First Bond To Die.

Daniel Craig’s last ever Bond. Is it too gauche to say he goes out… with a BANG?

NO TIME TO DIE is a handsome robust conclusion to the Daniel Craig Bond adventure, something the Bond franchise has never done for its other leading spies. After wrapping SPECTRE (2015), with Daniel’s admission that he would rather eat glass than make another Bond, it seems fortunate that producers at EON Productions (Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli) could coax one last entry out of him, to close the final chapter respectfully. Although it seems Daniel was just in a mood during that particular interview, as his respect for the icon he stewarded for the last 15 years is apparent in this story that almost mirrors his real life reticence.

Bond (Craig) is enlisted by the CIA’s Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) to kidnap a biologist named Obruchev from Spectre, whose DNA-based weapon can wipe out whole swathes of humanity. Bond’s own spy agency MI6, works against him to kidnap Obruchev for themselves, employing a newly-minted 007 – a black woman, no less (Lashan Lynch, knocking down two woke birds with one stone). And playing against them all, a mumbling stranger (Rami Malek) with the phonetically saucy name of Lyutsifer Safin.

James Bond: spy about town.

NO TIME TO DIE mirrors Craig’s real life in that he wanted out of Bond – and in the movie, Bond is off the grid with his lady-love from SPECTRE, Madeleine (Léa Seydoux – another first for the Bond series: a continuing love affair across movies); then Craig signed up for another Bond, but the real world pandemic shut him out – while in the movie, Bond wants back in to MI6 but his cantankerous boss M (Ralph Fiennes) shuts him out; in the real world, speculation soars on Craig’s replacement – and in the movie, Bond has been replaced by another double-oh!

This last point has the internet abuzz that EON Productions is setting up Lynch as a “female Bond” – but stop that fretting, misogynistic mother’s-basement incels. Yes, casting Lynch stinks of the new reverse-sexism of “girling up” traditionally male movie roles (GHOSTBUSTERS, THOR, OCEAN’S ELEVEN), but it becomes apparent that Lynch is not here for the long haul; she is merely a device to illustrate “Bond losing everything” – even his spy identity – so that his hero’s journey will be all the more epic.

Yet it still stinks of pushing the envelope when it is hinted that Q is gay. The “Q” used to stand for Quartermaster; now it seems to stand for Queer… If you writers (director Cary Joji Fukunaga, with co-writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade) want to create a new gay character – go nuts! – but why fuck with 60-year-old canon for the sake of appeasing tweeting Karens? Why not shoot the whole shebang and make the next Bond a non-binary quadriplegic bi-racial muslim midget? Oh, I see one of the writers is Phoebe Waller-Bridge – no doubt the one responsible for all the woman-whining in the script (my summation based solely on her portrayal of that feminist droid on SOLO. So sue me).

The cold open is 23 minutes long (that’s the length of a First Act!), finding Bond on the ancient cobbled streets of Italy (exactly where Michael Corleone went to hide out). Bond languidly promises Madeleine, “We have all the time in the world”– Uh-oh, the last time Bond heard that Louie Armstrong song (ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE, 1969), his wife was brutally murdered. This time, it’s the other way ‘round…

While both try to move on from their pasts, they find that people from their pasts don’t share the same zen. (Again like Michael: “Just when I thought I was out – they pull me back IN!”) Assassins force Bond onto a bike (the stunt up the staircase and over the courtyard wall is Steve McQueen in GREAT ESCAPE – times 10!), and then into his tricked-out Aston Martin – with the guns and smoke and spiky little mines – but the upshot of all the machine-gunning and musclecar-drifting is that Bond now doubts whether Madeleine betrayed him or not. And the scene of him putting her on a train saying, “You’ll never see me again!” is heart-wrenching!

We fade into opening titles, with Billie Eilish whispering the song No Time To Die (with no silhouetted naked women — damn you, Phoebe Waller-Bridge!).

5 YEARS LATER

The Obruchev plot kicks in. It always amazes me that in any movie where the smart scientist is being pursued, his formula/invention/weapon only resides in HIS brain. Guys, ever heard of flash-drives, trusted colleagues, or even the damn Cloud? Like my I.T. guy keeps telling me: MAKE A COPY OF YOUR WORK. Smart like squirrels.

As with all Bond adventures, it’s big and bold and European, first teaming Bond with a stunning slit-skirted MI6 agent, Paloma (Ana de Armas – last seen with Craig in KNIVES OUT 2019). In Craig’s first (CASINO ROYALE, 2006), when asked by the bartender, “Shaken or stirred?” his retort, “Do I look like I give a damn?!” was to buck convention – but now, in this final entry, to keep the legacy rose-colored, his drink order for Paloma and himself: “Two vodka-martinis – shaken, not stirred.”

Besides making thirteen-year-old boys wonder how Paloma’s jumblies don’t fall out of that lowcut-no-back-thigh-slit dress, her short cameo as an action heroine shows us how woman empowerment should be done – her every move sensual, from dragging Bond into a closet to suit him up, to inserting his ear bud; from giggling about being a naif on the job to kicking ass and wielding an automatic machine gun. There’s nothing more attractive than a powerful woman who keeps her mouth shut about being a powerful woman.

It’s great to see Ben Whishaw as Q again (if only Desmond Llewelyn had this much meaty screentime! Although getting the old-school curmudgeon to acquiesce to man-love would’ve been a harder proposition), and find ourselves wondering which of Craig’s crew will remain across screen Bonds. And it is very sad to see Jeffrey Wright take his final bow as Felix (the longest-recurring Felix – 5 movies – with David Hedison far behind with only 2 appearances).

Bond reconciles with Madeleine, and discovers her strange connection with Blofeld…

I’m really disappointed in Christoph Waltz’s portrayal of Blofeld across the Craig Bond series. If ever any filmmaker was going to recapture Waltz’s stone-cold menace from INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, then surely casting him as one of film history’s greatest villains should have done the trick. Alas, what little menace he mustered in 2015’s SPECTRE (his first appearance as Bond’s nemesis, Blofeld) has been leached from this entry, as he mustache-twirls for five minutes while in cuffs, and is then dispatched quite offhandedly.

Blofeld’s oomph-Bond-Gimmick was his scar over his eye, Donald Pleasance sporting it for maximum mad scientist effect in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967). Here, they’ve Hollywood-ized the scar, making it an inauthentic non-eye, clearly the result of greenscreen prosthetics, and losing all menace entirely. Barbara Broccoli – you had Christoph Waltz! And you blew it!

Though the story is more cohesive than any entries from Sean or Roger, the plot is diluted when the movie mishandles its actual major villain – Malek’s Lyutsifer Safin – who is the engine behind the Obruchev plot, but doesn’t appear until well into the second act, expositing his retcon connections with Madeleine, with his face on Quarter Deformity. (No cute star goes Full Deformity. Though his burned face is meant to inspire the same body-horror as Blofeld’s scar, they’re not gonna risk that bankable cutie-pie mug with any real ickiness.)

Like every great morally ambiguous villain, Safin wants to save humanity by ending it (my kinda guy!), “We tell each other lies about the fight for free will, but… we want to be told how to live – and then die when we are not looking. People want oblivion. And a few of us are born to build it for them.” He tells Bond that they are not so different: “We both eradicate people to make the world a better place.” Ah yes, again with the Demon est Deus inversus – the Devil is God upside down – the hero and villain are two sides of the same damaged coin… Hence, his name – Safin believes he is opening the world’s eyes to evolve (Lucifer = “light-bringer”).

In the film’s final showdown, Safin does what every Bond Villain should have done for the past 60 years – shoot Bond point blank… but then, instead of a kill-shot, Safin does what every Bond Villain has done for the past 60 years – start talking.

– – – – – SPOILERS – – – – –

 A poetic ending, a live-by-the-sword parable. Though we never want our hero to die, I must admit, if Bond had to go, this is a most satisfying way – while saving the world, while sacrificing himself for the greater good, while wishing his loved ones “all the time in the world”…

We discover – as Bond does – a daughter of Madeleine’s. Mathilde. Striking blue hawk eyes. Is she or isn’t she… a Bond Girl? Whomever she is – SUCH A CUTIE! You thought Lexi Rabe was cute with her “Love you 3000” to Iron Man; you thought Abby Ryder Forston was cute playing with Ant Man, well Lisa-Dorah Sonnet is Cuteness x 007!

At one point, Mathilde realizes she’s lost her bunny doll, her “Dou Dou” – and in running to escape the facility before it blows, Bond finds it and tucks it into his belt. We are conditioned to those saccharine endings, where Dou Dou might pop up from behind a table, to Mathilde’s delight, with Bond following it, to Madeleine’s delight… but Dou Dou stays tucked in Bond’s belt as he stolidly watches the nukes explode in a row towards him.

And Louie Armstrong sings us out. Except for Monty Norman’s James Bond Theme, this is the only song ever used in more than one James Bond film – We Have All The Time In The World. Suddenly taking on much more heartbreak, to what would seem the final Bond. (James Bond has never died in a film before.) But there is a bittersweet sigh of relief when we are assured this is only Daniel Craig’s final chapter, as the final titles sling that old refrain, white type on black background:

JAMES BOND WILL RETURN

END

“Have you got anything under 4 billion dollars that I can park around humans?”

Same old Bond! What did you ex-spectre?

James Bond 007 discovers the looming nemesis dogging his every move since he was in spy-nappies; the criminal organization for expensive suits and limited edition sportscars – SPECTRE!

Daniel Craig, in his fourth outing as James Bond, looks old and makes me tired. French flame-hair Léa Seydoux is Madeleine Swann, resident Bond Girl (which means she looks as pretty as Jon Bon Jovi, yet is somehow a doctor). And in what is initially an ominous role – that devolves to just another villain telling Bond his plan before putting him in a trap that allows him to escape – the brilliant Christoph Waltz as the rebooted Ernst Stavro Blofeld (most memorably played by Donald Pleasance in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE). Blofeld starts as a shadow, with the power to make men do his bidding with a whisper – and ends as Dr. Evil.

Waltz’s intrinsic sinister demeanor is felt here only when he is in darkness, and is immediately lost once he reveals himself and starts egotistically explaining his plot like any Goldfinger, Largo or Drax. I was very disappointed not to be terrified by this man, in a role that should be the most terrifying of his career – someone behind pre-meditated world-spanning crimes, not just a Jew Hunter; I mean, he was more sinister in HORRIBLE BOSSES 2.

And his organization Spectre is misused here as well. Producer Kevin McClory sued EON Productions in 1961 (owners of the Bond franchise, headed by Albert Broccoli at the time), prohibiting their use of SPECTRE and Blofeld, both his creations. (That’s how we ended up with Roger Moore dropping a fake Blofeld down a chimney shaft in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY and the rejoinder to that juvenile gesture, the Connery film NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, produced by McClory.) That’s why we never saw SPECTRE or Blofeld appear in any post-Connery film.

Well, McClory died in 2006, and in 2013, the McClory estate settled with EON, who were granted the copyrights to use the properties. So what does EON do in this film? Not only do they re-insert Blofeld back into Bond canon, they make Blofeld claim to be responsible for EVERYTHING that has happened to Bond over the last four decades. “I am the author of all your pain.” Jesus, talk about “grasping”! Or “retconning,” as the cool kids call it.

Bit childish, dontcha think? Claiming this person or org has been behind the plots of the old episodes is THE most pointless plot device in a series chock full of pointless plot devices. Is producer Barbara Broccoli, like some kind of megalomaniac from a Bond tale, just seeking revenge for her father? Lemme tell you, Babs, newer Bond fans don’t care, and older Bond fans will just roll our eyes.

Also, the acronym (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) is apparently discarded, and “reimagined” as Spectre. So am I meant to think about Spectre whenever I rewatch Scaramanga or Kristatos or Elliott Carver? Because I WON’T. And guess what? Nothing changes. Unless you actually go in like George Lucas and change dialogue and add banthas in the background. Which I’m sure you snide, petulant, grasping assholes will do eventually.

The James Bond series of films has always been a little flamboyant, due to the technology being AHEAD of its time – pens that shot explosives, watches with telex communication, rings with built-in cameras, cars that turned into submarines – but in 2015’s SPECTRE, the technology is at the level of 2015 technology! Nothing is surprising: there’s a gun with laser sights that shoots explosives, a watch that explodes, a tracking device injected into the blood, a dentist’s chair with remote-controlled drills, a computer that shows road maps, a sports car that spouts fire at its pursuer… yawn… Wake me when they use something that can tell time not just locally, but around the world, as well as predict the weather, show traffic accidents, identify songs, has a guitar tuner, an altitude meter, a compass, a flashlight, a dictaphone, an appointment calendar, email, internet, constellation map, camera, video games, metronome, stopwatch… or they can just USE MY PHONE.

How do we get excited over a spy who’s using technology that’s less impressive than what’s keeping my balls irradiated?

Opening sequence is a seemingly unbroken take that follows Bond through the Day Of The Dead festival in Mexico City, up into a hotel room, and out onto rooftops, where he eventually perches with a machine gun scope to assassinate someone in the next hotel. The logistics to set up the festival crowd alone is mind-boggling. It is technically NOT an unbroken take, but the transitions are so seamless it is obviously meant to be. It is by far the best scene in the movie.

Then — a lung-busting explosion, a building falls, a foot chase, a fight in a swerving helicopter above a crowded square… a ring with a seven-armed octopus…

While Bond is suspended by M (a stalwart Ralph Fiennes) for chasing an unknown organization without authorization, a new MI6 boss Max Denbigh (a smarmy Andrew Scott) is looking to scrap “the prehistoric double-oh program” altogether, thereby making Bond redundant. That old device of robbing the hero of his very essence (IRON MAN 3, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION, THOR, hell, even this movie’s predecessor SKYFALL) to make his struggle back even more heroic.

Dave Bautista is this movie’s Jaws, a towering killer of few words, sent by Spectre to kill Bond. Ben Whishaw is once again weapons expert Q (and computer whiz too), and Naomie Harris is once again Moneypenny, both of whom help Bond stay on the track of Spectre despite his own spy agency disavowing him. They share many exciting scenes of talking and looking at computer screens showing source code.

As with all the modern Bond films, it’s a classy production, with lush soundtrack by Thomas Newman (SKYFALL, THE IRON LADY, WALL-E), screenplayed by John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth (the first three having worked on all Craig’s Bond films), and directed by SKYFALL’s Sam Mendes, so there is definitely a tone of continuity. Although that tone might not be the best direction for Bond: everything here is dire, dark, depressing; Bond does not retain the lightness of his character from previous movies and incarnations; no quips or wistfulness. Roger Moore was a looong time ago… Are Bond’s filmmakers following the example of Nolan’s DARK KNIGHT series too well, by making everything that was once flamboyant grounded in stultifying reality?

Lea Seydoux meets Bond and immediately reverts to bedhead.

Bond and Swann travel to exotic locations, escape inescapable situations and feel the urge to plonk after every life-and-death battle. Best audacious chase scene is Bond smugly pursuing a Jeep in the snow – in a plane being demolished as it slides down the ice, ending up tail-less, wingless and engine-less – and still catching his quarry! (Homage to Roger Moore’s car being cut down in VIEW TO A KILL.)

There are many nods to the series in general: “shaken not stirred,” the Aston Martin, the origin of Blofeld’s scar, Judi Dench cameo, Bond’s carelessness with Q’s toys, and the fact that Bond plonks an arbitrary buxom beauty (Monica Bellucci) for the sake of a password. And a sort of turnaround on a famous quote: Bond says, “I came here to kill you!” Reply: “And I thought you came here to die.” (In the vein of GOLDFINGER‘s, “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”)

When the connectivity with all the recent Bond films and villains is revealed, this news does not seem compelling, because it seems like Bond is just waiting to hand in his resignation for the sake of Bon Jovi’s panty. It’s not even Daniel Craig’s real life comments about rather slashing his wrists than doing another Bond film; the plot itself steers him in that direction like a luxury sportscar.

Pierce Brosnan (the 5th Bond) is also not impressed with this 24th Bond film, blaming it on the point I made about the technology, putting it another way, “Is this Bond or Bourne?” meaning the movie is not separating itself anymore from the mill of hi-tech actioners, whereas once – even during Brosnan’s most recent era – Bond films were an audacious hyper-reality.

If Daniel Craig decides to return for another one, tell Barbara Broccoli she can borrow my smartphone…

END

Pwnage.

Two couples whose sons were involved in a school fight meet to discuss how to deal with their sons. And fight.

Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly are Penelope and Michael Longstreet, whose son lost two teeth being hit with a stick by the son of Nancy and Alan Cowan (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz). Film opens with Penelope at her computer, surrounded by the others, writing a statement about the incident. There is disagreement over the phrase “armed with a stick,” which is resolved quickly to “carrying a stick,” but we immediately sense the façade of amity that every character has thrown up around themselves to get past this uncomfortable meeting with strangers.

The beauty is in watching the erosion of that façade.

Director Roman Polanski (THE PIANIST) turns Yasmina Reza‘s French play, LE DIEU DU CARNAGE, into a quirky little thought experiment. “Thought experiment” because, though this situation has been lived by countless parents over the millennia, Reza decides to keep the two sets of parents in the same room until entropy is attained. (Entropy: not just a thermodynamic steady state, a German doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration.) Because if you draw anything out long enough – friendship, marriage, treaty, contract – it will disintegrate due to humans being human.

The four actors give excellent performances in this well-directed dramedy, constantly reminding themselves they are more sophisticated than savages and that they should not descend to incivility. Yet we can see where all roads are leading, as they alternately blame, bond, accede guilt, ally, bully, vent, belittle, taunt, accuse, and ultimately resolve nothing.

Reilly seems slightly miscast (a talented actor whom we’ve grown accustomed to seeing as a screwball), yet he holds his own against these Actor’s Actor heavyweights. His Michael is self-admittedly a gruff guy who is faking civility, and would probably not even care about his son’s incident if it were not for his wife Penelope forcing the drama.

Waltz (in the few English roles we’ve seen him in), as always, the most studied, sober and deepest in the skin of his lawyer Alan, allowing himself a breeziness that shows us he is also not too concerned about the universe collapsing on what were once simply boys-will-be-boys actions. Though he would much rather be someplace else, almost seeming callous about the fates of the two boys, he still manages to sporadically exude that snakecharm ominousness that defined him in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. When Penelope mentions his son “deliberately” hitting her son, his smile is toxic, “Why do you have to slip in the word ‘deliberately’? What kind of lesson are you trying to teach me?”

Winslet is at turns a gracious guest and drunken alleycat. Like the rest of the cast, her Nancy is trying in vain to be upper class and almost succeeding. Vomiting over Penelope’s art books doesn’t help, her “proper” demeanor further deteriorating under alcohol.

Foster’s Penelope has staked the most emotion in this issue, an almost fanatical desire to see justice meted out. Towards the end, her reactions are extreme; it seems like director Polanski, though he must have filmed enough varied takes, used the takes that were not the most appropriate reactions for the scene. But then, all the characters seem to get in on the inappropriate reactions, calling each names, insulting each others’ sons, emasculating, denigrating, crying, histrionics; madness which we feel would prompt any sane guests to leave, not with polite or fake excuses, but with an unceremonious “Let’s-go-honey” race to the door. Yet they all remain in the same room without fisticuffs ensuing! Is this the measure of civility? Slander without bloodshed?

CARNAGE is a snide satire on this politically correct era of coddling. In a simpler time, one schoolboy losing two teeth to another was considered part of growing up. Now First World countries seem to think children are delicate crystal angels. This statement was made – sarcastically as hell – on the SOUTH PARK episode “Sarcastiball,” where all gruffness, incivility and energy were leached out of school football games so that kids wouldn’t get hurt. Only in First World countries would anything as small as two missing teeth be turned into a national incident; where people are sooooo sensitive about injuring other people yet hypocritically want to go to war at the drop of a muslim.

Alan tells Penelope: “I believe in the god of carnage. The god whose rule’s been unchallenged since time immemorial.” Sounds less like a case of belief in a god, more like a case of humans being human.

END

Once Upon a Black Time in the White West.

Whiteys: 0. Niggers: 1

Quentin Tarantino, as he did with INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009), once again punches history in the face and rewrites the underdog as the alpha dog in DJANGO UNCHAINED. And says nigger a lot.

DJANGO UNCHAINED throws that word at us in such forceful abandon that it becomes hilarious to hear from the mouths of rednecks and high society alike; a grim reminder of the times (1858, two years before the American Civil War), when even the educated elite were conditioned to call African slaves niggers, not as pejorative or juvenile display of superiority, but as reference.

Rock solid Jamie Foxx is slave Django, liberated from a slave gang by dentist/bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (eternally mesmeric Christoph Waltz), at first to help King identify a bounty kill, then going Marvel Team-Up to rescue Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who was sold to a dandy Mississippi plantation owner, Kandie (a very sinister Leonardo DiCaprio).

As with all Tarantino films, the movie MAKING sells it, not so much the simple buddy/road-movie plot, which is once again littered with audacious coincidences and maddeningly convenient plot points. Tarantino’s signature compelling vignettes still litter the celluloid, the hip dialogue as ferocious as the bullet-fests, yet of all Tarantino’s oeuvre, DJANGO stands apart as arguably his first film that can neatly be sliced into three acts.

The acts are split into comedy, drama and violence. First act finds Django and King bonding on bounty kills, second act is the Long Con, and third act is all Foxx, hero angles, hero bloodshed, and hero slomo.

Act I, we meet heavily-drawling Don Johnson as plantation owner Big Daddy, replete with Colonel Sanders goatee, imperious white suit and finger-lickin’ necktie; Django posing as a “free man,” the plantation slaves so inculcated in perceiving black men as slaves that Big Daddy must instruct them on how to treat Django – “like a white man” – which flabbergasts them; and a wildly-miscast Jonah Hill, arguing with fellow Klan members over the eye-holes in their hoods being constrictive to their vision, like a Python sketch.

Act II is the Long Con, the most intense psychodrama sequence, where Tarantino sets up his beautiful dangerous tableaus: Django posing as a black slave trader (“lower than a house nigger”), he and King masquerading to Kandie as business partners seeking new talent for “mandingo fighting,” a whitey bloodsport pitting black against black to the death (broken arms, hammers to the head and other such whimsy). They attempt to buy Django’s wife from Kandie, on the pretense they would be investing thousands more buying mandingoes. When the ruse is uncovered – by the lowly “house nigger” – and Kandie brings out his father’s skull, we just know we’re in for some sweet Tarantino mindfuck dialoguing. And who is the house nigger? None other than Samuel L. Jackson; a wonder how he pulls off a role alternately so funny and so slimy.

Second act wraps with wild gunfire, dodging impossible hails of bullets, gouts of blood spurting in bucketfuls, each death an art statement, human entrails exploding in fiery red fountains… It’s classic Tarantino by way of Sam Peckinpah and early John Woo, with better technology, ergo better gratuitous gore. That’s why we love him. We also love Tarantino for his brazen deus ex machinae  that always seem as natural as spitting blood after being shot in the lung. But in DJANGO, for the first time – Tarantino fails to make it seem natural…

It is in these impossibly tense Kandie sequences that all Tarantino’s storytelling errors are made: firstly, King could have avoided Kandie’s revenge with one simple lie (that he bedded Broomhilda); secondly, King is outfitted with guns hidden up his forearms (TAXI-DRIVER-style) and opts not to go out blazing; thirdly, Django is saved at the annoyingly last minute by the person who hates him most, the house nigger. And he is sent on a cross-country trek with infinite opportunities to escape, like a 1960’s Batman episode. A jaw-dropping display of lazy screenwriting.

In BASTERDS, Waltz played someone so demonic, his every innocuous gesture contained menace, his every courteous word laced with arsenic and occluded intent. In DJANGO, Waltz is still lucid, ruthless, merciless (and it’s incongruously hilarious hearing him say nigger in that Germanic brogue) – but this time, he’s on our side. Here, Leo is The Christoph Waltz, teetering on a tightrope of volcanic eruption and insatiable violence, his beatific smile masking a sociopathic nihilism. And boy does he love saying nigger. Walton Goggins is a crazy-eyed Kandie ranch-hand (the guy you call when Steve Buscemi is unavailable) and the most comfortable having nigger in his redneck vernacular. But the movie is Foxx’s, to have and to hold. And he’s the only one who can say nigger with any conviction and impunity.

Act III is Jamie Foxx Unchained. Who would’ve thought Wanda would end up such a big brutal star?

On his trek to the Batman prison with three other caged slaves (minded by Tarantino in a jailer cameo with an atrocious Australian accent), Django, in his overbearing confidence, spins a tale to free himself, spitting at his dubious captors, “Do I talk like a slave?” (An excellent line, reminding us that though most slaves must have been cowed into obeisance, there must have been men among them who yet held their heads high enough to rise above the physical and psychological cowing of Whitey, otherwise Lincoln and his cronies would never have thought it morally reprehensible to keep these men captive.) After a brutally quick shootout with his captors, Django rides off armed to the teeth on an unsaddled horse, and one of the caged slaves watches him, the hint of a smile on his face. That smile, edged with tears, is a hammerblow button to this scene. It’s like the slave was looking at everything the black man could be; like he was looking at the revolution right there; witness to the beginning of the rising up from underfoot. Unwritten history written all over his face…

UNCHAINED is another Tarantino thunderball. Though based in an historical period, it unapologetically blazes outside the arc of history. Its lead character is an anomaly – Django is not just a rebel slave, he doesn’t even consider himself an underdog. It is not in his vernacular; he holds an intrinsic belief that he *is* superior to his captors, an aspect that was literally beaten and bred out of generations of Africans.

Tarantino had to field a slew of interviews to justify why his characters said nigger so much. (Why do you idiots focus on that one word? Is anyone hearing Waltz mention Alexandre Dumas to Leo, who coincidentally played THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK? Is anyone hearing the authentically Western soundtrack that contains numerous Ennio Morricone compositions, including themes from TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA? Is anyone commending QT for alluding to Wagner’s Brünnhilde?)

And here’s the thing: even though writer-director Tarantino set DJANGO during slavery and feels justified in sprinkling n-words like glitter, the tale of the unbound slave-turned-bounty hunter is hyper-realism – it’s not meant to be a documentary or authentic representation of the era – so Tarantino could have opted to be more niggardly with the “niggers.” But – as we discovered in PULP FICTION – QT just loooves dropping that bomb… I think it’s a case of just liking the way the word sounds, like “fuck.”

Like fuck, it drops like a ball-peen hammer every time you hear it. It never gets old and it never wears thin. Like fuck, it is all-purpose, can be used in any context, to friend or foe, to black or white, for stop or go. Could it be that modern Whitey guilt just doesn’t like admitting how blasé and passe the derogation was back then? That, just like rewriting “Mark Twain” and Republicans’ disavowal of slavery, they don’t want such a harsh light shone on their past cowardly White-nited States of America?

Once again, the purveyors of the message are attacked, instead of the message being heard. When I state that the Pope and his cronies fuck boys, it’s me who gets vilified for saying “fuck.” (What would you prefer I say – making love?) Do you critics think the actual crime/sin of fucking boys can be overlooked simply because you turn your hypocritical derision to the people who are calling it what it is?

Nigger, please!

END

Gloriously Bastardly.

Quentin Tarantino loves cinema. Even the characters in his movies talk cinema. And the ones who aren’t talking cinema still seem to realize they’re in a damn fine piece of it. And the major plot point of Tarantino’s latest cinematic masterpiece, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, revolves around the screening of a movie!

The Bear Cuke Jew

Tarantino knows cinema so intimately, he smashes a conglomeration of styles together to arrive at BASTERDS; we could trace the lineage of Kurosawa, Woo, Hitchcock and Leone, but unless you’re a film scholar with your hand down your pants, you just wanna get to the Jewish ultra-violence.

That’s where Brad Pitt comes in. As half-breed hillbilly Apache Aldo Raine, he recruits vengeful Jews during Hitler’s Holocaust and takes the fight to the Germans. His mission: “killin’ Natzees.” Ambushing, scalping, mutilating, baseball-batting… terrorizing. These blood-mad Jews become known as “The Basterds.” Their ultimate plan involves strapping bombs to themselves and blowing themselves up in a cinema packed with Nazi high command, including Hitler (Martin Wuttke) and his Minister for Propaganda, Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), who was also a real life film producer (leave it to Tarantino to uncover that nugget).

But Pitt is here purely for marquee muscle. His screentime is minimal. And though he puts in a fine performance, impressing us with how long he can hold that constipation face, he does little else, except spouting a few lines of dialogue which are far from Tarantino’s most luscious work, trying to perfect a redneck drawl that sounds like it’s coming from a guy who’s making a constipation face.

This movie belongs to Christoph Waltz.

As SS officer Hans Landa, “The Jew Hunter,” Waltz’s chilling performance will make your testicles shrivel. Every foreboding appearance he makes as the death-dealing interrogator makes your sphincter tremble in fear. Landa knows when you’re lying. And even if you’re not, you feel like you are. Because you probably are. It is such a fearsome tour de force of fatal charisma and nerve-wracking trepidation, it’s like Waltz did all his acting training with Goebbels.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is unconventionally structured, in Four Chapters, four tenuously linked storylines eventually intertwining for the payoff. And what a payoff! A catharsis for Jewdom. DEFIANCE (2008) showed us Jews who actually fought back during World War II, in a story Inspired By Fact. But writer-director Tarantino, unbound by facts, rewrites history without any compunction (let’s face it, like every American war movie about Viet Nam, Korea, WWII, only without pretending historical authenticity) and takes his WWII fantasy to a level that can only be described (by producer Lawrence Bender) as “a Jewish wet dream.”

It’s the Nazis who burn now, not the Jews; it’s the Nazis whose flesh is marked by the Jews as a sign of contempt; it’s the Nazis who tremble at the brutality of the Jew “basterds.”

Movie opens like a Leone western, officer Landa inviting himself into a desolate farmhouse of a poor farmer and his trembling daughters. He is looking for Jews that the farmer might be hiding. The tension that follows is like the best of Leone, hard closeups of the two faces and master shots that never budge. We are so gripped by the movie in these opening minutes and into the following Chapters, we never even realize its unconventional structure. Proving that good story wins out every time over a Hollywood system atrophying in its glossy rut.

It’s like four TWILIGHT ZONE vignettes strung together; every time the screen goes to black to end a Chapter, we find ourselves exhaling in relief and needing a neck massage from a nude female provider slash dancer. And as every new Chapter opens, we are thrust spittle-mouthed and unbreathing into the tension-driven second act of something that started before we arrived. It’s Total Tarantino.

In the Chapter “A German Night In Paris” we are introduced to Mélanie Laurent, who plays Shoshanna, doing Clint Eastwood as a sexy French, blond, green-eyed avenger. (This is what Alison Eastwood, daughter of Clint, should have become, instead of the C-Movie junkie she ended up as.)

Eli Roth is Donnie Donowitz, “The Bear Jew,” who gets his kicks beating Germans to death with a baseball bat. (Roth is the writer-director of HOSTEL, 2005 – any wonder he loves the ultra-violence? In a German interview, when asked to justify his character’s bloodthirstiness, he was outraged, “This movie is nothing but magic tricks, but your grandparents turned my ancestors into furniture! Into lamp shades!”)

The characterizations are formidable, each actor embodying the French and German and British characters they play. Noteworthy is August Diehl (as Major Hellstrom), another German-born actor, who – like Karl-Otto Alberty and Anton Diffring before him – scares the hell out of us like a real life Gestapo officer.

I think this might be the first time I noticed the power and prowess of German-born Michael Fassbender. (He was Spartan warrior Stelios in 300, but lost amongst the abs, and would soon go on to greater glories in X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, SHAME, and beyond.) His British undercover officer Archie Hicox is a tour de force performance, square-jawed and steely-gazed, slipping effortlessly in and out of English and German. Like Fassbender, Diane Kruger is also German-born and also impresses with her effortless bi-lingual German tongue.

Being a Tarantino film, there’s bound to be a Mexican standoff, where everyone is pointing a gun at everyone else. How Tarantino arrives at this situation is the true wonder; how it all makes perfect sense by the time everyone is pointing a gun at everyone else WHY everyone is pointing a gun at everyone else.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is that rara avis – a dialogue-driven war film more intense and exciting than any driven by pretty orange explosions.

nation’s pride

Within the film INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is Goebbels’s NATION’S PRIDE, which premieres at Shoshanna’s theater. Daniel Brühl (looking like a young Christopher Reeve) stars as “himself” Fredrick Zoller, a German hero who staved off an American advance singlehandedly by sniping from a bell tower. It’s a blackly hilarious satire on war films. (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN actually has a scene like this – from an American sniper’s point of view.)

It slots neatly with the concept that Tarantino tries to convey: that Germans are heroes too. The German commander who refuses to answer Raine and gets beaten by Bear was awarded his medal for “bravery” – proving it by dying at the bat of Bear. Message may be lost not through Tarantino’s fault, but that of his audience – because American war films and politicians have indoctrinated generations into believing all enemy combatants are quivering cowards – even if they display heroism.

In 2002, Bill Maher’s TV show, POLITICALLY INCORRECT, was cancelled because he expressed the – ahem – politically incorrect view that the terrorists who flew the planes into the Twin Towers were anything BUT cowards. Which is true, by all definitions of American bravery. But which was blockheadedly refuted because they were enemy combatants.

the inglorious bastards

There’s a strange paradox with the misspelling of this movie’s title.

Like THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS (2006), I hate misspelling for the sake of street-cred. Tarantino must know the film QUEL MALEDETTO TRENO BLINDATO (aka THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, 1978), an Italian WWII flick with a completely different plot; also called G.I. BRO, cos of star Fred Williamson’s blackness – I’m not EVEN joking. (Bo Svenson, another star of that film, plays an American colonel in Tarantino’s BASTERDS – which is either a giant coincidence or Tarantino simply flaunting his filmic erudition. Which proves he knows that film.) Is he trying to differentiate his movie from that one? Why not name his film something else? Even THE BASTARDS would have been sufficient.

So here is the paradox: Tarantino acknowledges his audience’s intelligence in many ways, not least by allowing his characters to speak in their native tongues (with subtitles), yet he simultaneously drives the intelligence quotient down by misspelling the title, for a whole generation of youngsters to be confused if this is the first time they are encountering those words. (The same kids who won’t understand the rage of the Jews against Nazi atrocities that are never shown.) Not to mention keeping that swathe of current American adults ignorant who don’t know the difference. You know, the Stoopid Basterds.

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