This poster TOTALLY rips off Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

See, same poster!

After reading the short synopsis of the Norwegian film Headhunters, I figured it was gonna be a thriller in the vein of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (and as the poster eloquently reminded me, the films share a producer). What I wasn’t expecting was a brilliant dark comedy mixed with extreme violence and gore.

Roger Brown (a VERY strange name for a Norwegian) is a recruiter (or “headhunter”) for major corporations with a beautiful wife and a beautiful home that looks like a showroom at Ikea. To pay for his extravagant lifestyle, Brown steals works of art from the rich men he recruits with the aid of Ove Kjikerud (now THAT’S a Norwegian name), a gun loving security guard. Everything is going great until he meets Clas Greve (played by Jaime Lannister on Game of Thrones, looking like a real-life Prince Charming from Shrek). Soon, his head is being hunted (get it, the title works both ways… those clever Norsemen) and he doesn’t know who is after him, or why they are trying so hard to kill him. Do they know he is a thief? Does this mysterious hunk Clas want his beautiful wife?

The film reminded me several times of the Coen Brothers. The tone is most like that of No Country For Old Men with people getting double crossed at every turn. There are also scenes of sudden, extreme violence that sometimes literally made me cringe. As many know, I’ve seen some truly messed up movies in my day, so if a movie can make ME cringe, it MUST be good! I give it a 14/17.

I love Mondo posters. They’re the best!

Next up is another film that surprised me: Seven Psychopaths. I had wanted to see this movie mainly because the director, Martin McDonagh made the vastly underrated In Bruges. I loved that film but after first seeing the trailer to Psychopaths, I lost most of my excitement (oddly enough, the trailer for In Bruges was also off putting and lame, this guy needs a new trailer editor). When it came out on DVD, I figured I would give it a chance and it was fantastic!

The film tells of a guy, Colin Farrell, writing a screenplay about 7 psychopaths. His best friend, played by the always brilliant Sam Rockwell, steals dogs with Christopher Walken and collects the rewards. They steal a local mafioso’s shih tzu and all hell breaks loose.

That’s right boys and girls! Tom Waits is in this and he is crazy as always.

The best way to describe this film would be Adaptation directed by Guy Ritchie. As the film progresses, the script Farrell is writing begins to become the film we are watching. It all becomes meta and self-referential, which sounds pretentious, but the film handles it in a very laid-back fashion without pounding the audience over the head with its cleverness. As with Headhunters, Seven Psychopaths was far more violent than I expected. Some of it I was actually surprised got past those wonderful censors at the MPAA. But the film also has moments of extreme sadness and beauty. When people die in the movie, it isn’t used for laughs as in other dark comedies. Instead, McDonagh understands the seriousness of death and isn’t so low as to use it as a gag. I give this one a 16/17. Check it out!!!

LCD Soundsystem played their final show to a sold-out audience at Madison Square Garden on April 2nd, 2011. The decision to end the band was made by LCD frontman James Murphy. He explained that he wanted time to live his life rather than spend his days touring on the road. LCD Soundsystem were always an interesting “band” because they began as a solo project for Murphy (who was best known as a DJ in New York who had a very eclectic record collection). Their first big “hit” was “Losing My Edge” which was basically an airing of grievances for an aging hipster upset that the younger kids claimed they knew more obscure bands than Murphy did. Next came the brilliant “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” about a house party in which those lovable Gallic robots show up to jam. It’s wasn’t until later that Murphy was forced to hire musicians to learn and play his album live. So basically, everyone knew LCD Soundsystem had a short lifespan. After the release of This Is Happening (their third and final album) the band decided to call it quits and stop before they became enemies or burnt out, as most bands end up becoming. The document of their final show is the brilliant documentary, Shut Up and Play the Hits.

The documentary is receiving many comparisons to The Band’s Last Waltz and for very good reason. LCD’s final show is littered with DFA Records regulars (the New York label Murphy started with Tim Goldsworthy), Arcade Fire singing back-up and a who’s-who of Brooklynites jamming onstage with the band. The entire show feels more like a giant party rather than a concert.

While I will admit that I’m a bit biased when it comes to reviewing this doc since LCD Soundsystem are one of my favorite bands, I found it very bittersweet and exciting. The concert footage is interspersed with the morning after the final gig and the week prior. Scenes of Murphy taking his dog for a walk around Williamsburg (aka The Hipster Capital of the World) juxtapose the excitement and anticipation of the band’s final show. Chuck Klosterman (the brilliant essayist and music critic) interviewed Murphy about his final performance and the conversation between the two provides a welcome break from concert footage.

A few days after their final show, the crew packed up all the equipment and left it in a large warehouse before it’s auctioned off. When Murphy visits the equipment, he breaks down and sobs. I couldn’t help but be bummed too since I will never be able to see LCD Soundsystem play live. But watching this documentary is the next best thing. I rate it a 15/17.

Just for fun, here is my Top 5 LCD Soundsystem Songs:
1. Someone Great
2. Daft Punk Is Playing At My House
3. Tribulations
4. Dance Yrself Clean
5. Never As Tired As When I’m Waking Up

“Kathryn Bigelow is a female director who makes “male” movies. Just look at Point Break or The Hurt Locker”. Nearly every review I’ve ever read about Ms. Bigelow either starts like this or mentions it at some point. This is very confusing to me. There are literally hundreds of male directors who make “female” movies every week, but no one ever feels the need to mention the gender of the director in a short review. Garry Marshall has made a career out of so-called “chick flicks” (ie Princess Diaries, Beaches, those shitty holiday movies with literally ALL of Hollywood staring in them) but no one ever asks, “how can a male director can make female-centric movies?” With each new movie Bigelow makes, the fact that she is female is ALWAYS addressed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Filmmaking is (and always has been) a male-dominated art form so its great and noteworthy when a talented female director comes along. But what makes Bigelow such an interesting filmmaker is the fact that the movies she makes never cater to the fact that she is female. Unlike Penny Marshall or Nora Ephron, Bigelow’s films deal with very traditionally “manly” topics: bank-robbing, nuclear submarines, bomb dismantling in Iraq. I think she said it best, “It’s irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don’t. There should be more women directing; I think there’s just not the awareness that it’s really possible. It is.” Personally, I would love to see more women making movies and I hope directors such as Bigelow, Mary Lambert, Jane Campion, Mary Harron and Lena Dunham pave the way to a future where one doesn’t have to start a review of a fantastic film like Zero Dark Thirty talking about the importance of female directors.

Now to the movie. Zero Dark Thirty is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. When I watch movies like this one, I’m in awe of how the writer and director are able to jam so much information into a cohesive film. This is Bigelow’s Zodiac or JFK. Like those films, Zero Dark Thirty deals with an obsessed individual trying to solve a mystery while displaying extreme amounts of research and theories. Zero tells the story of Maya (Jessica Chastain giving her best performance since Tree of Life) thrown into a world of torture and espionage, tasked with finding the elusive Osama bin Laden. Like Silence of the Lambs’ Clarice Starling, Maya is a woman in a man’s world (and one could argue Bigelow is as well, but that’s a little obvious). In Lambs, director Jonathan Demme constantly framed the petite Jodie Foster standing next to large, muscular men. In Zero, Bigelow has characters refer to Maya as “the girl” or have them ignore her entirely. It’s obvious that Maya is the smartest, strongest character in the movie, but she must work for the others to understand this. At one point during a political meeting, Maya interrupts the men to explain what they are missing and the men look shocked. One man asks, “and who are you, dear” and she responds “I’m the mother fucker who found his place, sir.”

Everyone knows how the film ends. *SPOILER ALERT* Osama bin Laden is killed. But the leading up to his death is one of the most suspenseful scenes I’ve seen in a very long while. The Navy Seals hired with infiltrating bin Laden’s fortress are extreme professionals. When he is finally killed, it is not done in “showy” or cinematic fashion. Instead, he is shot… quickly and almost boringly. The Seal who kills him doesn’t even realize what he did. I found the direction in this scene fantastic. In lesser (or more, lets say, cinematic) hands, his death would be shown in slow motion to extend the action and emotion of the scene. But this is not that kind of film. This is not 300 or Kill Bill. It is extremely realistic, much like a documentary.

I’m quite surprised that Kathryn Bigelow didn’t get a Best Director nomination in the Academy Awards. It seems they pick the lesser of all the best directors in any given year and nominate them. I mean come on, Behn Zeitlin or Michael Haneke are NOT better directors than Bigelow, Tarantino or even Ben Affleck, but I digress. The direction was the most interesting aspect of Zero Dark Thirty. I can’t wait to see it again to catch more information (some of the Palestian names get confusing, especially when many people have 5 different aliases). I rate it 17/17 on the Sitzmatic scale (or a 10/10 on the Deuce Scale).

Has anyone else seen this? Did you like it? I’m interested because I know it’s gotten a lot of controversy from both political sides.

Djake: I knew I would love Django Unchained as soon as I heard Quentin Tarantino was making a “Southern” about a slave seeking revenge. It truly is a story tailor-made for Tarantino’s sensibilities. And I was happy to hear that he was finally making his all-out Spaghetti western. He has flirted with the genre before in Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds, but never fully adhered to my favorite sub-genre. Django is finally the epic western he has promised to make his entire career.

As most people already know, Django Unchained takes its name from the great Django (1966) starring Franco Nero (who makes a brilliant cameo in Unchained) and directed by the other Italian Sergio, that is Sergio Corbucci. After the success of Django in Europe, the Italians rushed out (as they do with any popular picture) to make copies and unofficial sequels. None of these offshoots starred Nero (except the delayed sequel, 1987’s Django Strikes Again) and none were directed by Corbucci, but they used the mythic stranger Django as the antihero and protagonist who avenged women and others throughout the Spaghetti West. Tarantino said that he wanted to make his own version of Django, like he did with Pai Mei in Kill Bill (a Kung Fu staple in literally hundreds of Hong Kong films) but this time Django was a slave in the pre-Civil War South who takes his revenge on evil slave owners and traders. And what a bloody revenge it is!

This film might be Tarantino’s most violent so far in his entire ultra-violent filmography (and no I didn’t forget the House of Blue Leaves bloodbath from Kill Bill). At one point, Tarantino includes a shootout that rivals anything Sam Peckinpah or John Woo could ever wish to have. When Django shoots and kills people, it literally looks like they are being shot by a canon. It gives the character a mythic, almost otherworldly quality in that his bullets do more damage than any other character in the film, which is fitting when we learn the German folk tale of Sigfried and Broomhilda from Dr. King Schultz (played beautifully by Christoph Waltz) that is paralleling the story and Django’s quest throughout. And like Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction, he seems to be protected by God because he is never shot (when any other man would be riddled with bloody holes) and shakes bullets out of his holy jacket. But along with the gratifying, shall I say cartoonish violence, Tarantino also injects scenes of terribly disturbing and horrific violence. Most of these, as one would expect in a film dealing with slavery, involves characters getting whipped by evil, white slave-owners or getting ripped apart by vicious dogs. In these scenes Tarantino actually shows restraint in his depiction of the violence. One particular scene involves a dirty, disgusting “Mandingo” slave fight that involves one guy getting his eyes gouged out. But as he did with the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs, we do not see this, only the looks on the faces watching the horror. He had said in an interview that he originally included the gore, but had to dial it back because audience members were too disturbed and couldn’t laugh or enjoy the rest of the film.

I don’t think there was a single actor or actress in the film that didn’t give a career best performance. My favorite was Leonardo DiCaprio who plays the detestable villain, Monsieur Calvin Candie (a Francophile who doesn’t speak French and is embarrassed by those who do), owner and operator of Candieland, one of the largest plantations in Mississippi. This is the first role I’ve seen DiCaprio do that involved him hamming it up and playing a character that is insanely flamboyant and mean rather than brooding and sad. Candie is aided by his trusted house slave, Stephen played wonderfully by Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson gives his best performance since Pulp Fiction playing the trusted confidant to the evil slave-owner. He is the Wormtongue character who whispers in the kings ear and tells him the trickery going on around him. He is wonderfully feisty and has some of the funniest scenes in the whole film. Again, Tarantino creates scenes that would otherwise be horrific or disturbing and makes them funny (think the head shooting car scene in Pulp Fiction). Christopher Waltz is once again fantastic and delivers a character nearly as charismatic and interesting as Hans Landa. Kerry Washington is gorgeous as the mythic, dreamlike wife of Django’s night- and daydreams. As Broomhilda, she is Django’s only love and the reason for his need for revenge and justice. And now comes Jamie Foxx. He is simply brilliant as the tough, quiet and strong Django. Of course he reminds one of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, but his character is much more complex and layered. He is a newly freed man who is learning the bounty hunting trade from his mentor, Dr. Schultz and at the same time coming to terms with the idea of being a free black man in the disgustingly racist period know as the Antebellum South. Foxx plays the character with an underlying rage that I’ve never seen him do before. He is great, and a perfect choice to play this fantastic character.

As with all Tarantino films, Django is littered with homages and tributes to classic westerns and exploitation flicks. A lot of the flamboyant slave-owners reminded me of Robert Fleischer’s controversial Mandingo and its superior “sequel”, Drum (one of Pam Grier’s first major roles). Many of the snow scenes made me think of Corbucci’s masterpiece, The Great Silence, one of the few Spaghetti westerns to be set in the snowy snow. Other scenes reminded me of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, especially Dr. Schultz’ grey fur coat. I’m excited to see a detailed list of minor homages and influences since Tarantino always litters his films with them.

Notice how McCabe’s (Warren Beatty) fur coat is similar to Dr. Schultz’ (Christopher Waltz) gray one in Django.

Now the music in this film is the best so far for the great audiophile that Tarantino is. Of course there are some Ennio Morricone and Luis Bacalov western themes as expected, but the best music choices were the unexpected ones. At one point, Rick Ross comes on with the Jamie Foxx-produced “100 Black Coffins” and anyone can’t help but nod their head. Then comes the John Legend revenge-ballad, “Who Did That To You” that acts as a sort of blaxploitation theme for Django. This was also the first time Tarantino included original pop songs for use in his films.

Django Unchained is, by far, my favorite film of 2012. Currently it stands as my 2nd favorite Tarantino film, standing closely behind Inglourious Basterds. If you have not seen it yet, rush out and see it immediately. If you are easily offended by strong violence and liberal uses of the N-word, as Spike Lee was, or movies in which the black character is the hero then it is DEFINITELY not for you, and frankly I’m sorry to hear that because movies like this only come every so often, and only from the best filmmaker working today.

So, thanks to Jake for his review! If you have any thoughts you want to share, be sure to leave a comment. Thanks for reading!