I had mixed feelings about Django Unchained, though I enjoyed most of the film (I thought the last third kind of fell apart). I think most of it worked as a WESTERN, but given the context...ehhhhh. Every time one of the unnamed background characters looked at him in awe I kind of shrunk in my seat a little bit. I DID like how the "classes" of slavery issue was kind of touched on, demonstrating that there's never one single group of oppressed but always strata. When Samuel L. Jackson sits down in front of Leonardo DiCaprio and starts explaining everything, and the DiCaprio character listens without hesitation--I thought that was a GREAT moment because it showed all of the weird relationships inherent in that set-up. There's a weird mutual respect there--but it was also kind of out of place, or maybe just the doubling of the Schultz/Django relationship. I dunno.

I just thought it was an interesting, weird film, but a bubblegum film, and I'm not certain we're far enough away from the source material to make it a bubblegum film yet? Does that make sense? (For what it's also worth, Scott and I saw it in a suburban Atlanta theater with maybe 1/3 audience being black; but Atlanta is also a majority black city, so...take that for what you will.)

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*nods* I really like your thoughts on this, especially on the classes of slavery and on the appropriateness of a bloody bubblegum film approach to this subject matter. (And the last third totally fell apart into bloody chunks, wtf.)

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

With the twin caveats that I a) am a white guy and b) haven't seen the film, a lot of what I'm hearing about Django Unchained elsewhere on the net seems to boil down to "Quentin Tarantino made another Quentin Tarantino movie" in a tone that suggests the reviewer found this somehow notable and extraordinary. I find this confusing, because after a certain point, people really ought to know what he's selling. Thanks for your perspective on it, which was a lot more...present...than most of the other things I've read.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :) There are different, intersecting axes here -- it's a revenge story, it's a story about slavery, it's a QT story. I tried to be clear about which axis I addressed at any given time.

[jadelennox]

I avoided the revenge porn about Jews (partly because I hate excessive violence in films, but also because I felt very uncomfortable about an outsider's view about what was appropriate revenge porn the Holocaust). In that light, I feel even more uncomfortable about DU; as a white man living in the US he's complicit in the aftermath of the story he's revengey about in a way he wasn't for Inglorious Basterds, and I am a similarly complicit-by-default viewer.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

In reverse this is why I'm absolutely not seeing Inglorious Basterds, yeah. I thought hard about seeing Django Unchained, but I decided that what I wanted out of it was the rescue and the revenge, and I did find those aspects largely satisfying. Contemplating what Mr. Tarantino may do with my implicit approval is disquieting, but... I'm not sure how much of that is my responsibility as opposed to his.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

omg, that sad-off was amazing!!!

(not about to be seeing django unchained, because i steer well clear of tarantino.)

as for les miserables, there was one thing about the movie adaptation that disappointed me, and one that bothered me.

the disappointment was that i felt that two of my favourite scenes - the ending sequence of 'at the end of the day', where everyone turns on fantine and she gets thrown out into the streets, and the confrontation between the bishop and valjean, culminating in his being given the silver and sent on his way, both felt a little flat in the movie. well, maybe 'flat' is the wrong word, but ... the thing is, they're *really* critical scenes. if you already know the story (and really, les mis one of those shows which is better if you do), you see at that moment how fantine's and valjean's respective fates are determined right there at the beginning, and when i've seen the show on stage, that came across really powerfully (i teared up both times). in the movie, i just didn't find myself responding the same way, and i have to wonder if the director underplayed them a bit because he was still in the 'building up' phase of the movie. for fantine, it's nothing i could really put my finger on, but one of the things i noticed in the bishop's scene was how inexplicably they cut the whole "tell his reverence your story" lead-in and had his accusers rattle off a few spoken lines instead. it completely undercut the dramatic impact of the bishop breaking in to support valjean, and showed that the director didn't think that whole scene was worth everything he could give it.

the bit that bothered me was the changes they made to the songs. i was pretty sure there would be cuts, so i'm not complaining about that, but then they turned around and added a song that, i felt, was weak, and didn't really fit in musically (though i have to admit, it *did* improve the plot coherence, so from a movie standpoint it was a net win). what was *not* a net win (and is the one thing about the movie i'm actually a bit mad about) was the verse they added to gavroche's part in "look down", the bit about how they killed a king in the glorious revolution, and what good did it do because here was another king. again, it did provide a nice and needed bit of context that (if i'm honest) the stage musical *should* have incorporated somewhere, but it was done in a very ham-handed fashion here. firstly, gavroche was the wrong person in whose mouth to put it. it would have made a fine speech in the mouth of one of marius's companions, for instance. secondly, did they really have to add a verse to a song? thirdly, if they did, they really, really, really needed to do a better job of it. the lyrics were just plain unpolished - heck, they even used a single rhyme in a triple rhyme slot at one point (!) - and felt rather hastily thrown together. i know it's only ten lines or so in an entire movie, but it was a very startling blemish.

oh, and i agree with the people who said russell crowe didn't make the world's best javert :) but he wasn't so bad as to be offputting.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Then you should sign the petition to get the director's cut with its presumably longer songs!

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/les-miserables-2012-extended-edition/?m=0

*grins at you* Seriously, I hear you, but/and this is why I say I'm not really up to properly analyzing Les Mis; I was just too damn enthralled to care about the imperfections. I will have to leave the thoughtfulness to you a bit longer until I'm done wallowing in feelings.