Movies I Need to See, Part I

A friend of mine, Thom Carnell,  is doing a "366 movies in 366 days" challenge this year.  It's ambitious.  It means watching great cinema and crappy popcorn flicks, it means watching things that aren't quite in your taste spectrum, and it means flat out watching things you just hate.  He's even reviewing them all. To that I say, good for him.

He and I differ in tastes.  He's a lot more into things that are elevate movies to an artwork.  He's into stylistic choices with shots and scenes, he's into obscure films by obscure film makers (and believe me, he knows his shit.  Check out The Bonus Material Podcast, where he and two co-conspirators talk about film and filmmaking.  Eye-opening stuff), whereas I'm admittedly much more simple than that.   Do I love a great story? Absolutely.  Do I enjoy cool cinematography? Sure.  I don't necessarily require them to have a good time at the movies (however, a bad story will almost 100% of the time result in a bad movie and a terrible time at the movies.  I'm looking at you, A Most Violent Year).

Anyway, I throw up this story as a prologue for the movies I'm most excited about this year.  Keep in mind that I'm going to update this list frequently as more stuff comes out.  And yes, trailers.

Kung Fu Panda 3.  I'm into animated movies. So sue me.  DreamWorks has a wonderful thing going here with KFP and How to Train Your Dragon.  I grew up in the 80s in New York, where you could watch kung-Fu flicks every Saturday afternoon.  I loved that.  The Kung-Fu Panda series is a great homage/spoof of all that nonsensical and fun pseudo-mystical stuff from that era.  And who doesn't love that?

Deadpool.  Another attempt at recreating this character onscreen.  (His first time in X-Men Origins: Wolverine was just... no.). It's amazing what a madcap trailer from a guano-psychotic video.game will do these days.  It seems like this time they managed to capture the essence of the character, a dangerously unstable, fourth-wall breaking, regenerating, cancer-stricken mercenary.  It'll either be really good, or really bad.  I've gotta see it.







Zoolander 2.  If I'm being totally honest, there is no burning desire to see this for me. I thought the first one was funny, but it was also 15 years ago.  My girlfriend wants to see it, so if I want to drag her to see something I want to see, this sacrifice must be made.  You feel me, right guys?

Race. A bit on-the-nose with its title, this follows Jesse Owens and his winning 4 gold medals in the 1936 Olympics... in a very Nazi Berlin with Adolf Hitler watching. Maybe they'll touch on the issues he dealt with at home, being a Black Man from Jim Crow's South.  Worth watching, I think.









London Has Fallen.  Olympus Has Fallen was a fun action movie, no reason to think the next one won't be as well.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.  Tina Fey as a female war correspondent in Iraq.  The trailer's decently funny, and this could be pretty good.  Why not?

10 Cloverfield Lane.  Some years back, JJ Abrams put together a trailer for a found-footage monster movie set in New York City that featured the head of the Statue of Liberty being torn off.  That trailer became Cloverfield, and despite all its promise, it was one of the most disappointing movie experiences of my life.  Since then, JJ has done two Star Trek movies and a Star Wars movie, and I can't help to think he's learned something in the experience.  So I'm going to double down and see this one, which will either be really good or reeeeeallly bad





And that takes me to the end of the winter.  Next time I do this, it will be Summer Blockbuster Season.  Which means, comic book movies.  And there will be reviews.

Review: Django Unchained

I saw Django Unchained last week, and my impression was... meh.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad movie.  It was entertaining to a degree, and visually it was quite well done.  I was kind of n-weary by the end though.  This is a Tarantino flick, he uses the n-word.  Liberally.  By the end of the movie I came to two realizations.  One:  Quentin Tarantino wishes he was raised in Compton and two: he had a vision of what slavery would have been like if Shaft or Dolomite were around.  And a blaxploitation slavery movie seems a touch redundant, don't you think?

I'm not railing against the use of the word.  I grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn in the 80s and 90s.  For those of you that means something to, yeah.  For the rest of you, it means that I've heard and used the n-word a lot in my youth.  A whole lot.  I'm not as sensitive to the word itself as maybe I should be.  As I got older and realized it wasn't for polite company, I used it less.  And when I finally got the history of it, its intended use, it's actual meaning, I've taken pains to remove it from my vocabulary.  So while, in my humble opinion, Quentin Tarantino using the word as a punctuation mark is a bit on the excessive side and most definitely a turn-off, it wasn't my biggest issue with the movie.

Neither was the gore.  This flick was bloody and violent.  At a time when this country is still reeling from violent acts with firearms, its astounding how casually and frequently people are shot to death.  I mean, this is a Tarantino flick, once again, so we expect to be treated to little bits of brain and skull and pools of blood but... damn.  That said, however, that wasn't my problem with the movie.

My big problem was with the overall concept.  It didn't seem like it in the trailers, but this was essentially Roots set as a Spaghetti Western.  I'm not saying that we need to treat the history of the slave trade with church-like reverence, but the film asks you to make leaps of faith that are a little extreme, such as this one adult slave would be able to instinctively fire a gun, learn to read in three months, track down his wife three states away, and kill a whole house of slave owners.  Come on.

Props to Jamie Foxx, who did a great job portraying the hero in the context of the film.  Big props to Sam Jackson who plays Stephen, "the most hated Negro in cinematic history," as he put it.  Not so much to Kerry Washington, who a friend of mine called Hollywood's highest paid extra.  She didn't talk much but, to quote Django, "she pretty."

Like I said, not a bad flick.  But soft stomachs need not apply.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10.