Paramount Summer Classic Film Series-Double Feature Jackie/Foxy Brown

The Paramount continues to try topping itself with great programming on Friday evenings. This week we get a double feature featuring the great actress Pam Grier. The two films that are presented are at the far ends of her career. "Jackie Brown" was a prestige project from Quentin Tarantino that earned Pam Grier a Golden Globe nomination and should have earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. This movie was paired with a film from 1974, at the peak of her career in exploitation films, it is actually a pretty decent forerunner for "Jackie Brown",  This one is called "Foxy Brown".

Let's start with "Jackie Brown". This is a Tarantino film based not on an original idea of his, or a hybrid of exploitation films that he saw as a child, but rather on the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard. Tarantino adapted the book into a screenplay and made the central character a black woman so that Pam Grier could play the part. I haven't read the original text, I only know the screenplay from having seen the movie several times, but I can't imagine that the book is superior to the very clever screenplay that we get with this movie.

To Briefly summarize, Jackie Brown is an airline hostess for a low budget Mexican holiday flight operation, and she also makes extra cash by smuggling money for a gun Runner into and out of Cabo San Lucas. When things go wrong for Ordell, the gunrunner played by Samuel Jackson, Jackie looks like she is in the crosshairs of both the ATF and the violent Ordell. But you would never say that Jackie Brown was in over her head. This woman is whip smart, and fearless. And she devises a plan to get herself out of trouble with both of those sides.

The film is loaded with those Tarantino touches, such as mundane conversations turned into philosophical questions, expletive filled declarations of both love and hate, and a variety of characters that you don't really like but find very interesting. So it is clearly under Tarantino's thumb, and he makes the most of adapting somebody else's work to his kind of film. In addition to Jackie, there is one other character that is smart and sympathetic and that we will find interesting and ready to root for. Max Cherry is a bail bondsman who is being used by Ordell to make his targets available after they have been arrested. Robert Forrester, plays Max as a sympathetic and wise older man, who does play by the rules but finds himself attracted to the charm of Jackie Brown. Forester has to sell the idea that he is falling in love with the least amount of dialogue possible, in often very brief scenes. That he does so successfully accounts for his nomination as best supporting actor that year, the only Academy Award nomination that the film received.

As usual, Samuel L Jackson is full of expletives and attitude, and his character Ordell is one of the most loathsome psychopaths that we have seen in a mainstream story. This is a movie that plays it straight, and although Ordell looks like a comic book villain at times, he really does seem to feel like a real person, just not one that's very nice. Also along for the ride are Robert De Niro, as Ordell's dimwitted partner in training, and Bridget Fonda as the beach bum girl that Ordell likes to have around as eye candy, primarily because she is white. The dialogue between Fonda and Jackson is frequently brittle and very funny. Fonda's character is an attractive woman who is slightly over her youthful beauty and is now hardening into a harridan rather than a beach girl.

The cast is filled with very confident supporting actors including Michael Bowen, Chris Tucker, Tiny Lister, and most important of all Michael Keaton as the ATF guy that is interested in Jackie both professionally and romantically. Keaton and Bowen are the cops who are trying to manipulate Jackie into betraying Ordell, and Jackie has to outwit them as well as the dangerous gun dealer.

The film turns into a caper/con game movie in the last act, as Jackie and Max try to work out an exchange of money that implicates Ordell, frees Jackie from being under the thumb of the ATF, and also manages to separate the bad guy from his treasure. They do a dry run of the exchange so that the audience gets a sense of what's going to be happening, but of course Tarantino twists it around when they get to the big exchange, and he gives us the process from three or four different perspectives, starting at different times, but ultimately overlapping. It's a complicated sequence, but a good director has managed to make it completely understandable while still keeping us in suspense about what exactly is happening.

All of this only works because Pam Grier is a solid actress, who is finally getting a chance to play a smart character who doesn't rely on belligerence to get her way but rather on cleverness. She is terrific in the scenes where she has to face down Ordell, or when she is flirting with Max. She does get to do the belligerent bit a couple of times in the film, but interestingly she is playing a part with that belligerence, sort of a meta reference to earlier characters that she's played.

I was a guest on the Walt sent me podcast several years ago, where Todd Kristen and I talked about this film. The fact that Disney had bought Miramax, brought this movie into the house of Mouse, and the idea that Tarantino is responsible for a Disney movie just tickled us. I could not locate the episode, but believe me, we talked thoroughly about the film. 

The second film in the program was from 1973, Foxy Brown. It's not as intricately clever as Jackie Brown is, but it does give Pam Grier a chance to show the badass that we will be seeing 25 years later in the other movie. I'm going to do a separate post covering Foxy Brown on my site "Grindhouse Alley". When that goes up I will link it here so you can see my thoughts on the second film in more detail.

(Grindhouse Alley "Foxy Brown")

I'm happy to say that even though it became a late night because of the double feature, most of the audience stayed for both movies. And everybody was very appreciative with Applause at the end of both films. I'll say once more, the Paramount Summer Classic Film Series has hit the mark.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

I came to this film with the highest of expectations. It was my most anticipated film of this year, the trailer is fantastic and it covers a period of time that I lived through and remember. The subject of the movie is Hollywood itself and it's made by Quentin Tarantino. Through the roof were my hopes for the film. Let me preface my more in-depth comments by saying first that I loved the movie, but in total, there are issues and my expectations may have hindered some of my reaction to the movie in both positive and negative ways. As always, this is a personal reflection of how I saw the elements coming together, your mileage may vary.

The best thing you can do for yourself in seeing this film is not to read anything about it beforehand. I'm not simply talking about spoilers, I'm really referring to the impressions that people will have and the surprise that comes from the discovery of what this movie really is. I stayed away from every review and every press release about the movie. It was impossible to avoid some things but I lucked out in that no one revealed how this movie really develops. This is a warning: While I will avoid spoilers, to discuss this film requires that certain concepts be explained and that may inhibit your own reaction to the movie. Proceed with caution or come back after you have seen it.

Tarantino makes movies that are a little bit like a buffet. There are dozens of things to choose from when you want to focus on them, but if you don't have a plan, you may miss something important, or worse, you can mix dessert choices that simply don't pair well. From my point of view, he has lingered over some aspects of the film too long and not offered a main course that is fully satisfying. However, the side dishes are solid and the main confection that comes at the end of the story makes the whole thing worth taking in. I notice that many of the people I follow have done rankings of the Tarantino catalog as part of the process of discussing the movie and it seems fitting to offer a little bit of insight in that direction here. Without giving you a complete nine film ranking, I can say that this movie is better in my opinion than "The Hateful Eight" and "Deathproof" but it does not quite scale the heights of "Pulp Fiction" or "Inglorious Basterds". So that may be an indicator of my tastes and a way for you to measure the film as a consequence.

The three main actors all are terrific but the standout for me is Brad Pitt. As Cliff Booth, the stunt double/gofer to DiCaprio's Western TV Star Rick Dalton, Pitt gets to be amused, sardonic, detached and invested in a lot of different scenes. His back story is completely unnecessary to the plot but as a character point it is interesting. Which is exactly the kind of thing that Tarantino adds to his stories all of the time. The existence of the scene where he faces off against Bruce Lee only means something at the end of the movie and that may be one of those points that you can see coming and that I am hesitant to get into too much detail about. The same is true of his home life with his pit bull Brandy. There will be a payoff down the road and we can see that something is coming but we don't know exactly what. Brad Pitt's best scene however may be a long sequence at the Spahn Ranch, where he encounters something that makes him extremely suspicious and sets up another pay off later on. Although there is a dialogue with two central characters in the sequence, it is really just his facial expressions and general demeanor that makes Pitt sparkle in these scenes.

DiCaprio has a less flashy role here than he did in "Django Unchained", his previous film with Tarantino. His best moments are on the set of a television show he is guesting on, with a conversation between himself and a young actor (because the word actress is meaningless) and also a conversation he has with himself. In previous films by Tarantino, there is a heavy emphasis on language and conversation. Jules and Vincent are compelling because of the way they take mundane subjects and treat them seriously. Col. Landa hoovers over the conversations he has with the French Dairy Farmer, Shoshanna in her disguise and Lt. Aldo Raine, as if he is a vulture looking for a scrap of dialogue he can rip out and feast on. In "Reservoir Dogs" the opening sequence debating tipping is magnetic. Unfortunately, there is nothing that rises to those heights in this film. The one place that Tarantino may have matched his earlier high standards is in the employment of violence in key moments of the film.

There has been some on-line criticism of the shortage of dialogue for Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate. There is an explanation for this but again, let me warn you, it's not a spoiler but it will alter your perception of the story...she is a red herring.  Polanski and Tate are peripheral to what the ultimate outcome is. If that sounds strange because you thought this was a film about the Manson Murders, well, be ready for that Tarantino twist. This is a wish fulfillment fairy tale, in the mode of his best film in my opinion "Inglorious Basterds".  The movie takes us down a path of detailed history about Hollywood in 1969, and at the last minute rewrites it. The details up to the climax are all presented honestly, mixed with the fictional story of the declining career of Rick Dalton, but then there is a sharp right turn. Most of his work before this could be classified as revenge film cinema, and this will neatly fit into that classification.

The last fifteen minutes of the movie made everything that was overly long and unfocused in the first two hours irrelevant. Maybe the foreplay was inelegant and slow. It does not matter when the climax is so satisfying that you want to stand up and cheer even though you are witnessing a violent fiction. We want the scum that the Manson Family was, to get the retribution that they so richly deserve and society has denied. We want the sweet Sharon Tate and her innocent friends to be spared from the gruesome history we know exists. We want Rick Dalton to emerge from the crumbling Hollywood system that is taking down his career with some dignity and the hope that things will be better. And we want all of that with the signature overkill that Tarantino employs in most of his movies. This is not a genre take off like Django or Kill Bill and DeathProof. This is an original film that uses our willingness to suspend disbelief to get a result that we dream would be the truth.

I'm going back to see this again on Friday, and I plan on posting a second version of this review in video form. In that I will get into the technical pleasures of the movie and the historical context that made it so enticing for me. For now I will simply say that the movie turns what might have been a disappointment into a triumph. It's a great magic trick, but it does take a while to play out.

Video Update

Jackie Brown on the "Walt Sent Me Podcast"

                                      I am a guest on this great podcast with Kristen Lopez and Todd Liebenow. We talk Disney News, discuss the Cartoon Short "Who Killed Cock Robin?" and worship at the alter of Pam Grier. Listen in, I think you will really enjoy it.

The Hateful Eight

There are fans of Quentin Tarantino who will love everything he does and have an issue with any criticism. There are critics as well, who find his approach to film making to be infantile and sensationalist without much discipline. Lovers and haters, welcome to the latest film from the man who re-invented independent cinema and has copied himself repeatedly ever since. "The Hateful Eight" is exactly titled. There are no characters that are redeeming in the main cast, and the secondary characters may have sufficient drawbacks for you to dislike them as well. This three hour plus version of the movie is as indulgent as anything in the "Kill Bill" films but without the same level of bravado as those movies. The camera does not make itself an extra character, the violence is standard for a film from Tarantino, and there are long passages of dialogue that lack the wink and smile that made earlier films such a treasure. There are still plenty of things that make it worth seeing, but it may be the first film of his since "Deathproof" that cinema fans may not see as essential.

Let's start with those things that are confusing, wasteful, annoying or just plain dumb about the film. We saw the road show version of the movie and I have great fondness for some of the trappings that go along with such a presentation. An overture and an intermission provide a special feeling to the experience you are undergoing. The Ennio Morricone music during the overture was great, but it took two hours to get to the intermission, and it the first real action beat of the movie. Everything else has been set up of character, story points and setting. It was the right moment to break for the intermission, but it was an odd tone that lead up to it. There is some pretty awful plot development that leads to the moment of action. It is implausible, distasteful and designed to inflame racial animus not only between characters in the movie but for those watching as well. The story is supposed to be provocative, but the language and tone are anachronistic, and the visualization that goes along with it was gratuitous. We are lead to believe that no one in this group will be deserving of any respect, and Samuel L. Jackson makes sure that whatever empathy we might have had for his plight as a black man in a white man's world is dissipated by his lack of any decency or humanity. I saw a couple of younger kids in the theater, and while the violence that comes later is disturbing, the cruelty exhibited in this flashback moment of incendiary personal history was hard to bear. Not so much for an indignity being imposed on a white man by a black man, but for the galling brutality that one human being might be willing to impose on another. It's bad enough to imagine Eli Wallach as Tuco, forcing Clint Eastwood's "Blondie" to cross a desert without water in a Spaghetti Western from fifty years ago, it's another thing to layer on excessive humiliation on top of the torture. Layer that with spiteful and vivid imagery and yes, as Jackson's character says, we start to get a picture in our head. Tarantino makes sure we see that picture, not that we simply imagine it.

The story spools out as if it is going to be a version of Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians"  (and when you know the original title, you will see why Tarantino must have wanted to use t as the basis of a story). It plays out as the long form version of his favorite trope "the Mexican Standoff". From Reservoir Dogs to Django Unchained, Tarantino has filled his stories with faceoffs of antagonists and built tension and suspense with them. The basement sequence in "Inglorious Basterds" is probably the pinnacle of his story telling skills using this tool. That scene played out over a twenty minute time span, not a hundred and eighty seven. He is going to this well too often and too long in this film. While there are some great moments in the process, it feels exaggerated and overdone. The eloquence with which Oswaldo Mobray explains civilized justice is worth listening too but it lacks the same flair that it might have had if the character were played by a Teutonic Christoph Waltz rather than an effete Tim Roth.  Kurt Russel inexplicably disappears through the whole set up of the first gunplay in the film and Michael Madsen  makes laconic look like an active status. The characters don't get to do anything for the first two hours, they just listen, and many of them, we never see any reaction from. When there finally is some confrontation between characters, it is resolved with some pretty disgusting screen moments. It will provoke a laugh and a gag reflex at the same time.

If there is one perfect vehicle for the dialogue that Tarantino writes, it is Samuel L. Jackson. He conveys the irony and viciousness of the words with great effect. He is given a good run for his money by Walton Goggins. His inflection is almost enough to raise the language to the heights we have come to expect from a QT film. The script though robs him of the poetry that his character in "Justified" might have used. Had the colloquial terminology of Charles Portis been more of a presence, this would have been eloquent and memorable. None of the lines are really quotable, and the impact they have is mostly dependent on the reading provided by the actors. The conversations just do not snap they way they did in any of the  previous seven films from Tarantino. They are still better words than you will get in ninety percent of the scripts you will see on the screen, but it feels like a step down.

The last confusing or disappointing element I want to mention is the decision to shoot in 70 mm. I heard Goggins speak about the lenses and cameras used to make the film being the same ones used in widescreen epics like "Khartoum". This would lead you to believe the story will be a spectacular visual treat with David Lean like shots. Instead, it is a stage bound single set piece, which makes the Panavision 70 mm seem like a strange affectation rather than a bold attempt to capture the grandeur of a big scale story.

Ok, now for the stuff that works. Goggins, Russell, Jackson are the jewels in the crown. Jennifer Jason Leigh has to wait until the last hour to sparkle, but when her character gets the chance to become part of the story, it is finally clear why they need to have an actress of her type, tough and intelligent. The shoot outs and special effects eviscera are enough to satisfy even the most demanding gore hounds. There are also some nice twists that are revealed in the non-sequential formatting of the story, another Tarantino trademark, and they work great. The music is also worth wading through the movie to get to hear. There are very few snippets of the music cues that Tarantino is used to relying on, this is a much more traditional score and it is beautiful. There is a sense of closure that seems appropriate to the characters, but you will still want to take a long shower after spending so much time with these types. In the end, I liked it, but it may be one of the least successful of  stories in his filmography. Like "Death Proof", you have to meander through a lot of narrative that goes nowhere to get to the stuff you have been waiting for. Take it or leave it, I doubt it will have the repeatability of any of the other seven films from Quentin Tarantino.