TV/Movies Megathread

[Darth Wagtaros]

Just watched the Doctor Who Christmas special.  Featuring, as the voice of the Great Intelligence, Sir Ian McKellen!  How did they keep that secret?

Wasn't bad.  I liked some of the other Christmas specials better.  I sometimes think they make The Doctor too depressed in some of the latter seasons.  He's had companions die in the past, in the case of Pond they just went to another time and lived out long happy lives.

[Martinus]

So, my holiday fairytale catch up continues. Watched the Sorcerer's Apprentice. I know I am not supposed to like it but I did.

[mongers]

Quick answer needed, is 'The Dark Knight Rises' worth watching/getting out of bed for ?

[CountDeMoney]

Yes, it is worth it, even if your plan is to wrap up the series.

[mongers]

Yes, it is worth it, even if your plan is to wrap up the series.

I'll just watch it as a stand alone.

[Eddie Teach]

Yes, it is worth it, even if your plan is to wrap up the series.

I'll just watch it as a stand alone.

If you're only watching one, it should be The Dark Knight.

[Ideologue]

Django Unchained.  It only took 363 days, but I finally got to watch one great movie in the theater this year.  Go see it.  I'll say more about it later but it's way good.

[Habbaku]

Yeah.  Fuck Spike Lee; Django was definitely worth watching.

[Ideologue]

Yeah.  Fuck Spike Lee; Django was definitely worth watching.

What'd Spike "I'm remaking perfect movie, what may be argued to be the best movie since it was released, only ten years after its release, for no good Goddamned reason except it was in Korean and I can" Lee have to say about Django Unchained?

[Habbaku]

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/spike_lee_says_django_unchained_is_disrespectful_to_my_ancestors/

He's been trying to attention-whore over it for a bit now.

[jimmy olsen]

Yeah.  Fuck Spike Lee; Django was definitely worth watching.

What'd Spike "I'm remaking perfect movie, what may be argued to be the best movie since it was released, only ten years after its release, for no good Goddamned reason except it was in Korean and I can" Lee have to say about Django Unchained?

What's he remaking?

[Syt]

Oldboy

Yeah, that's going to go well, Josh Brolin or no.

[Razgovory]

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/spike_lee_says_django_unchained_is_disrespectful_to_my_ancestors/

He's been trying to attention-whore over it for a bit now.

I didn't even know anyone paid attention to him anymore.

[Ideologue]

I mean, I ain't gonna say he doesn't have a point, but that point applies a lot more to Reservoir Dogs (all white cast, racism used to flavor the white characters) and Pulp Fiction (Tarantino's own "dead nigger storage" bit played for laughs).

It doesn't apply so squarely to Jackie Brown, which is still Tarantino's most sedate film, where it's used solely by black characters and in imitation of the patois of the street and all that shit.  After Jackie Brown, I'm not sure anyone in a Tarantino movie even utters the word "nigger" once till Django--it's not in Kill Bill, and it's not in Death Proof, and I forget if the Nazi talking about King Kong in Inglorious Basterds uses the particular phrase, but even if so, his deployment of the word has been rather strategic for the past decade and a half.

But, yes,  I can confirm: it gets said about 140 times in Django Unchained.  However, more than it ever was in Dogs or Fiction, it's genuinely for serious artistic reasons.  It's a movie set in the American South in 1858.  Now I wasn't there, mind, but I understand that racism was pretty pervasive in that milieu.

Of course, that's actually hitting a strawman--Lee's probably more upset with the basterdization of another crime against humanity.  Personally, I think the major issues one might have had with Basterds are not present in Django--Django and King do not assassinate Jefferson Davis.  If Inglorious Basterds was the prototype for a new subgenre of historical revenge movies, the targets of vengeance are more abstract in Django--a fictional slaver played to perfection by Leonardo DiCaprio in a role that should give that man a damn Academy Award--and the avenger more concrete--a man less concerned with racial payback than Shosanna, and a lot more concerned with living his own life.  He's doing himself a disservice by not at least seeing it so his offense might at least be done with the knowledge of what he's being offended by.

P.S.: when I saw it, I think the audience was predominantly black.  So maybe Spike Lee shouldn't speak on behalf of his ancestors, who are of course also the ancestors of all the people who seemed to really enjoy the movie, even if it is a really convenient rhetorical device because people that have been dead for a hundred fifty years can't speak for themselves.  My guess is that former slaves, if they found their way into an early cinema, and assuming they weren't scared to death by the prospect of MOVING IMAGES like all the quasi-barbarian white folk of the period were, and got to see Django Unchained, they'd have liked it.  Why?  Because it's about killing bad people, and that is a theme that is beloved by all races in all times.

Oh, and P.P.S., since this wound up being a full review, I'll go ahead and tackle some other points:

1)No joke, Calvin Candie is the screen's finest villain since the Joker--and DiCaprio gets to play him in a much better movie.  The role, and DiCaprio's performance (the finest the film, not to take anything away from Jaime Foxx or Christoph Waltz), combine a foppish playfulness and genuine if ugly charm with a murderous intensity that is amazing and revolting to behold.  I'd actually say he's better than the Joker, because you can watch the dumb old Dark Knight and never really be repelled by the Joker, because it's all make-believe (as much as I love my superheroes).  Calvin Candie is heightened and refined reality, who has real analogues in real life, representing a real system of terrorism, rather than a mere id monster.

2)The plot--and the setting--require Jaime Foxx to play second fiddle to Christoph Waltz for a good part of the movie, but Foxx is never overwhelmed by Waltz' more prolific verbosity.  He's a seething, palpable, barely restrained presence even when he's not saying anything, and even when he's not in the frame.  Good work.  [spoiler](He does, latterly, become the hero of his own movie.  See below.)[/spoiler]  He's also quite funny when called upon to be so.  I've also noted that he's not really out for justice.  To really explain what I mean, I have to compare him to King Schulz, his partner, and that'll require spoilers.

3)Christoph Waltz is a real treat--and a lot more likeable than the last time he was in a Tarantino movie.  As King Schulz, he's really endlessly entertaining.  [spoiler]I hated it when he died, because he is so much fun.  Of course, I accept it was necessary.  At the same time, it's also a very strange death.  I'm gonna talk about it for a while.

King goes out in, arguably, kind of a stupid way.  King of a really stupid way.  In the film's first climax, King dies.  He could've walked away--$12,000 poorer--but with a lot fewer holes in his gut.  Through various failures of subterfuge, King's made the purchase of Django's wife from Candie, and the contracts written and drawn, but the deal is not done till he shakes Candie's hand.  Because they're both gentlemen.  King refuses.

I get the feeling that Django would have just shook Candie's hand, because Django hasn't really had the luxury of being an asshole-get-everybody-killed crusader, because he's got a wife and, as I said before, because he just wants to get her and him both out of the shit alive.  He's not a savior figure--at least not purposefully, and not to satisfy his own sense of self-righteousness.

King's motivations are mostly implied in the movie.  He's Django's trainer in violence--not that he needs too much training--and teacher and, briefly, his owner.  A line he has before they embark to Candie Land (lol), however, elucidates what he's after: he says he feels a sense of "responsibility" for Django.  There's a real streak of martyrdom and white man's burden that colored abolitionism, and this streak is heavily at play in King Schulz' character.  He's with Django not just out of friendship, though I felt that was genuine, but also as a vehicle for his own desire to fuck with slaveholders and the whole social system of the South that he, however rightfully, disapproves of.  "Look at my pal, the black guy!"

When he refuses to shake Candie's hand, and murders him by shooting him in the heart instead, it's of course something we want to see, but it's a stupid act, and it's a selfish act.  He's very much betraying his friend--and pulling him and his wife down into what he must have known almost certainly should have been a martyrs' deaths.  It's at least selfish, if not a little racist, on his part, to think that it was just fine to dragoon Django into a gunfight that he couldn't win just to kill a few evil white people, when that is not at all what Django's whole reason for existence has been.  (I appreciated that he did, at least, apologize. )

Maybe Spike Lee should watch this movie.  He might get something out of it after all.

And my appreciation of Django (the character) only grew that he did forgive his friend--well, his friend's corpse--because he knew he wasn't a bad guy, just, like John Brown after him, a little self-involved.  A big part of the revenge that Django wound up taking after all, was for him.[/spoiler]

Oh, and on a technical level, when we do get to that shootout at the plantation (I don't think this is a spoiler really), the action suffers a little bit from Tarantino not providing us fully with a sense of its geography.  It's most reminiscent of the fight with the Crazy 88 at the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill, albeit not (quite) as cartoonish.  That scene gets set up so we understand how the set-piece works.  I wasn't really quite clear on the layout of Candie's house, although granted it's less important because the action and the body count aren't as much ends-in-themselves here as in Kill Bill.

But with that minor caveat, A+.

[Ideologue]

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/spike_lee_says_django_unchained_is_disrespectful_to_my_ancestors/

He's been trying to attention-whore over it for a bit now.

I didn't even know anyone paid attention to him anymore.

Dude's still a hell of a director.  Watched Inside Man the other night.  Another A+.