Creepy-Crawl Cinema: One Upon a Time in… Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

1969 feels pretty impossible to escape at the moment. All these 50th anniversaries coming thick and fast – moon landing, Manson murders, Woodstock, Brian Jones, Altamont – and now, man-of-that-particular-moment Peter Fonda passing away right on schedule, an exact half century after his image was pinned up on a thousand dorm room walls. Perfect timing then, for retromancer in chief Quentin Tarantino to chime in with the celluloid equivalent of a shiny collectible plate. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got some room on the sideboard.

I.

Like many movie fans, I could frankly spend all day here trying to unpack my mixed feelings about Tarantino and his work, but for the sake of both your sanity and mine, I’ll try to keep it brief.

As sophisticated, cine-literate readers, you will no doubt have realised long ago that all of Tarantino’s films are essentially set within a fantastical movie wonderland. They are films-about-films, indulgent thrill-rides with zero real world relevance, offering pure, dumb-headed escapism.

An obvious point perhaps, but one that is worth restating at the outset, given the persistent failure of many mainstream critics to comprehend it. (Honestly, how they can continue to toil away under the misapprehension that ‘Django Unchained’ actually has something to say about slavery, or ‘Inglorious Bastards’ about the Second World War, is beyond me.)

Though I can dig this superficial, ‘fantasy-land’ approach to a certain extent, I confess its appeal has worn pretty thin for me over the years, particularly when (as in the examples above) the Big QT finds himself romping around in the midst of subject matter which would conventionally seem to demand a certain amount of depth or ideological engagement. For a while now, I’ve been hoping that one day he might finally leave the play-pen behind and make, like, you know – a proper, sincere movie of some kind?

By gently weaning Tarantino away from his films-about-films universe and moving to a painstakingly researched, naturalistic historical setting that just happens to be all about the making of those films he loves so much, ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’ (man, I HATE that ellipsis) would seem to offer him the perfect opportunity to do this, allowing him to play his meta-textural, movie nerd games, but in a more grounded / ‘realistic’ context - one in which actions may be seen to have consequences, and in which characters might finally manage to acquire a second or third dimension for themselves.

Given that he basically fails to take up this offer though, instead delivering yet another barrage of defiantly shallow, crowd-pleasing nonsense, I think we can assume by this stage that he probably never will make the jump to the quote-unquote ‘next level’.

As such, this leaves us with a few things that we are just going to have to accept if we are ever going to enjoy any Tarantino movies.

Firstly, they will mean nothing. Any thematic framework or ideological intent detected within will be purely coincidental - probably just a by-product of all the cultural tropes being re-heated and played around with.

Secondly, they will be massively indulgent, typically containing upwards of an hour of entirely irrelevant material that he shot and kept in the movie just because he could. (We may roll our eyes, but hey, if it’s good enough for Fellini…)

And, thirdly, everything in his films will feel just slightly cartoon-ish and overblown. Comedy / character scenes will drag on too long, just to make sure everyone gets the joke. Serious/violent scenes will pretty much always fall off a cliff into OTT absurdity, just because, as all exploitation fans know, crazy stuff is cool, and cool = good. Pop-cultural references and tributes meanwhile will be so shamelessly foregrounded that they might as well be accompanied by a little QT popping up in a box in the corner of the screen ala a Japanese TV show, pointing to them and guffawing.

Once we accept these certainties and abandon the possibility that things may one day be otherwise, we can hopefully loosen up a bit and appreciate the fact that, taken on its own terms, ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’ is about the most purely enjoyable three hours of cinema that the 21st century has yet been able to offer.

II.

As someone who has spent a great deal of time living and breathing the storied mythos of Hollywood ’69 over the years, I’ll confess that I was pretty psyched about seeing this movie, and that – leaving aside the caveats outlined above – I was not disappointed.

Although the film is packed with things (small details, creative decisions, wasted potential) which irked me, each of them is balanced out by two other things (character beats, clever gags and references, likable performances) which delighted me. (1)

Yes, this makes for a large number of ‘things’ in total - but such is only right and proper for a picture with this kind of gargantuan run time. If you like films with ‘things’ in them, well strap in buddy, cos you’ll certainly get your money’s worth here. The frantic pace barely ever flags across 170-odd minutes, and new stimuli comes thick n’ fast with every shot. As an immersive ‘Where’s Wally?’ puzzle for a pop-culturally literate crowd to lose themselves within, this film is hard to beat.

As such, it is ‘Once Upon a Time…’s production design which is chiefly deserving of celebration. Barbara Ling [Production Designer], John Dexter [Art Direction], Nancy Haigh [Set Decoration], Arianne Phillips [Costumes] – take a collective bow.

There are, it is safe to say, few other living filmmakers who have both the resources and the inclination to retro-fit vast swathes of Los Angeles to conform to some mystic, rose-tinted dream of late ‘60s perfection, and the results Tarantino’s team achieve in this regard are magnificent – a triumph of “world building” equal to any of this century’s CG-enhanced fantasy epics, and a hell of a lot more fun from my personal POV.

Again and again over the past forty years, we may have seen movie directors pay teary-eyed tribute to the days when Americans could roar around guilt-free in massive, pastel-coloured automobiles, chain-smoking their way into an early grave as they negotiate a neon labyrinth of cinema marquees, movie billboards and fast food outlets…. but never has this celebration been rendered quite so exuberantly, quite so convincingly, as it is here.

As a result, moments such as the panoramic shot in which Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth stands on the roof of Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio)’s Cielo Drive house to fix the TV aerial, looking down over the perfectly rendered sprawl of the Hollywood Hills and down to the streets below, are pretty darn spine-tingling.

(The cinema in which I saw the film isn’t exactly what you’d call top of the line in terms of its A/V presentation, but even so, Robert Richardson’s 35mm photography, ripped through whatever kind of cutting edge HD processing brings it to our 21st century screens, looked *incredible*.)

Yes, brothers and sisters (but mainly brothers, let’s face it), this really WAS the promised land, Quentin seems to be telling us, and for a moment or two here and there, I do not feel inclined to disbelieve him.

The fact that Tarantino grew up in L.A. and was six years old in 1969 should probably be noted here, particularly in view of ‘Once Upon a Time..’s all-consuming obsession with syndicated TV, movie posters and radio ads. As you might well imagine, the film’s dense collage of movie nerd fan service is a joy to behold, at times becoming so dominant that it almost takes the movie into quasi-documentary territory, complete with voiceover narration and clip / poster-based alternate history recaps.

And, just as inevitably, I can’t help but love this stuff. Whatever high-minded reservations I may have about Quentin’s oeuvre, all I need do is think back on the fact that Rick Dalton’s calling card action movie was “The Fourteen Fists of McClusky”, or upon hearing Al Pacino (playing Dalton’s liaison with the Italian movie industry) describe Sergio Corbucci as “…only the SECOND BEST director of Spaghetti Westerns in the world” (in outraged, what-do-you-mean-‘who’ tone of voice), or indeed upon the clip of DiCaprio appearing in an Antonio Margheriti spy movie… and all is forgiven. I might as well be sharing popcorn with the fucker on weekend movie night.

(Incidentally, based on the audience’s mocking laughter, I think many of them must have assumed Tarantino was just making all this Italian b-movie shit up for giggles. Little do they know…)

III.

More surprisingly meanwhile, the film’s other great strength is its cast. In the past, I’ve often been surprised to read critics earnestly praising the committed performances of actors in Tarantino movies, given that the director doesn’t display much more concern for in-depth characterisation than if he were Michael Winner shuffling around the cannon fodder in a ‘Death Wish’ sequel… but, such is the paradox of an exploitation filmmaker who finds himself working with the kind of talent and resources usually reserved for critically-acclaimed Oscar-winners, I suppose.

Here though, the plaudits seem more justified. After all, ‘Once Upon a Time..’ is a long film which needs to retain our attention whilst holding back violent action or pyrotechnics until the final reel, and, as fictional creations with the chutzpah to get us there, Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth certainly make for a winning pair of protagonists.

An anxious, clumsy, floundering movie star and his vastly more handsome and confident stuntman / gopher, they’re clearly conceived as an odd couple in the age-old Jeeves and Wooster mould, but their relationship is believable, their interplay with the movie’s other characters is always fun, and it’s basically easy for us to settle in and have a good time with their assorted travails and misadventures.

DiCaprio’s performance may have a touch too much huffing-and-puffing Wellsian grotesquery about it for my tastes, but this suits his character, and if nothing else, he certainly succeeds in persuading us to anchor our sympathies to a guy who is essentially pretty pathetic and dislikeable.

Here, though, is a sentence I never thought I’d find myself writing in a Breakfast in the Ruins post: it is Brad Pitt who is the real revelation here. He is not an actor I’ve ever much cared for in the past, but what can I say, he really seems to have “grown into himself” in ‘Once Upon a Time..’, if that makes any sense?

Essentially representing Tarantino’s ideal of the time-honoured Hollywood hero, Cliff Booth is our requisite humble, taciturn working class guy who looks good, does good, and always comes out on top. And, somehow, Pitt manages to embody this storied archetype whilst also ringing true as a fully-formed and immensely charming individual, absolutely nailing that crucial “yeah, what a cool guy” feeling we all love to get from our favourite movie heroes.

Of all of the far-fetched notions which film’s script asks us to accept in fact, probably the most outlandish is the idea that this guy has apparently been hanging around on TV and movie sets for decades, and no one seems to have noticed that he radiates star quality like a goddamned lighthouse.

IV.

Backing up this dynamic duo meanwhile are a wide variety of equally talented supporting players, whose work in small roles and ‘one-scene-wonder’ parts enhances the film considerably. I don’t so much mean the inevitable big name cameos (Pacino, Kurt Russell), but more the younger cast members really… which brings us neatly to the thorny issue of the film’s portrayal of the Manson Family.

Again, I have mixed feelings about this. In script terms, the Mansonites don’t really serve much of a purpose here beyond providing some generic antagonists, parachuted in to liven up the final act of what would otherwise basically be a stress-free three hour “hang out” movie. Indeed, Tarantino seems entirely unconcerned with exploring the context behind the Family’s existence and activities, instead relying entirely upon his audience’s perceived familiarity with the historical background – an approach which worked just fine for me, but which could easily cause problems in terms of the way the film plays for a wider audience.

For instance, I watched the film with a predominantly young crowd, and when, in a beautifully rendered scene early in the film, we see Cliff and Rick cruise past a group of ragged teenage girls who are scavenging from a roadside dumpster whilst singing one of Charlie’s songs, I could almost sense a 50/50 split in the audience between those who shared my shiver of recognition, and others who had no idea of the intended significance of what they were seeing.

Throughout the film, references to the cult’s lunatic beliefs or to Manson’s psychological hold over his followers are entirely avoided, leaving us in a strange situation where the only message which can drawn from the text itself is that dirty hippies are inherently evil and murderous, and that Quentin Tarantino hates ‘em.

That said however, the pivotal sequence in which Cliff visits the Spahn Ranch after picking up a fictional (I think?) Manson girl named ‘Pussycat’ (Margaret Qualley - and yes, fear not, Tarantino’s feverish obsession with trying to wring comedic value out of terms for female genitalia remains undiminished here), is wonderfully observed, feeling ‘real’ enough, and crammed with enough esoteric detail, to satisfy even the most demanding of Manson obsessives. (2)

Although Tarantino has the scary, dead-eyed hippies swarm and diminish like Romero zombies at times, what really won me over here is the fact that most of the Mansonites (barring a witchy, passive-aggressive turn from Dakota Fanning as Squeeky, and James Landry Hébert as a redneck grotesque Clem) are disarmingly naturalistic. The fact that they play it calm, friendly and not overtly crazy is to me more unsettling than any quantity of ominous, horror movie shit the film might have thrown at us.

(In view of my speculations below, it might be worth noting that the kill squad, when we share some time with them in the car on their way to Cielo Drive, basically speak very much like 21st century young people; I particularly liked Sadie/Susan (Mikey Madison) exclaiming that, “I’m sorry if I’m not familiar with every FASCIST who was on TV in the FIFTIES”.)

Likewise, the decision to concentrate during the ranch sequence on Cliff’s need to ascertain the well-being of George Spahn (a splendidly cantankerous performance from Bruce Dern – notable here I think as the only cast member who was actually on the scene in Hollywood when these events went down) proves an inspired one. It’s dramatically interesting, true to Pitt’s character, and allows the film to shine a light on an element of the Manson mythos which has largely been side-lined in the past, in factual and fictional chronicles alike.

Thinking about how Cliff immediately zeroes in on the necessity of speaking to George (because I mean, of course this 40-something stuntman would be more concerned with checking in on an old buddy than with quizzing a buncha fuckin’ hippies about the finer points of their belief system) meanwhile gets me thinking about the extent to which Tarantino essentially frames this entire film through the prism of his protagonists’ worldview. (Admittedly, it could be argued that this is not too far removed from his own worldview as another middle-aged Hollywood dude, but… let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume at least a thin line of division, shall we?).

V.

Though the surface signifiers of the counter-culture – in the form of sex, drugs and long hair - may have been ruling the roost in Movieland by 1969, Hollywood nonetheless remained a world in which women were expected to be seen and not heard, and in which non-white faces were almost literally invisible. And, this is exactly what Tarantino gives us - reality filtered through the eyes of a couple of old school, movie industry bros, with no explanation or apology offered along the way.

For better or for worse, proceeding in this manner, without even a passing nod to contemporary standards of representation, is a ballsy move on the director’s part, and as usual, certain sections of the media seem to have had a hard time even comprehending it. In particular, articles such as this one, which criticise the director for giving Margot Robbie little to do beyond looking pretty in her role as Sharon Tate, seem to be missing the point entirely.

After all, the sad fact is that the real Sharon Tate was given little to do in her tragically foreshortened life, beyond looking pretty. She was the product of a culture that allowed young women few other avenues for advancement, and her portrayal in the film merely reflects this. Of course, we can always imagine that she may have steered her life and career in a more rewarding direction had she lived, but trying to retrofit this ultimate victim of the era’s chauvinist attitudes as a super-capable 21st century heroine would have seemed questionable to say the least.

Likewise, I’m happy to defend Tarantino when it comes to the movie’s other big bone of contention, comedian Michael Moh’s portrayal of Bruce Lee as an egotistical buffoon. In a complete reversal of the Robbie/Tate issue, I have no reason to believe that this is an accurate characterisation of Bruce Lee, but at the same time there is something very refreshing about seeing such a revered, untouchable figure get the bubble of his legend so crudely ‘popped’ and – the ultimate justification for anything in a Tarantino film – the scene he shares with Pitt is loads of fun. (I particularly enjoyed the perfect take-down of the old “my fists are registered as lethal weapons” routine.) (3)

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WARNING: Spoilers follow in the next few paras. This film has some nice surprises, so please do go and see it before reading the rest of this review.

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Whilst I’m generally cool with all this stuff though, I do fear that, whether by accident or design, the director’s willingness to court controversy and blow a few gentle raspberries in the direction of quote-unquote “political correctness” may be apt to lead him into some choppy waters here, should anyone choose to disregard my First Rule of watching a Tarantino movie above, and succumb to the cardinal sin of actually thinking about the damn thing for five minutes after the lights go up.

After all, QT’s personal/professional reputation only just made it out of the whole Miramax / Weinstein debacle in one piece, so, as much as I wish I could just turn my brain off and go with the flow, it’s pretty difficult not to detect a certain, uh, emphasis in the fact that the first movie he has made since severing those connections ends with the triumphant spectacle of two middle-aged Hollywood dudes violently murdering a couple of mouthy young women who wish to forcibly disrupt their comfortable, decadent way of life… y’know what I mean…?

In real life of course, we know that those women were the brain-washed pawns of a criminal lunatic whose practice of racism and misogyny dwarfed that of any Hollywood playboy, but, given that ‘Once Upon a Time..’ pointedly fails to address this and instead merely depicts them as a bunch of damn fuckin’ hippies who won’t get off Leonardo DiCaprio’s drive…. well, let’s just say that the potential for a very troubling alternative reading of the film is certainly there, should you insist on poking it with a stick.

Personally, I’m happy to leave it be. As I stated at the outset, I’d question whether Tarantino has *ever* set out to make a film with this kind of ideological subtext, and even if he did, I’d inclined to believe that this film’s violent finale should be read as heavily tongue in cheek – an intent clearly acknowledged by the young audience at the screening I intended, as they gasped and guffawed in “I-can’t-believe-he-just-did-that” style disbelief.

Basically, I think Tarantino chose to end the film this way for the only reason he has ever done anything in his films – because it’s cool, and funny, and will leave the audience feeling good. The bad guys lose, and DIE! Movies and the swell guys who make them triumph! Brad and Leo save the ‘60s, and a brighter alternative pop cultural universe opens up for everyone.

Which, come to think of it, is the only possible conclusion for a movie named ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’. Fairy tale ending meets Western ending meets po-mo inter-textural headfuck ending. Perfect.

It may be crass and ugly and contrived and stupid… but there’s a strange kind of beauty here too. Just like Hollywood, am I right?

Boom, great ending for a review! Cut and print!

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(1) I couldn’t find a way to slot this into the main text, but the only thing that seriously annoyed me about Tarantino’s direction here was his decision to include lengthy scenes of DiCaprio’s character performing his lines in a TV western pilot,  shooting them with gliding Steadicam, beautiful diffuse lighting, Leone-esque cutting between multiple angles and other things that would obviously NOT have been present in a 1969 TV pilot.

Basically he presents these scenes exactly as if they were part of one of his *own* Westerns, having apparently not yet got that bug out of his system, which feels both disruptive to this film’s period setting and indulgent in all the worst ways. Wouldn’t it have been a lot more interesting to pull back and take a verite / behind-the-scenes kind of approach to these TV-show-within-the-film bits, giving us a look at the detail of how shows like this were made, and of what the crew were getting up to as the actors did their thing etc…? Just a thought.

(2) The set looks pretty much like an exact repro of the photos I’ve seen of the Spahn Ranch, and I loved details like the pile of dune buggy parts, the sign pointing toward the ‘chop shop’, and the inclusion of a few surly, disengaged bikers, and even a guy done up like Bobby Beausoleil, in the background. Well done, team, well done.

(3) For anyone counting the beans re: the film’s representational issues, I’m fairly sure Moh is the only non-white actor in the cast who actually even has *lines* -- but again, I’d put this down to nature of the world inhabited by our viewpoint characters, rather than any reflection of Tarantino’s personal agenda.

New Movies Reviews!

As in, a few short-as-possible takes on recently released movies – because, uncharacteristically, I seem to have watched quite a few of them recently.

One Cut of the Dead

(Shin'ichirô Ueda, 2017)

If you’ve not yet seen this high concept Japanese indie mega-hit, let me simply say that you probably should, because it’s wonderful.

Beyond that however, it is the very definition of a film that is almost impossible to write about without spoiling the surprise, so what follows is less of a conventional review, and more just a couple of quick pieces of advice for potential viewers.

1. Though it is being marketed as a zombie film, I’d probably tag this one more as a family drama, disguised as a film-about-filmmaking, disguised as a zombie film, so - keep your monster kid expectations in check.

2. Though the opening half hour might well cause you to question why you’re bothering to watch this thing, stick with it and you will be richly rewarded.

3. Likewise, if you, like me, tend to experience motion sickness when watching shaky-cam handheld footage, this opening act will soon become a horrendous, stomach-churning nightmare. Once again though, please keep it together and keep your eyes on the screen, because blessed relief awaits at the thirty minute mark, and you’ll be disappointed if you missed some important details whilst staring at your shoes feeling nauseous.

And finally, I will note that, despite its low budget origins, this film’s achievements in the oft-overlooked fields of pre-production planning and continuity are quite possibly unparalleled in the medium, and, I believe, deserve to be recognised with some kind of gigantic medal and a hearty round of applause from the entire international film community.

Get Out

(Jordan Peele, 2017)

So yes, I was pretty late getting around to this one. I really liked it though! In particular, I appreciated the way in which Peele manages to spin his “yeah, I see where this is going” Stepford/Bodysnatchers type premise into a considerably more challenging and thought-provoking social allegory than I had been expecting.

By which I mean, I like that he clearly decided that making his bad guys traditional white supremacists would be just too easy, and instead sets his satirical sights upon a slightly trickier target – namely, a very particular slice of white, liberal America that tends to fetishize the black experience whilst failing to respect the existence of black people as independent, self-determining, well… people, basically.

Elsewhere, the film has some fine acting and character interplay and some effective bits of humour, together with an exquisitely rendered atmosphere of unease, top notch cinematography and a handful of queasily surreal images that will live long in the memory. All in all, it rather put me in mind of a slicker and more professional Larry Cohen film, which is certainly no bad thing. (One Larry Cohen film in particular in fact, but… that’s a story we’ll get into in another forthcoming review, I suspect.)

All of these qualities are meanwhile only slightly undermined meanwhile by a script so monumentally unfeasible that plotholers will no doubt be gleefully trooping toward this one with their hardhats and grappling hooks for years to come.

(My biggest personal bugbear: I know there’s probably a point to be made about the black community being ill-served by law enforcement, but even so, surely someone in a position of authority must have noticed that ten plus missing persons cases were all in a relationship with the same woman at the time of their disappearance…?)

The Sisters Brothers

(Jacques Audiard, 2018)

A sprawling, historically detailed pre-Civil War western with an oddball, black comic tone, ‘The Sisters Brothers’ is in many ways an unmistakably contemporary (by which I mean, 21st century) prospect, but at the same time, it certainly wouldn’t have embarrassed the architects of the great, revisionist westerns of the 1970s, in terms of its narrative ambition, production design, immersive visuals and general sense-of-place.

In these days of micro-managed, producer-bedevilled screenplays, I appreciated the way that the film feels, for better or worse, like the sole vision of writer-director Jacques Audiard (who makes his Hollywood debut here I believe, having previously hit big in his native France with ‘A Prophet’ (2009) and ‘The Beat My Heart Skipped’ (2005)). This in spite of the fact that the list of production companies & sundry other entities involved in ‘presenting’ ‘The Sisters Brothers’ takes up an entire widescreen frame of subtitle-sized text. (Honestly, I thought it was a gag, until the opening scene – depicting a massacre - established a considerably less flippant tone.)

In particular, I liked the way that this film’s storytelling moves away from the “leaden gravity of karmic fate” approach so often favoured by westerns, instead adopting a rambling, quixotic framework that allows all kinds of episodic diversions and sidebars to distract us from the main thrust of the title characters’ intertwined arcs, including random bear attacks, shipwrecks, transgender casino proprietors and a tour through the bright lights of Gold Rush-era San Francisco.

Adherence to conventional screenwriting doctrine would have seen most of this stuff mercilessly excised, but personally, I’m glad that that these various bits and pieces made the final cut, simply because they are fun and interesting, and help to make the world of the film richer and more involving than it may have been if restricted to a straight-down-the-line, three act type job.

Speaking of rambling however…. well, let’s just say that, whereas the great American westerns of the past were largely united by their zen-like mastery of the ‘SHOW, DON’T TELL’ approach to character development, Audiard by contrast takes the Wes Anderson route here, allowing his characters to bang on interminably about their family backgrounds, personal ambitions and psychological conflicts, sometimes even in the form of fourth wall-breaking, straight-to-camera monologues.

Lord in heaven, I’ve never known such a bunch of touchy-feely cowboys – The Wild Bunch they ain’t. In fact, if sainted Sam Peckinpah was still with us, the effect of a screening of this one on the old boy’s blood pressure might have finished him off for good.

This all culminates in a curious variation on the old ‘Treasure of Sierra Madre’ gold prospecting expedition, in which three of the four grizzled, gun-toting participants gradually come to recognise each other as frustrated, autodidact intellectuals who share a utopian belief in the common brotherhood of man…. leaving only one authentically brutish tough guy amongst their number. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well, but, like most everything else in this film, it at least ends badly in a pretty unusual way, breaking curious new ground within this most heavily codified of cinematic genres.

I’ll admit, all the self-reflective nattering and teary pontificating in ‘The Sisters Brothers’ really got my goat – perhaps simply because it conflicts so strongly with my own personal ideal of the western – but on the other hand, there’s a whole load of satisfyingly cathartic violence here too, so hey - swings and roundabouts.

In most other respects however, this is an admirable piece of proper, old fashioned filmmaking, anchored by a truly exceptional performance from John C. Reilly as the older, more mature of the two brothers. His relationship with his wilder younger sibling (Joaquin Phoenix) touches upon that same ‘old, dying west vs new, incoming civilisation’ conflict that lies at the heart of so many of those brilliant ‘60s and ‘70s westerns - only here, it is civility, settlement and compromise that Audiard sees as the more noble, more poetic option, in contrast to the doomed, twilight-of-the-gods masculine belligerence hymned by directors like Peckinpah and Leone.

Though the film’s occasionally quirky tone and failure connect with me emotionally prevent me from hailing it as a modern classic, there is a lot going on in ‘The Sisters Brothers’ for western scholars to get their teeth into, and it certainly makes for a fine way to pass an evening, irrespective of one’s personal investment in the genre.

Widows

(Steve McQueen, 2018)

Venturing even further toward the mainstream (because Japan Airlines in-flight entertainment neglected to include any English friendly old movies), I actually thought the trailer for this all-star heist movie from Steve McQueen (not *that* Steve McQueen, as I will insist on specifying until the day I die) actually looked quite promising, and indeed, as an intricately plotted crime procedural set in modern day Chicago, it’s rock solid.

In fact, watching it feels very much like reading a rock solid, intricately plotted contemporary crime novel, an achievement which I’m going to assume goes all the way back to Lynda La Plante’s source novel. (I’ve never previously felt the need to read any of her charity shop-filling doorstops, but I do feel somewhat warmer toward them on the basis of this satisfyingly labyrinthine, POV-hopping yarn.)

Outside of all the stuff with gun and gangsters and vans blowing up, there is plenty of swelling music, emotive flashbacks, manipulative ‘tearjerking’ moments and a lot of (perfectly reasonable, let’s face it) commentary on the hard road faced by women and ethnic minorities in contemporary society to endear the film to the Oscar Bait crowd, but I personally didn’t find any of it too cloying, and the relentless mechanics of the plotting keeps the engine ticking over nicely throughout; keeping our eyes always on the next corner, so to speak.

Initially, I thought we might be looking here at a kind of sophisticated, non-exploitative modern Hollywood take on the old Pam Grier/Jack Hill via Pinky Violence formula, wherein we get to enjoy the cathartic release of seeing wronged women exact revenge against a grab-bag of utterly despicable, cartoonishly horrid males (representatives of course of an utterly despicable, cartoonishly horrid system), but, as ‘Widows’ progresses, characterisation on both sides of the gender divide becomes murkier, casting at least some welcome shade onto the film’s socially progressive right n’ wrong dynamics.

Ironically for a film that so deliberately puts its female characters centre stage, I actually found that by far the most compelling aspect of the story was the material concerning the behind the scenes machinations of a local election, wherein two equally corrupt, duplicitous male candidates from opposite sides of the tracks attempt to put one over on the voting populace of the city ward in which the action takes place.

Both Colin Farrell as the Teflon-coated old money candidate who secretly hates the hypocrisy of the role his domineering father has groomed him for, and Brian Tyree Henry as the ruthless gangster who has reinvented himself as the “progressive social change” candidate simply because he believes politics will offer him better kickbacks and a longer lifespan, are fantastically monstrous creations, and it’s great too to see old Bobby Duvall pretty much napalming the joint in a ferocious turn as Farrell’s aforementioned father.

To be honest, the interlocking sisters-doing-it-for-themselves narrative suffers in comparison, feeling a bit underdeveloped, in spite of the vast acres of screen-time allotted to filling in the protagonists’ respective back stories. Nonetheless though, performances remain strong, and the film believably conveys the destabilising trauma that can ensue when every day, more-or-less-law-abiding citizens suddenly discover that their lives sit precariously atop a steaming mountain of corruption, violence and extortion.

The eventual emotional impact of all this is muffled by a few loose ends and a BIG PLOT TWIST which feels poorly handled and unnecessary, but hey, you can’t have everything. Overall, ‘Widows’ is a solid crime film that lives and breathes within the conventions of its genre despite its wider thematic concerns, and its heart is certainly in the right place.

I’ve not yet had the opportunity to see S. Craig Zahler’s controversial cop epic ‘Dragged Across Concrete’, but I’d imagine it could make for an interesting “compare and contrast” with this one. Something tells me I’ll probably rate ‘..Concrete’ more highly as a film, but I’m pretty sure I already know which of the two I’d rather hang out with were they to take on human form, if you get my drift.

The Predator

(Shane Black, 2018)

I’m assuming that, by this point, this awkwardly monikered sequel/reboot/whatever must have already been consigned to obscurity, from whence it will be distantly recalled as one of the biggest franchise-killing turkeys ever to have strutted its way through the gates of the Fox backlot onto the baking streets of Hollywood. I’d normally be content to leave it there, sizzling on the sidewalk, but the curvature of the earth adds about ninety minutes to the reverse leg of my annual Tokyo / London flight, so – ladies and gents, ‘The Predator’.

Actually, in truth, I feel a certain sympathy for this effort simply because I’m aware that director Shane Black is a close friend and long term collaborator of Fred Dekker, a man still revered by us horror fans as the creator of ‘Night of the Creeps’ (1986) and ‘The Monster Squad’ (1987). Indeed, Black & Dekker (ha! I only just noticed…) share the sole screenplay credit for ‘The Predator’, although god only knows what percentage of the movie they originally had in mind actually made it to the screen after what I imagine to have been a torturous nightmare of uncredited re-writes, executive producer ‘notes’ and studio-mandated re-shoots.

Nonetheless, the movie (during its first hour, at least) retains a breezy, happy-go-lucky b-movie feel that is actually somewhat endearing, including a few dialogue exchanges which I’m sure must have come straight down the line from Dekker’s sainted keyboard. (In particular, I enjoyed the running gag about the Predator not technically being a predator at all, because it hunts for sport rather than for food, with a character at one point likening it more to “an intergalactic bass fisherman”.)

With its definitive article title rendered even more redundant thanks to the fact that the script actually features several Predators, ‘The Predator’ is, undoubtedly, a bad movie, rife with forehead-slappingly dumb ideas and mindless, video game-y nonsense. Crucially however, it is not an unenjoyable bad movie.

Unlike most second tier Hollywood action product, the first hour here is neither boring nor charmless, and it’s muddled totality can perhaps best be appreciated by considering it as the kind of movie that some ‘80s trash maven like Albert Pyun or Fred Olen Ray might have made, had they been gifted with an eighty million dollar budget and a cruise liner full of Red Bull-huffing digital effects “artists”.

Would Pyun or Olen Ray’s Predator movie have included cute alien doggies who chase and swallow hand grenades? Probably!

Would they have presented us with the idea that a bus-load of inmates from the psychiatric ward of a military prison might actually turn out to be a gang of lovable, good-natured goofballs who can be safely left in charge of children and trusted with an array of city-block-levelling firepower? Sure, why not!

Would they have tapped into some paint-by-numbers Spielberg type shit by having a hard-done-by autistic kid take possession of a Predator helmet and wear it out as a Halloween costume, using its powers to take care of bullies, etc..? Well, ok, perhaps that’s a little bit far off the low rent sci-fi action movie tracks for Pyun and co, but if you can get some school holiday/family TV appeal into the bargain it’s all money in the bank, right?

Well, either way -- you know that whole business with the hot lady biologist being whisked off by helicopter to a top secret pentagon alien research lab built into the side of a mountain, where visitors need to strip naked for the ‘decontamination chamber’, whilst a white-coated scientist-who-looks-like-Gary-Busey-but-isn’t cracks wise over the body of a sedated Predator they have restrained on the examination table (absolutely NO danger of it waking up and slaughtering everybody, no siree)..? THAT is some prime ‘80s trash sci-fi business right there, no question about it.

(The only difference is, in the ‘80s, there would have been boobs. But, as we all know, they don’t exist anymore (at least outside the context of grim, taboo-breaking ordeal movies about how sex is horrible and people would rather cut bits of themselves off with rusty knives), so no dice, lechers.)

In this spirit, I’d go so far as to say that – bearing in mind I was sitting in an air-conditioned tin can thousands of feet above the plains of Siberia when I watched it - I actually found much of ‘The Predator’s run-time uproariously entertaining, in an “I can’t actually believe what I’m seeing here” kind of way.

My enjoyment was further enhanced by the fact that the film’s in-flight presentation had been “edited for content” in the most hilarious fashion, leading to dramatic exclamations of “FUDGE!”, confusing references to a female character’s “pudding” and macho soldier guys who tell each other to “shut the heck up”. (I’d assumed that this kind of melon-farming TV redubbing was now a thing of the past, so I’m delighted to see it making a comeback.)

It’s a shame then that the film’s final act more or less squanders this good feeling and proceeds to become extremely boring and charmless – an interminable, knocked-up-inside-a-PC, sound & fury styled action finale in which the sight of characters the film has tried its best to make us care about getting violently killed off inspires little more than a passing shrug as we wait in vain for the damned thing to be over.

Unfortunately, this finale also serves highlight my least favourite aspect of the film – namely, the generic “bombastic action movie music” that seems to have been plastered wall-to-wall across the entire picture without even the slightest attempt to match it to the on-screen action. It’s like some kind of hellish anti-muzak, designed to keep you aggravated and on edge, and it gets pretty tiresome after a while. Perhaps this is just normal now though, I don’t know?

In fact, there are a lot of things I don’t know. Like the reason why Fred Dekker hasn’t been allowed to write or direct a film in over 25 years, despite his brief run in the late ‘80s suggesting he might be quite good at it, for instance. Eat my pudding, Hollywood!

Cinema Trips: Free Fire (Ben Wheatley, 2017)

In spite of all the plaudits director Ben Wheatley has received since his disturbing kitchen sink/crime/horror mash-up ‘Kill List’ first put his name on people’s lips in 2011, I must admit that I felt quite sorry for him following the release of ‘High Rise’ last year.

That film was his most ambitious and high profile project to date by quite some distance, and, suffice to say, many in the world of what I suppose I’ll have to take to grit my teeth and call “alternative culture” were on tenterhooks at the thought of a director like Wheatley helming a relatively big budget take on one of J.G. Ballard’s most uncompromising novels. But, as the reviews began to trickle in, enthusiasm (on my part at least) swiftly began to wane.

Having your big break-out movie savaged by mainstream critics who have missed the point or were predisposed to hate it is one thing - but imagine how Wheatley must have felt, clicking on links as they popped up in his feed and reading a succession of thoughtful, well-informed writers and bloggers presaging their articles by declaring their earnest admiration both for Ballard’s book and for Wheatley’s earlier films… then going on to regretfully express their opinion that he actually seemed to have made a bit of a hash of it.

I mean, that’s got to hurt pretty hard – especially when working in a segment of the film industry that still relies largely upon critical adulation and word of mouth to push punters through the gates.

After such a setback, one might have reasonably expected Wheatley to retreat into the shadows and spend some time licking his wounds, like previous contenders Richard Stanley or Neil Marshall before him. But, thankfully, our boy also seems keen to cultivate a reputation as one of the most determinedly prolific filmmakers around, and, though he doesn’t quite crank ‘em out as relentlessly as, say, Takashi Miike (which is probably for the best), he’s nonetheless back in cinemas, less than a year after ‘High Rise’ crashed and burned, with ‘Free Fire’.

And, by god, it’s a knock-out. The cinematic equivalent of straight jaw punch, seemingly designed to to instantly obliterate memories of his previous project’s over-reach and indulgence from the minds of potential future backers – which thankfully makes it a pretty great time for us as viewers, too.

If there is one overriding concern that can be seen to have emerged from Wheatley’s work to date, it is a fascination with the ugly results what occur when quote-unquote “tough guys” (violent or ego-driven men of one kind or another) are pushed into situations way behind their control, often in confined and treacherous environments; a kind of anti-Hawksian dynamic that sees the “men on the scene” heroism of the traditional genre movie uncomfortably shattered into a million pieces.

This thread can easily be traced through ‘Kill List’, ‘A Field in England’ (2013) and ‘High Rise’, and we can perhaps speculate that what most appealed to the director when conceiving ‘Free Fire’ was the chance to spend an entire movie taking this notion to joyously ridiculous new extremes – with “joyous” perhaps being the operative word.

The first thing to get out of the way here then is to make clear that, where previous Wheatley films have tended to be somewhat dour, unsettling experiences, their humour arising from toxic social awkwardness and their tone black in the extreme, ‘Free Fire’ by contrast represents perhaps the first time the director has dropped his patina of "seriousness" and delivered more of a MOVIE than a FILM, abandoning his exploration of aberrant psychology and grim social realism to instead reward his viewers with a guilt-free thrill ride of laughs, shocks and lovingly reiterated genre clichés – a fun flick in other words, if admittedly one predicated almost entirely upon mindless violence and the wanton infliction of pain… but, we’ll get to that.

Very much a ‘high concept’ joint as far as action/crime movies go, the set-up for ‘Free Fire’, in case you’ve not read about it elsewhere, goes as follows:

In the seemingly arbitrary setting of Boston, 1978, a pair of Irish Republican fighters, along with their American street punk accomplices, arrive at an abandoned dockside factory to meet with an eccentric white South African arms dealer, his ex-Black Panther partner and their own additional muscle. The ‘fixer’ who brokered the deal is also present, as is the pretty girl who initially put the various parties in touch (because hey, it’s a movie).

The meeting is tense to say the least. The assorted bad-asses do not get along too well, and trash talk and dick-swinging are just barely kept in check. Certain elements of the deal are not exactly what the Irish agreed upon, but nonetheless, ten crates of assault rifles are about to change hands, and the ex-Panther guy is counting the money.

We’re maybe twenty minutes or so into the movie by this point, when it becomes clear that one of the arms dealer’s driver/loader back up guys has a serious personal beef with one of the Irish’s local hired punks. Attempts to resolve this do not go well, and, before long, the shooting starts.

About seventy minutes later, the shooting ends.

Filling the interim is a single, real time, one-location action scene that I for one thought was a pretty extraordinary piece of filmmaking, but please don’t just take my word for it – if you think this whole business sounds like your idea of a good time, pick up a ticket to your nearest screening, and I’m confident you won’t be disappointed.

I’ve already read some reviews criticising ‘Free Fire’ as a characterless technical exercise, but to be honest I think such an accusation is way off target. True, we don’t get a lot of back story to fill us in on the participants’ lives outside of this single night of carnage, but neither do we need any. This is a minimal, self-contained action movie, and thus what Wheatley and his writing partner Amy Jump wisely give us is minimal, self-contained action movie characterisation, of the best possible kind.

We may not get any explanatory monologues or heart-string tugging childhood flashbacks (thank god), but, in the grand tradition of directors like Hawks and Siegel, we learn a huge amount about these characters simply through their body language and the way they relate to each other, as we find ourselves sizing them up as if we were a stranger blundering into the room, trying to figure who to stand behind and who to keep well away from.

Naturally, it is the actors who must carry the weight of putting these characterisations across, and the cast – comprising a great number of vaguely familiar people who have no doubt done sterling work in modern movies I never bothered to watch – do it absolutely beautifully. Just great ensemble stuff all round.

Surprisingly for a movie so entirely concerned with action, ‘Free Fire’ is in fact an extremely talky film (even if 30% of words spoken are probably either ‘fuck’ or ‘aargh’), somehow managing to allow its characters to speak and interact throughout, even as they are in the process of trying to inflict dreadful violence upon each other, making the film feel at times like some strange variant on the perennial ‘Old Dark House’ formula wherein everyone is continuously letting rip with high calibre weaponry.

I don’t know if I made it clear in my earlier synopsis that ‘Free Fire’ is as much a comedy as it is an action movie, but, well, it is, and it’s an extremely good comedy at that, with these exaggerated, barely believable tough guys bouncing off each other like champs, as Wheatley & Jump’s somewhat glib, wise-cracking dialogue prompts more genuine laughs and post-screening quote-offs than any film I’ve seen in recent memory.

(As the most broadly comic participant in the shooting match, Sharlto Copley as Vernon – the South African – proves particularly good value, coming on like a cross between Maurizio Merli in an Italian poliziotteschi and Will Ferrell in ‘Anchorman’, as the other characters’ wordlessly contemptuous “is this guy for real?!” responses to his clumsy antics provide a constant source of amusement.)

As the shooting begins, viewers will naturally find themselves weighing up the chances of the different characters, mentally placing their bets on who they expect to go down first, who they expect to be the last (wo?)man standing, and so on. But Wheatley’s masterstroke in ‘Free Fire’ I think comes from his rejection of the predictable, slasher style “picked off one by one” approach that could have seen the movie degenerate into a coldly mechanical multi-player death-match.

Instead, every one of the eight or nine major characters manages to stay alive until the gun fight’s final act, keeping all of them ‘in play’ even as they accumulate increasingly debilitating combinations of flesh wounds and limb damage, meaning we are eventually treated to the sight of the bullet-riddled combatants hobbling and dragging themselves across the increasingly battle-damaged sets, lapsing into occasional bouts of unconsciousness before an overload of pain and adrenalin propels them forward, increasingly unhinged, toward the resolution of their own sorry personal vendettas. This gradual collapse into entropy adds a sense of Godot-esque absurdity to proceedings that, needless to say, Wheatley absolutely relishes as things take on an air of desperate, baroque madness – a zero sum game as blackly pathetic as anything in his previous films.

Alongside all this, it almost goes without saying that ‘Free Fire’ is an astonishing achievement from a technical standpoint – a total master class in good action direction, fight choreography and editing, as Wheatley succeeds in cutting between the activities of up to ten independently motivated characters occupying different positions within the same cluttered set, keeping things coherent, suspenseful, gripping and visceral at all times, never bludgeoning us into insensibility the way many contemporary action directors tend to, and only allowing moments of chaos to temporarily break through when they represent the confused POV of characters for whom events are simply moving too fast to take in.

Given that the bulk of the film represents a single, real time sequence shot over the course of what I’d imagine must have been many weeks, simply maintaining continuity through different shots must have been a Herculean task, requiring the filmmakers to keep track not only of the locations and sight-lines of all the characters in relation to each other, but also of the spread of props, cover, weapons, ammunition and so forth across the set, not to mention the ever-multiplying injuries and damage to clothes, etc etc. I mean, seventy solid minutes of fight scene must have been a tough gig for all concerned, but I think the efforts of the rarely heralded continuity staff deserve a particular round of applause on this one.

I realise that official ‘making of..’ featurettes for contemporary films are generally dull as ditch water, but I would genuine love to find out about how they went about making the technical side of ‘Free Fire’ work as well as it does, and look forward to watching any such material available when I purchase the film on blu-ray – as I inevitably will, on the very day it is released more than likely.

In fact, it is difficult for me to fully express the extent to which I enjoyed ‘Free Fire’. I genuinely think it is one of the best movies I’ve seen in years.

If I found any fault with the film, it arose mainly from the occasionally shaky application of the period setting; some of the dialogue and reactions assigned to Brie Larson's character in particular seem decidedly contemporary, and the Tarantino-esque 'needle drop' soundtrack also gets a bit heavy handed in places (it's hard not to cringe for instance when some Ayler-esque free jazz bursts in to accompany a sequence in which the film's only black character goes on the rampage).

As a marriage between the pure visual kineticism of a good action movie and the thespian chops of a good, multi-hander stage play though, ‘Free Fire’ works brilliantly, and if auteurists or future thesis-writers – ever sniffy about the idea of films actually being fun - may not wish it to be considered as a contender for Wheatley’s best film with regard to the realisation of his own personal vision and so forth, I nonetheless foresee it remaining my own favourite amongst his movies, by quite some distance and for quite some time to come.

Cinema Trips: Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler, 2015)

Ok, listen up folks: S. Craig Zahler’s ‘Bone Tomahawk’ is a 2015 production, theatrically released in the UK in 2016, and it is a really good movie.

Given the attitude of curmudgeonly disdain that I usually affect when discussing 21st century cinema in these pages, I hope that that statement carries some weight. In fact, the only thing that stops me from chalking up ‘Bone Tomahawk’ as a bone fide great movie is that it actually feels more like two good movies, stitched together Frankenstein-style in a manner that doesn’t entirely work… but more on that in a few paragraphs, after I’ve waxed lyrical on the good a while.

For the bulk of the film’s run-time, what we’ve essentially got here is a classical American Western, played straight, played well, and entirely lacking in winks, nods and awkward college-boy postmodernism of the Tarantino variety. It may not be quite on the level with yr Fords and Peckinpahs (how could it be?), but it’s a solid, serious-ish yet entertaining genre film aimed at grown ups, with good writing, good performances, good photography and good direction. If John Carpenter or Walter Hill were to walk out of the wilderness in 2016 and deliver the former’s long-promised Hawksian Western, there’d be a fair chance it would be less good than this one, put it that way.

In sub-genre terms, we’re looking at a ‘long arduous trail’ / ‘rescuing kidnapped innocents’ number that, remarkably, has the good grace to run through all of the elements that make such stories work without making any cack-handed textural references to ‘The Searchers’ (well ok, very few anyway). If you, like me, yearn for films that can play the old “guy with bad leg can’t keep up with others” / “guy has to shoot his beloved horse” / “guy acts like a trigger-happy jerk but goddamnit he has his reasons” cards and make them feel like actual, significant events for the characters involved rather than just cornball scripting conventions, you’ll be in a happy place through much of ‘Bone Tomahawk’.

Part of the reason the human drama works so well is the exceptionally leisurely pacing, which allows the actors to sink into their roles a bit more thoroughly than is usually permitted in a ‘tough guy’ genre flick like this, meaning that, by the time the proverbial shit hits the fan in the final act, each of them has attained a degree of depth that could reasonably be called ‘novelistic’ (even if we’re talking more Zane Grey than Dostoevsky here), making the succession of gut punches that take place when the gears shift into ‘grueling survival horror’ mode far more harrowing and gripping than would otherwise be the case.

Having said that, the slow-burn approach gets a bit much here and there, leading to a slight ‘sag’ in the middle of picture that a more ruthless editor might have been justified in slicing away at, but basically, I don’t think the excess really amounts to more than one or two scenes that might have been better relegated to the “save it for the director’s cut” file, and these are more than compensated for by the enjoyment of watch a modern movie with enough faith in its audience to stretch out a bit and not feel the need to hit us ‘round the head with some action-packed shenanigans every ten minutes, lest we lose interest and flick channels.

On the acting side, most of the cast is – at the risk of repeating myself – very good, with Richard Jenkins (whom I don’t believe I’ve previously seen in any other films) deserving particular praise for creating a likeable and fully rounded individual out of a character that in lesser hands could have become merely a tiresome comic relief sidekick, and a great cameo from the ever-delightful Sid Haig.

Really though, no one’s going to dare deny that this movie belongs to Kurt Russell. Admittedly, it probably helps that this is the movie Kurt Russell was pretty much born to star in (I mean, for “old school Western with horror twist needs heroic but slightly bumbling aging sheriff to grit teeth and shoot guns”, who else you gonna call?), but still - having accepted the call, he does a magnificent job with it.

Though it barely takes up ninety seconds of screen time, his character’s farewell to his wife before setting out into the wilderness carries more a genuine weight of feeling than anything in a movie like this should really be expected to, and, about one hundred minutes later, his last few minutes on screen comprise such an exultant testament to good ol' fashioned, mans-gotta-do-what-a-mans-gotta-do heroism, it almost makes you want to stand up and salute. Go on, bring on yr soul-withering torture-porn monsterism, movie, you find found yourself thinking, Kurt Russell’s here, and everything’s gonna be ok. Needless to say, he’d be collecting his Oscar right now if we here at BITR had a say in such things.

Which brings us neatly onto the film’s final act, which, as mentioned above, is a bit of a kick to the head to put it mildly. Not that there’s anything wrong with it exactly, you understand – on the contrary, on its own terms, it is thrillingly disorientating and extremely effective. The problem lies more in the fact that the shift in the film’s tone, and more importantly, in the scale of its ambitions, is so vast that parts A and B never quite manage to cohere into a unified whole.

Basically, the two thirds of ‘Bone Tomahawk’ that are purely a western are so well done that the story could have concluded in a wholly conventional manner (with, say, a shootout with some bandits or something), and the horror-free variant of the film would still have been as fine a tribute to the legacy of the genre as one could wish for. The western stuff is stately, dramatic, emotionally affecting and even somewhat epic… making the decision to suddenly derail it into the realm of a nerve-shredding, low budget horror movie a bit of a hard sell, in some respects.

It is admittedly a pretty good nerve-shredding, low budget horror movie for the most part, it must be said, with tension, fear and foreboding all exquisitely wrangled during the ‘transitional’ build-up between the two ‘sections’, meaning that when the film’s troglodyte savages do eventually make their attack, it is genuinely frightening in its suddenness and bloodthirsty daylight realism. Like much of the best movie violence, it conveys a sense of dazed, “shit, what happened… is that my arm over there?!” surrealism that rings very true, even if most of us hope we’ll never be in a position to test said truthfulness.

It was only after this, when the film’s characters enter the realm of the savages, that I started to have my doubts. Partly, this is a personal issue, arising from the fact that I found the filmmakers’ decision to start referencing Italian cannibal movies at this point (via the savages’ white-chalk appearance, their predilection for locking people in wooden log cages and subjecting them to displays of sadistic cruelty, and so forth) both cheap and unnecessary. But then, it is possible someone who actually likes Italian cannibal movies might have a different take on that, so there’s little point in my banging on about it further. (Drop me a line, we’ll argue about it some time.)

At this point, it is worth briefly noting that whilst the violence in ‘Bone Tomahawk’ is agreeably strong and bloody throughout (which is exactly as it should be, given the subject matter), the film’s “captured by cannibals” segment features one scene that is exceptionally brutal, going considerably beyond my own personal comfort zone for such things. (I mean, maybe those who regularly seek out ‘extreme’ horror kinda stuff may scoff, but by the standards of a theatrically released film with a name star, it is really nasty.)

This isn’t necessarily a criticism of the film – merely something that potential viewers might want to be made aware of prior to viewing. Actually, in narrative terms, the scene in question proves extremely effective in knocking us off balance and subsequently making us utterly terrified at the thought of the fate that potentially awaits our surviving characters. It’s all just a bit… difficult to reconcile with the enjoyable, old fashioned western I thought I was watching half an hour ago.

‘Bone Tomahawk’s “cannibals” are at least more imaginative creations than the Italian variety, I’ll give them that, and, during the film’s final half hour, we are allowed some fascinating glimpses into the workings of their horrifying and degraded culture. Though as far as I’m aware, nothing even remotely resembling this nameless, languageless, inbred monster tribe ever surfaced during the white man’s conquest of the American continent, the vastness of the North American wilderness and the fragmentary nature of Native American tribal culture does at least lend these creatures an eerie historical plausibility that - as with the cave-dwellers in Neil Marshall’s ‘The Descent’ (2005) or the subterranean tube-wreck survivor in Gary Sherman’s ‘Deathline’ (1972) - makes thinking through the logic of their grim existence a singularly chilling process.

Thinking further in fact, I believe the only real reason that the cannibal / horror segment of the film doesn’t quite gel with the western section is that it just feels a bit *small* in comparison to the story that has proceeded it. Whereas the western section takes in grand landscapes, swelling music, and touches on the familiar ballet of long shots and close-ups that defines its genre, the ‘horror’ section by contrast finds itself largely confined to one claustrophobic set and a bit of scrubland, whilst the editing becomes jagged and the camerawork functional and shaky.

Far be it from me to level such accusations at what was clearly a very dedicated and well-organised production unit, but at times you almost get the impression that the filmmakers were having so much fun making a Western, they forgot about the horror stuff and found themselves having to knock it up pretty quickly in the last few days of shooting, or whatever.

Certainly, if they’d had a mind to, they could have taken the final act a lot further - made it longer, nastier and more grueling, ratcheting up the tension to the level of something like ‘The Descent’, and showing us a lot more of the savages' world in the process, rather than pulling straight towards a slightly rushed (though still highly stirring) finale and an easy exit for the survivors. For the sake of my nerves, I’m actually  kind of glad they didn’t drag things out, but if they had, I feel it would have made the different halves of the film balance up a lot better, given the monumental scale of the build up that brings us to those last few reels.

But anyway, enough bellyaching.

Like Carpenter and Hill films of yore, there are, mercifully, pretty much no ‘themes’ that can be picked out of ‘Bone Tomahawk’. You could point out to the filmmakers (and I’m sure many have) that presenting an uncritical conflict between white ‘civilisation’ and non-white ‘savagery’ is hardly a helpful or progressive stance for a motion picture to take in 2016, but more than likely they’d just tell you, so f-ing what – it was a good story, so we told it. Ill-advised socio-cultural analysis is really not the point of the exercise.

Like the work of those aforementioned directors, ‘Bone Tomahawk’s virtues lay in the sphere of cinematic craftsmanship, satisfaction (and modification) of genre expectations, and traditional dramatic storytelling. What it has to say about the world is expressed entirely on a surface level, through what the characters say, and through the way they behave toward their fellows. And to be honest, such an attitude proves extremely refreshing, in an era when so many movie scripts seem to function primarily as fuel for second-rate thesis proposals and social media bickering.

Remember the days when people used to go to the cinema just because they wanted to see a damn good movie, rather than for the opportunity to bitch about it afterwards in the safety of some judgemental fan culture echo chamber? Well whether you do or you don’t, the people who made ‘Bone Tomahawk’ remember, so do yourself a favour and check whether their film is screening anywhere near you this weekend. As long as you’ve got the stomach for the nasty bits, I’m confident you won’t regret it. I mean, you like good movies, don’t you?

Nippon Horrors: The Woman From The Sea (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1959)

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VIEWING NOTE: At present I do not own a copy of this film, and the review below is written on the basis of a screening that I attended as part of the BFI’s Nikkatsu centennial season in June. As such, no proper screengrabs I’m afraid, and my hazy memory may have injected some slight inaccuracies into the plot info summarised below. I’ve also been unable to locate an accurate / understandable cast list for the film, so character and actor names are scarcer than I might have preferred.

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One of the key figures in the rebirth of Nikkatsu studios as a powerhouse of contemporary youth and crime films during the late 1950s was novelist and scriptwriter Shintarô Ishihara. Probably better-known in Japan today for his subsequent political career, which saw him championing a raft of disappointingly right wing policies during his thirteen year tenure as Governor of Tokyo, the ‘new wave’ sensibility of his early writing proved a great boon for Nikkatsu as they sought to engage with younger audiences, and Ishihara-scripted films such as ‘Season of the Sun’ (1956), ‘Crazed Fruit’ (1956) and ‘Rusty Knife’ (1958) (all starring the writer’s brother, teen heartthrob Yûjirô) proved to be huge critical and popular successes for the studio. A somewhat less celebrated work from the pen of Shintarô however comes in the shape of 1959’s ‘The Woman From The Sea’, a decidedly peculiar borderline horror / coming of age tale with an ethereal, seaside atmosphere that seems uncannily similar to that of Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, released two years later. (1)

Unobtrusively directed by one of Nikkatsu’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers, Koreyoshi Kurahara (‘Black Sun’, ‘The Warped Ones’), ‘The Woman From The Sea’ begins in a similar milieu to Ishihara’s “sun tribe” stories – an idyllic coastal retreat where idle rich kids while away their summer holidays, mamboing to swing records and engaging in sundry horseplay, whilst the adult world looks elsewhere. One of these youngsters seems a little more serious-minded than most however. Young Toshio (Tamio Kawachi) rejects the empty hedonism of his peers (and particularly his jock/sex pest brother), instead dedicating his time to strumming his ukulele, staring wistfully out to sea and pottering about in his modestly equipped sailing boat. It is implied that the two boys are adopted orphans whose rich new parents don’t really care for them – or I think that’s the case anyway, the dialogue is somewhat unclear. But whatever the case, affection of any kind seems very distant for poor Toshio, his only real emotional connection being with the kindly Nanny (Keiko Sumida) who is charged with looking after the boys in their beach house, and his only real ‘friend’ (well, sort of) a ‘touched’ beatnik writer whose not-quite-all-there babblings he blankly tolerates when the two bump into each other on the cliffs.

It is this writer character who provides us with our first inkling that something unusual is afoot on this stretch of coast, exhibiting the kind of foresight often attributed to artistic types and the mentally ill (so a double score for this guy) as he drags Toshio down to the shore one morning, insisting that he has seen a terrifying apparition – some kind of ghostly woman had who previously appeared to him many years earlier, trying to lure him siren-like into the ocean… or something. Understandably, Toshio ignores the writer’s ravings, just as he pays little attention to the surly local fishermen who subsequently accost him, complaining that some maniac has destroyed their fish-farms, slaughtering their stock.

Slightly harder to ignore however is the sight that greets Toshio when he heads back down to his boat at dawn the next morning: a voluptuous, muscular young woman (Hisako Tsukuba) clad in a skimpy, makeshift swimsuit, sitting on the deck, bloodily devouring a raw fish. As you might well imagine, Toshio’s initial reaction to this discovery is a combination of confusion, outrage and disbelief, especially when the girl casually tells him that she caught the fish with her bare hands, that she swam to the harbour from her home ‘nearby’, and that she lives alone, sustaining herself solely via the food she catches from the ocean.

Despite Toshio’s bewilderment though, his new acquaintance seems to have taken a bit of a shine to him, perhaps appreciating the gentle earnestness that sets him apart from his more obnoxious land-dwelling peers. Following their first meeting, she soon begins making unannounced visits to his bedroom at night, clambering up the rocks outside and sneaking through the window, prompting several laugh-out-loud moments as poor old Nanny intrudes on the pair, suddenly finding her shy and introverted charge in the company of a brazen, half-naked amazon.

Soon of course, Toshio’s initial reluctance dissipates, and he finds himself following the same path as any other lonely young heterosexual fellow suddenly confronted with such a fortuitous turn of events: namely, he falls head over heels for the nameless girl, cherishing their time together as he temporarily puts aside the vagueness of her explanations of who she is and where she comes from, and discounts any possible connection between her sudden appearance and the various rum goings-on that are now dominating conversation in the local village.

More fish have been slaughtered, and boats have been damaged. Sightings of a large and predatory shark have been reported, and a fisherman has gone missing (in fact, Toshio and the girl find his severed arm whilst out diving). Before long, we learn about how, twenty years previously, the men of the village hunted down and killed a giant shark that had been plaguing the harbour. It is whispered that this particular shark had the power to take on human form, and that it had taken a human woman as its lover, spiriting her away to the sea, from whence she has never returned, and…. well you can probably guess where all this is heading, especially once the superstitious villagers catch a glimpse of Toshio parading around with his mysterious new girlfriend.

Much like ‘Night Tide’ though, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ presents a far more ambiguous take on things than a standard “vengeful femme fatale from the ocean” narrative, down-playing the story’s potential supernatural aspects and instead focusing on the ontological uncertainties the previously apathetic Toshio is suddenly confronted with, and on the blink-of-an-eye ease with which the frankly insane beliefs of the villagers suddenly take precedence as the dominant belief system on this quiet corner of the Japanese coast - an explanation for their troubles that, for the lack of any alternative, is deemed solid enough to justify violent action against a flesh & blood woman.

And even if we – like seemingly everyone else around - accept the villagers’ supernatural hypothesis, Tsukuba’s shark-woman remains a very sympathetic figure, in spite of the destruction she may have caused. Her concerns are simple, and she acts impulsively, like a proud animal spirit, just going about her business. Certainly, she shows no sign of embodying any of the evil desires which the villagers project upon her. In all likelihood, she has simply returned to the harbour for much the same reasons a normal shark would - to find food and warm water, rather than to pursue any agenda of ghostly vengeance. And her affection for Toshio seems very genuine too – a source of companionship that connects her to her former human self, rather than some attempt to lure him to his doom.

Seemingly shot almost entirely in the very early morning or late at night, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ has a fresh, blinking-in-the-sun-at-dawn kind of quality to it that very much adds to the slightly unreal, daydream-like nature of proceedings. Led by the reserved Kawachi and the matter-of-fact Tsukuba, the drama of the film is handled in very ‘light’ fashion, managing to exercise a strange grip on the viewer whilst rarely resorting to melodrama or explicit displays of emotion. But what hasn’t come across thus far in this review is that, in spite of some potentially dark subject matter, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ is above all an extremely funny film. Rather than chest-beating emotion, the keynote of pretty much every inter-personal encounter here is an endearing sense of polite awkwardness. From Toshio’s disinterested tolerance of his writer friend’s outbursts, to Nanny’s utter bemusement at the unconventional behaviour of the scantily-clad new arrival in her household, the film achieves a kind of deadpan, goofball surreality that it’s hard not to love.

Japanese comedy, like that of many other countries, often doesn’t translate well when presented to the English-speaking world (2), but in this case I think it’s safe to say that the subtleties of the gags arrive intact, and there is a great deal of honest laughter to be had from ‘The Woman From The Sea’. Perhaps most interesting in this respect though is Kurahara’s knack for directly fusing this humour with the film’s more poignant and troubling aspects in a somewhat challenging fashion that perhaps prefigures the confrontational projects the director was to undertake during the ‘60s, creating odd juxtapositions of laughter and pathos that twist up the viewer’s emotions something rotten. Witness for instance the sight of Toshio earnestly practicing his ukulele after learning that his brother and lover have apparently died in a boating accident, tears running down his cheeks as he incongruously whistles a jaunty, Hawaiian melody; or the almost apologetic, ‘sorry-about-all-this-but-whatcha-gonna-do’ tone taken by the angry mob who turn up at the door to inform him that his girlfriend is a shape-shifting shark monster, their embarrassed buffoonery strangely undercutting the savage violence of their purpose.

Hand in hand with this tonal ambiguity and otherworldly atmosphere is the vague implication that Toshio is to some extent living out a fantasy, perhaps having ‘invented’ or otherwise summoned up the shark-girl to assuage his own loneliness – a notion that even seems to occur to him towards the end of the film, meaning that even in the wake of the crushing, all-too-real bloodshed that closes proceedings, he is still able to reluctantly shrug off what has happened like a lost dream, the supernatural atmosphere which now prevails allowing him to stumble forward into adult life without shedding a tear… but with the shadow of the haunted writer’s solitary existence nonetheless looming large in his future.

Prior to its horrifying conclusion at least, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ plays very much as a consciously light-weight film, but nonetheless it is one that lives long in the memory. Strange, funny, touching and genuinely haunting, it could easily sit alongside ‘Night Tide’, ‘Spider Baby’, ‘A Bucket of Blood’ or – particularly relevant here, perhaps - Val Lewton’s ‘Cat People’ in the loose pantheon of emotionally resonant black & white horror favourites. If only it had been more widely seen, I’m sure it could have gained a measure of the same affection those films receive from their fans; though modest in both style and execution, it is a work that justifies the overused “undiscovered gem” designation as well as any other film I can think of at the moment.

(As a post-script, my Japanese friends tell me that this film’s story was reworked for a notoriously sleazy TV show in the 1980s, revelling in a slightly less subtle title that translates as something like ‘Terrifying Shark Woman: She Eats Human Flesh’. Still proudly bearing a “created by Shintarô Ishihara” credit, it’s easy to speculate that the exalted Governor of Tokyo’s embarrassment at such a connection may have played a role in the near complete invisibility of this apparently well-remembered series online - a circumstance that perhaps also serves to deepen the relative obscurity in which ‘The Woman From The Sea’ languishes..?

Whatever the case, it’s certainly a shame that the film didn’t make it onto Criterion Eclipse’s recent ‘The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara’ box set, despite it clearly being a very distinctive and enjoyable example of the director’s work. But the sub-titled print Nikkatsu provided to the BFI this year looked quite nice, so I suppose we can maybe at least keep our fingers distantly crossed for some kind of release at some point in the future..? Here’s hoping, because I’d certainly like to see it again.)

The pitchfork photo at the top of this post was uploaded to Flickr by PreviewF3C. Many thanks to Satori for helping me track down the other screen-shots used above.

(1) Seeing as how ‘The Woman Form The Sea’ was never released outside Japan and remains largely unseen in the English-speaking world to this day, I think the notion that Harrington took any direct inspiration from this film can probably be discounted; the similarities between the two works are likely more just a happy coinciding of eerie aesthetic sensibilities.

(2) A factor that perhaps serves to reinforce the slightly skewed picture we tend to get of their popular culture… but that’s another story.

Wow, I Actually Saw a New Film:Some Thoughts on ‘Django Unchained’.



This week saw me undertaking my bi-annual trip to the cinema to actually see a new film, and turns out it gave me a whole bunch of stuff to get off my chest, so why not do so right here, I thought to myself, if only to spare my real life friends the hassle of having to listen?

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Readers should be aware that there are going to be some fairly extensive spoilers in what follows, so if that’s an issue for you, I’d suggest waiting until you’ve seen the film before reading.

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To begin, I should state that I like Quentin Tarantino’s films and offer no apology for it. For all that their thefts from other films can prove irksome at times, they remain ridiculously good fun, technically impeccable, and generally represent the best (only?) chance we currently get to see some of the spirit of 60s/70s low budget filmmaking blown up to 21st century blockbuster proportions. And like all QT pictures,’ Django..’ is indeed hugely entertaining - a defiantly UN-subtle, brightly hued business that’ll have you leaving the auditorium with a swing in your stride and a cool song in your head (hopefully the newly composed Ennio Morricone one, which is bloody stunning – wish it had been allowed to play out for longer in the film).

Moreso than any of his previous films though, the second you start to think more deeply on what just transpired on screen, the illusion collapses, and the gaping, ugly flaws of the project are revealed.

The thing is y’see, for me the success of Tarantino’s previous films rests on the fact that (with possible exception of ‘Jackie Brown’) they have all been entirely cynical, self-absorbed endeavours, wherein characters and situations simply play out as tropes of the various genres and aesthetics he’s riffing on – mechanisms for providing the requisite sights and sensations we expect from films like these, openly rejoicing in the fact that there’s no deeper purpose, no moral imperative at work whatsoever – the cinematic equivalent of the enthusiastic sneer that seems permanently etched on the director’s face. None of which is a criticism; on the contrary, it’s great, and it works very well for him.

‘Django Unchained’ though marks something of a sea-change in his approach. Perhaps tapping a bit too heavily into the underlying sentimentality of the Western genre, this one sees him inexplicably presenting us with what is essentially an earnest melodrama with a fairy tale ending – a film in which the characters speak directly in terms of love and friendship and destiny, rather than just offering barbed comment on the cinematic archetypes they represent, and in which genuine historical/political issues are evoked, and dealt with on a strictly one dimensional good vs evil type level. This new approach brings with it a new set of expectations, one that the director is perhaps not quite so used to meeting.

We’ll get onto that shortly, but first off, a more minor, personal, ranting-outside-the-cinema type gripe. I’ll put these paragraphs in italics so you can easily skip them if you just plain don’t give a shit.

Despite his presumed status as a big fan of Westerns, I felt that QT at several points failed to stay true to the core values of the genre as I understand it. I don’t mean in terms of stuff like shifting the action from the West to the South and pushing back the clock to the pre-civil war era (things that you could at least *imagine* Leone or Peckinpah doing, even if they didn’t actually do them), but more in terms of the way the characters function, and the way that their actions define our sympathies towards them.

In essence, what I’ve always loved about the figure of the archetypal cowboy hero – what makes him so distinct from the often tedious romantic/chivalric heroes of most popular fiction – is that he operates on a purely utilitarian level. In a good Western, making a big show of honour and pontificating about one’s beliefs is left up to the bad guy. The cowboy silently observes, his motives opaque. And when the time comes, he does what needs to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible, then buggers off, leaving the bad guy floundering in his own pomposity and hypocrisy until he meets his inevitable demise. Fucking brilliant! That’s what I want ‘heroism’ within this genre to represent basically, and I was hoping that, given his ingrained cynicism and love of genre tradition, QT would come though with some of that good stuff. Sadly not.

What particularly irked me was the key moment when Christoph Waltz’s character shoots DiCaprio. Waltz’s Dr Schultz very much comes from the ‘canny, educated foreigner / enabler of the primary hero’ tradition of Van Cleef in ‘For a Few Dollars More’, Franco Nero in ‘Companeros’ etc, and if there’s one thing all of those guys would have recognised, it’s that they had a clear chance here to walk away in one piece with their goal (freedom for Django’s wife) achieved, without having to fire a shot… mission accomplished. But instead Schultz gets involved in some sanctimonious puffery about refusing to shake hands with the guy. Any proper, utilitarian cowboy-hero would realise that shaking hands with a bastard means nothing – that both men will be judged by their actions, not some ceremonial gesture – and would have got on with it and got the hell out of there. Even William Holden and the Wild Bunch would have realised that the odds were against them at that point, capitulated and withdrawn to contemplate vengeance at a later date.

Not Tarantino’s beta-hero though – he’s got to beat his chest and refuse to compromise and make his big moral point… even when that guarantees his own death and of a life of continued misery for the friends he’s gone to so much trouble to help out. Schultz is presented to us as a steadfast and noble character, worthy of tribute, but as he dies all we can think is “what an idiot”. Tarantino sets him up as a hero, but in the end he doesn’t make the grade and dies a fool, betraying his ground level goals for some misplaced moment of idealism.

So that pissed me off. And as for Django himself, well his conduct is even more troublesome in the hero stakes. If you were to assemble a panel of great cowboys of yore – Franco Nero’s Django included - and ask them to put themselves in New Django’s shoes during the epic gun battle that immediately follows the deaths of Shultz and Candie, I think their priorities would be clear – the girl (D’s wife) is the pivotal object in this scenario (and as far as the film is concerned, she very much IS an object, but that’s another story..), so keep her in sight, keep her safe and get her out of there. But what does Django do? He abandons her completely, running off to some other part of the mansion and blasting away at everyone in sight, as the remaining baddies casually creep up and put a gun to her head. Again – what an idiot! I don’t care how cool and aspirational you look in your black cowboy get-up Django, you fail cowboy class for that one.

Obviously these are just my own bugbears with the minutiae of the film’s plotting, based on expectations created by a bunch of old movies I happen to like, and as such might be entirely irrelevant to the casual viewer, but there is also something more seriously wrong with ‘Django Unchained’ that didn’t really occur to me until I was walking home from the cinema, something that put a bad taste in my mouth and proceeded to infest my feelings about just about every part of the movie, and that – and I realise how much of an ass I sound saying this about a Quentin Tarantino film – is the moral message that ‘Django..’ conveys.

As mentioned above, ‘Django..’ is the first film Tarantino has made that, by the very nature of its melodramatic storytelling and emotive subject matter, is forced to embody a social/political message, however simplistic. Ok, so I guess ‘Inglourious Basterds’ spent a long time telling us that Nazis are bad, but hopefully most viewers were smart enough to realise that that movie had more to do with other war movies than it did with the actual war, and treated its goofily superficial ‘message’ accordingly. ‘Django..’s message is similarly blunt, and we get it sorted out nicely in the opening five minutes - “racism is bad, folks – now enjoy the show”. And we do, patting ourselves on the back for being such a good liberal audience as we go along.

But unlike ‘..Basterds’, ‘Django..’ has no post-modern safety-net to fall back on, and, well I don’t quite know how to best put this, but: demonstrating that racism is wrong and that black people are the equals of white people should not exactly be a difficult proposition for a filmmaker to achieve in a one dimensional comic book-style movie in 2013. Issues of fate vs free will, imprisonment vs self-determination, the individual as representative of the masses etc should pretty much write themselves into a story about slavery, with no additional head-thinkin’ required. It’s not like QT is trying to do anything difficult or challenging with this material – it’s straight down the line primary school level ethics, and yet somehow he manages to screw it up royally.

The mess he makes of things might not be immediately obvious on a surface level, but just dig this ok, and see if you can get what I’m talking about:

When Schultz picks out Django to help him at the start of the film, it’s more or less pure chance. It’s not because he’s the toughest or the coolest or the smartest, it’s just because of some random information he happens to possess. Under different circumstances, he could have picked out any other slave in the South, and surely, we assume, this is going to be the point of the movie – that each and every slave can become Django, can break free and define his or her own future.

And yet when we reach the end of the story some two and a half hours later, this fairly elementary point has never been made. Instead the film falls victim to the rather insidious notion of unearned exceptionalism that seems to have become the norm in heroic Hollywood narratives in recent years – a notion that takes on a particularly ugly aspect when mixed up with issues of racism and historical destiny.

Although Candie and the world he represents has been thoroughly shot, castrated, crippled and blown up by the end of the film, his central doctrine of phrenology-guided racism – which he is allowed to fully outline in a lengthy dialogue scene – has never actually been effectively challenged. At the film’s conclusion, Django actually TAKES A LINE from the dead villain’s bullshit, happily describing himself as “the one in ten thousand exceptional n**ger”, whilst the other black characters in the film remain helpless imbeciles, craven traitors or, in the case of the women, so incapable of independent action they might as well be statues.

I mean, I hate to be the one to engage in supercilious “blah blah, so and so’s being vaguely racially insensitive” internet bitching as regards a movie that was generally highly enjoyable, and yes, Spike Lee’s much-publicised dismissal of the film was pompous and self-defeating (pretty much turning his nose up at the idea that a mere genre film could ever address serious issues), but still: honest to god Quentin, what were you THINKING?

Not only does this poorly-managed shift from random everyman to pre-destined superhero make for a lousy bit of screen-writing that even a second-rate spaghetti western director would probably have wanted ironed out before the cameras rolled, it also exposes a failure to responsibly address even the most basic moral/political issues that reflects very badly on a guy who’s been directing pretty good movies for over twenty years now. Hopefully he can chalk this one up to experience and return to what he does best – making superficial, escapist capers about amoral characters with no connection to the real world whatsoever.

Because, on that level at least, ‘Django..’ succeeds pretty well. There are lots of memorable scenes, good gags, fine performances from the supporting cast, great bits of filmmaking etc, all present and correct. It’s a pretty light-hearted affair given the subject matter, but as long as you’re primed to expect something more like one of Robert Rodriquez’ shiny action movie westerns than a work that approaches the great directors mentioned elsewhere in this post, it’s a good time, with a handful of transcendent moments that stir the blood the way a good western should.

For me, the best of these moments comes in the scene in which Django dispatches the Australian gangers who have been charged with delivering him to a hell-on-earth mining operation and high-tails it back to Candie’s plantation for a final showdown. There’s something truly rousing – genuinely heroic - about the way he hitches himself up on an unsaddled horse and roars off over the horizon, rifle in hand, as his fellow slaves stare at him in disbelief, his legend being born behind their eyes – “holy shit, check THAT guy out”. The film could have benefitted hugely from a few more moments like that – moments that give the figure of Django a wider role in the emancipation of black America, rather than just callously writing him off as an “exceptional n**ger”, standing head and shoulders above his fellows.

The western may traditionally be regarded as a genre that celebrates the individual, but as aficionados of the form like Tarantino should be aware, many of the best entries in the canon – and even most lesser-known John Wayne flicks – tend to end with the hero succeeding only thanks to the bonds of trust and compromise he has built with his allies (that utilitarianism again). And in the rare instances in which westerns have engaged with political issues and succeeded in making some kind of point ( I’m thinking particularly of Corbucci’s ‘Companeros’ and Damiano Damiani’s superb ‘Quien Sabe’ /‘A Bullet For The General’), they have done so through an appeal to a basic revolutionary collectivism, ending with the individual hero subsumed into the mass of the people, ready to overthrow the grandiose clowns who oppress them, regardless of personal loss or gain. I think that this approach would have been a perfect fit for Tarantino’s mixture of spaghetti western and slave plantation Southern gothic, and could have really given Django’s story the wings it deserved.

Given the director’s joyous screwing with history in “..Basterds”, what I really wanted to see at the end of this film (and it wouldn’t have taken much of a change of narrative to bring it about) is Django riding back towards the Big House not alone, but at the head of a whole army of freed slaves, fighting the Civil War two years early, with no damn Abraham Lincoln needed to help him out.

Corny and obvious maybe, but then EVERYTHING in this story is corny and obvious, and if you’re going to spell things out for the audience rather than relying on their perceived cultural sophistication (as per QT’s previous ironic mode), you might as well go the whole distance and leave their hearts swelling with cathartic glee, rather than with that faint withering feeling that accompanies yet another tale of a Chosen One stomping all over everybody for the sake of his individual happiness with his plastic fairy tale bride.

And I know, I know – I’ve just spent two thousand words chewing Quentin Tarantino out for making a film that doesn’t *mean anything, man*. I can’t believe it either. What a bore. As I say, the fact that they don’t mean anything is what I LIKED about all his previous films! But like any good cowboy, if he’s going to talk the talk, he needs to walk the walk, and failing to even mosey through a one-dimensional “racism is bad” revenge story without falling on his ass does not bode well for his future career as a proponent of grown-up issues. Sorry dude. But at least the violence was cool, and the one-liners were funny, and the music was good. Roll on ‘Kill Bill Pt. III’.