Disconnect

Just about everyone in the Free World interacts with the internet in some way. It's a normal condition to be available to a slew of acquaintances, friends, and even strangers at the touch of your cell phone. I watched Disconnect (2012), thinking this would be a mediocre survey of the situations our connections with one another brings us. The surprise was not pleasant. Rather, it was a deeply relevant and honest side of the truth about our relationships, both in real life and in cyber space.

The three story lines weave in and out of each other to highlight the dealings with social media, grief, identity theft, marital and familial relationships, and lots of secrets. Paula Patton and Alexander Skarsgard play a troubled married couple trying to cope with death. Jason Bateman is a lawyer, husband, and father of two high school children; a family living the 21st century American Dream. The other story line takes place between a newswoman and a young guy in the internet sex industry.

Visually, I found the movie very interesting because of the muted colors used in the wardrobes and camera filters. It showed how often we can physically be somewhere but not really be present. The soundtrack was always brooding with angst, anxiety, and loneliness. At the start of the movie, I felt like I was falling and that feeling never went away.

This isn't one of those thrillers where you're trying to string dots together. Instead, you see inevitable misfortunes coming that cut deep, in spite of the foresight. It is a powerful movie.

Django Unchained - A Review and Rant

Well, hot damn, Tarantino. You did it and you did it good!

I loved the movie. It was full of passion, romance, action, butt kicking, and most of all good acting. I loved the music too. It was The Good the Bad and the Ugly meets crooning meets the body-thumping bass of hip hop. It was hardly flawless but I think the flaws are greatly overshadowed by the spirit and realism of the story.

The story begins in 1858, Texas, USA. Django (Jamie Foxx) is rescued by a German "dentist" named Dr. Schultz-who is really a bounty hunter. He needs Django's help in identifying some wanted men, as Django was once a slave of these wanted men. The good doctor, in my opinion, carries the show. He's funny, against slavery, and is a smooth talker. Django, was separated from his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) and desperately wants to find her because they are in love. A ton of chaos and adventure goes on... you'll have to see it. There is a lot of Tarantino-style blood, where it looks like guts come out of people no matter if they're shot in the arm or the stomach. A bit graphic, but that's Tarantino's fantastical nature at hand.

What truly makes this movie a success is its polemic. Not since Roots has there been a mainstream slave-time depiction on film, television or otherwise. When it came to the true horrors of slave life, Tarantino did not go the route of fantastical and cartoonish. He went the route of what was dark and real; frankly, things that aren't talked about anymore. When I was growing up in middle and high school, slavery was a bad thing that happened long ago. End of story. Django, very realistically, showed exactly the kind of bad that slavery was. It rehashed the severity of 300 plus years that is largely trivialized today; many kids naively conceive black slavery as a bunch of people working in fields, who were sometimes whipped.

So to Spike Lee and other dissenters of the film, get over yourself.

People need to be reminded what it was like. The story is fictional, obviously. But the N word was not.  It was 1858. That's what black people were called back then. Anyone criticizing that lives in a bigger fantasy world than Tarantino. Hot boxes were something I never learned about in school. But they were very real, as were the mandingo fights, mammies, field slaves, comfort slaves, and courtesan (mistress) slaves all depicted in the movie. And frankly, if you research these slave functions, you'll find a surprising "family tree" of how these functions have manifested themselves in today's society. The brutality in Django was nothing short of accurate. It wasn't any less true than the chained slaves thrown off ships during the Middle Passage journeys (Roots).

Was the "Spaghetti-Western" style fictitious? Yes. Was the overall storyline fictitious? Yes. Were some of the guns in the movie not invented until after the Civil War? Yes.

But that's the nature of Tarantino's work: extreme, hyperbolic. Who doesn't want the underdog to have power?  Who can make that a downgrade of the movie when so much of it welcomed an unadulterated depiction of slave life?

In the end, I'm forced to think that Spike Lee is mad for two reasons: He has become irrelevant. His last big hit was He Got Game. He has released movies since then but not with as much positive reception. And I'd like to add that Summer of Sam was a movie that said the F word more times than any movie that had existed until then. It's hard to say that this expletive was even a little bit historic as was the use of the N word in Django Unchained. It is easy to say, however, that there is a lot of unnecessary hypocrisy going on. Spike is drinking some haterade.

In my opinion, the movie was both entertaining and educational. I don't think you can ask for much more than that when so many movies are trash today. If people decide that they dislike the movie, they should evaluate why. It was gory because slavery was gory. It was depressing and cruel because slavery was depressing and cruel. It had an unrealistic ending because Quentin Tarantino wrote it.

If you can't handle the heat, then get out the damn kitchen.

Killer Joe

I've been waiting to see it since it came out back in the summer. The problem was it was a limited release or something. I'm not sure what they call it in the movie biz but the result was that I couldn't see it anywhere I lived. Then I moved to Arkansas right before the fall started and... well, it's Arkansas. I had better chance seeing Satan skiing in Arkansas than seeing Killer Joe in Arkansas.

It was released on the On Demand cable systems recently; I watched it last night.

Killer Joe was awesome.

It was originally written for the stage by Tracy Letts. It showed Off-Broadway for 9 months in 1998. The story takes place in small-town Texas; trailers, dogs on chains, cars on cinder blocks, the whole bit. Everything looks and feels a little behind the times even though it is set in the present day: the way people dress is modest, the cars they drive are old and make noise, everybody knows everybody. The family (stepmom, father, sister, and brother) is the focus of the story. The stepmom is a floozy and the dad is an obtuse, brawny mechanic who doesn't realize his wife's infidelity. The daughter is a pretty, teenaged girl who seems slow but is very observant. Her brother, who is older, is a Class A screw up who owes someone money and comes to his family to figure out a way to resolve his debt.

What immediately impressed me was the realism. Where in a Tarantino film, you get real settings and characters that look real. You also get a sort of cartoonish script full of hyperboles and clumsy pauses. It's good. But it feels like a movie. Killer Joe has the real look and the feel. The lines of the characters sound natural and typical. They say humdrum, mindless things. They make meaningless conversation and curse a lot. It made the movie slow but believable. Along with the 'real' aspect of the movie came the violence. It was graphic, yes. But something about the way it was achieved elicited an emotional reaction from me; something that felt sorry for characters or at times indifferent. It wasn't like Tarantino's machine gun Hitler scene in Inglorious Basterds. That was just funny.

The depth of the characters is what I noticed next. The family all had instances when they interacted with each other on individual levels as well as in their family unit. So you got to see each of their versions of affection, panic, manipulation, idiocy, and succumbing to pressures of people and situations.

Matthew McConnaughey gave a totally captivating performance. He was an odd and calculating yet charming and handsome predator. You had no choice but to pay attention to his time in front of the camera.

I liked the use of colors both on the characters and in their environments. They were not necessarily indicative of unspoken plot secrets but they made things visually interesting and supported some of the personality traits of the characters. The cinematography/screenplay was nice because it kept the "play" aspect of the story intact. During the crucial scenes of the movie you could see multiple characters in one still shot, how they contributed to the scene, and how the set aided those reactions.

The movie has surprises. The end is interesting. The music is okay. The only thing that I would change is the presence of the sister and brother's biological mom. The movie was hard to follow at one point, and not for any intentional reason for all I can tell.

I'm sad it took me so long to see it but not regretful in the least bit that I did.