Review: Spring Breakers and Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

In the The Wizard of Oz, the people Dorothy knows in Kansas are recast as fantastic versions of themselves: the mean old crone into a wicked witch; Hunk the farm hand into the Scarecrow; Professor Marvel into the doorman to Emerald City, the guard at the Wizard's Castle, and the titular Wizard of Oz himself (I'm guessing if you stare long enough at the cover to Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, you'll probably see his face in the prism, too). This year, actor James Franco serves up a near-simultaneous double-feature that suggests a similar, yet wilder, transformation in his two different-yet-evocatively-similar films, Spring Breakers and Oz the Great and Powerful. 

I would love to believe that had Franco's more earth-bound character Alien in Spring Breakers seen Oz the Great and Powerful, he would have it playing on repeat in his sprawling home ("I've got Oz on repeat! OZ! On repeat!")

Oz is about a con man coming to a fantastical land and saving it from resident witches (while recruiting some more). Spring Breakers is about some dangerous girls coming to a magical place where the wizard already lives and becoming savage queens and entering a life of bloody crime. Either way, in both films, Franco plays immoral yet charming criminals, beset and enchanted by a handful of dangerous women. 3D landscapes or spring break nudity--either way, the visuals remain equally gratuitous. As for the witches in the picture, the bolder route taken by Spring Breakers, where the least well-drawn characters last the longest, cuts closer to the bone: these are both movies about how the pretty-looking things are dangerous vessels, and the conniving male protagonist is in over his head. In Oz, Franco jumps into a pile of golden riches he finds waiting for him; in Spring Breakers, he goes on a scene-stealing monologue in his bedroom, telling the women around him to "look at all my shit!" In both, the women stand nearby, potentially plotting his demise.

An annoying stroke of genius in Spring Breakers is its astounding use of repetition. Lines echo for minutes after they're spoken. Writer-director Harmony Korine, known for writing the seminal Kids and Gummo, tortures the viewer of Spring Breakers with the repetition of the title of his latest film. "Spring break ... spring break forever," the characters say, again and again, in melodic-poetic tones, expressing a desire to live the moments of their vacation-gone-wrong over and over again. It's a present-tense culture, where the characters yearn to hold on to everything they're enjoying, to replay it, to repeat it until it's unbearable. Excess stretches beyond the material to the experiential.

One modern equivalent of this yearning for a repetition of anything enjoyable is easily found in the penchant for Hollywood to double-back to known properties and throw the same brand-names at audiences again and again. Sequel, prequel, who cares--it's all by-products of a culture chasing the high of blissful moments long since past.

Oz the Great and Powerful itself is a regurgitated mess of both the original The Wizard of Oz as well as Tim Burton's awful Alice in Wonderland (itself the reheated leftovers of better art).

In other words, spring break forever.

In the market of moden artistic creation, we even judge our efforts by the number of times they're viewed, replayed, shared, posted, linked, resent, forwarded, pinned, and embedded in other places. The triumph of Spring Breakers lies in its ability to see such habits and honor them. I went into the film braced for nihilism; what I didn't expect was the empathy the film has for its characters. When James Franco's murderous gangster performs a poolside rendition of a Britney Spears melody on a piano while defending the disgraced pop star, surrounded by gun-toting, bikini-clad femme fatales wearing pink ski masks, Korine's film achieves a beauty beyond those found in the derivative digital imaginings splattered across the screen in the latest Oz effort.

Why Spring Breakers is also ultimately a better film may rest in the strength of its key musical number and the lack of one in Raimi's Oz. My favorite scene in the original Wizard of Oz is, without doubt, Judy Garland singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Where Spring Breakers updates Judy Garland for a brilliant montage set to Britney Spears's "Everytime," Raimi's film doesn't even bother and ends up feeling more heartless than the Tin Man.

It's a shame. And it's funny that Korine, in making a film so dedicated to shining a light on a culture of surfaces, found more depth in a 2D picture than Raimi did in his 3D prequel to a treasured classic.

Spring Breakers remains my favorite film of the year so far (I give it all appropriate stars), while Oz the Great and Powerful only proves how vacuous the content of our Hollywood-fashioned dreams have become.

Just color me gobsmacked by the idea that a gritty filmmaker like Harmony Korine gave me a film echoing more Judy Garland than the one mustered by a veteran Hollywood dreamer like Sam Raimi.

Review: Django Unchained (2012)

It's easy to think of Django Unchained as the second in a loose trilogy of historical revenge fantasies. But to me it feels more like the second of Tarantino's all-out blaxploitation films, closer in spirit to a followup to 1997's Jackie Brown than 2009's Inglourious Basterds. In Jackie Brown, a sweet-natured white bail bondsman named Max Cherry helps Pam Grier out of a tough spot; in Django, the helpful white man is the well-spoken bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (played with courteous glee by Christoph Waltz), who frees Jamie Foxx's Django and sets him on a path to kill as many white slave owners as he can. In both films, the honorable white man is portrayed as a selfless servant to the lead black character, and at the end of each film nothing is owed. These pale-faced assistants do what they do out of love of the black characters, and they always keep a half-step away from asking anything in return.

There are several issues one could take with a film of this nature. First of all, who does Tarantino think he is, doling out all this historical justice on behalf of minorities? Additionally, doesn't it make Tarantino more than a little disingenuous to ostensibly defend black people while at the same time fully exploiting their pain and torture? And finally, isn't it discourteous to reality to fictionalize and embellish where the truth might be dramatic enough?

Well, you know--if you want to take such positions, I can't stop you. Nor can I say you're especially wrong.

But I do think you'd kind of be missing the point.

The truth is, the truth isn't good enough, and it never will be. We can never go back and undo what has been done by history. We can't actually take a machine gun and fill Hitler full of holes. Nor can we jump off a horse, take the whip from a cracker, and turn it against him. But, man--that's what dreams are for, and films can certainly be a canvas for such dreams. And if we can't relax and have a good time watching the fictionalized retribution against slave owners and Nazis that Tarantino has provided in his last two films, in what space can we let our rage loose?

And what fun this film truly is. Its first half is immaculate, and it puts Jim Croce's "I Got a Name" song to the best cinematic use I've ever seen. Later in the film, when Schultz brings up the point that Alexandre Dumas was black, I wish he'd go further. I wish he'd made that point that Dumas elected to take his last name from his slave grandmother. Because it's clear Tarantino has done his homework here. It's clear he knows things that most white men don't. There's such a rich, subtle sense of black history running through Django that it's hard to look back now on Inglourious Basterds without wishing Tarantino had half such a grasp on Jewish history.

Tarantino runs into the most trouble writing the female characters in Django. While Schultz and Django are on a mission to rescue Broomhilda from Leonardo DiCaprio's entitled plantation owner Calvin Candie, she is never much more than a German-speaking MacGuffin put in place to drive the plot by staying just out of reach. Worse still, she's not even the best of Tarantino's MacGuffins; she may glow just as brightly, but her character is less interesting than whatever was in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. 

Which is why I think the thing that could most improve Django Unchained is a longer cut to flesh out some of the parts that feel too thin. It begs for the four-hour treatment, and I know the material is out there--the director and his stars have said as much, and on the official film soundtrack you can even hear some of the bits that didn't make it.

Still, Django Unchained remains a great work, and it represents Tarantino boldly doing what everyone else is afraid to do. Hell, a lot of people are even afraid to enjoy this kind of film (or even see it), let alone make a film like Django. I can only imagine the reaction had a black filmmaker helmed this thing. All this discomfort would no doubt manifest itself as outright fear. When Spike Lee made Do the Right Thing, Mookie couldn't even throw a trashcan through the window of a pizza parlor without inciting decades of controversy (and I don't think Spike Lee's made a film that strong or that angry since). It's no surprise to me that audiences somehow find a way to argue that Django's vengeance is too violent; what is a surprise is that a film like this has finally been made and has found enough of an audience to feel like it matters.

Frankly, I get giddy when I hear Django's own lines sampled in the euphoric mash-up of James Brown and 2Pac that plays over his assault on the Candieland plantation. In such ways, Django achieves a beautiful and metaphoric retaliation for more than just himself.

Despite its flaws, Django Unchained is a triumph. Black vengeance has another new name. Everyone who helped bring this one to life: you did the right thing. You threw, and you threw hard.

One last thing: if you, like me, think comments from a white guy about the depiction of race in another white guy's movie are of questionable value, allow me to point you in a better direction. The best comments I've read concerning Django Unchained's place in black cinema can be found at Big Media Vandalism. Their analysis is as good as it gets.


Film Stack Rating: 5/5 

Django Unchained is rated R, for pretty much every reason you could imagine. 

Review: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

It's been a long time since Jamie Lee Curtis fought her way onto the police force and battled a violent psychopath in Blue Steel, and, while Kathryn Bigelow (who wrote the screenplay for that film) has continued to grow as a filmmaker (and win Oscars), the story of a bright and fierce professional woman like Jessica Chastain's Maya remains something Bigelow always seemed primed to make, though committed to forever avoid. Thankfully, she finally found a truly feminist story she couldn't resist telling. The triumph of Zero Dark Thirty is not in its historicity; it's in the fantastic characterization of its protagonist.

Zero Dark Thirty shouldn't be taken as history any more than should Django Unchained. Both films are menacing, violent portraits of the artists behind the camera. I came at Zero Dark Thirty from the perspective of a pro-Obama, anti-torture liberal, and I didn't find my political views echoed in everything on the screen. But that's okay. I think I would disagree with Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal about the efficacy of torture (or the morality of it even if it did produce results), but at least the film portrays it as appropriately sickening and corrosive to the mental health of those involved.

Violence is never enjoyed or celebrated in Zero Dark Thirty, as it is in films like Django Unchained and Gangster Squad. Even when soldiers storm the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Bigelow puts painful emphasis on the crying children whose fathers and mothers are being executed.

Yet as horrible as the violence is, Maya and the filmmakers never flinch. A detainee looks to Maya at one point for mercy and finds none. Yet Maya is not cold; her strength is shown in how much the torture actually does bother her. She pushes through it in order to do the job she feels she must. Chastain lets just enough emotion spill out to convey humanity but not fragility. When senior officials struggle with the decision to launch a strike on the compound, given imperfect evidence yet again, they uneasily move forward in large part due to Maya's confidence. It's a decision that's beautifully problematized; after the debacle of finding no WMDs in Iraq, no one wants to trust imperfect intelligence, but that's exactly what they're forced to do. Zero Dark Thirty is often a film about the discomfort of finding your imperfect self perfectly capable of executing a task of dubious morality.

Somber and complicated, Zero Dark Thirty never sells Maya out with pratfalls or cute klutziness or asinine girlishness. Contrast Maya with Aaron Sorkin's female characters in his recent HBO show The Newsroom: Sorkin's characters can't get past the soap opera silliness of their personal lives, but, as Maya puts it, she is "not the girl who fucks." The lack of any romantic subplot in Zero Dark Thirty reminds me of Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs--driven, professional, and human. There are too few female roles like these.

It's not a perfect film; I doubt it would work at all for someone who hadn't lived through the last decade. It exists within our present history and cannot escape it, and yet it is not a documentary. The disingenuous comments of the filmmakers that it is somehow a journalistic portrayal of events rubs me the wrong way. It's hard to tell the truth in a documentary, let alone a re-shaped fictionalization such as Zero Dark Thirty. 

Still, I'm glad Bigelow made a serious film with a female protagonist. Though it likely won't win the accolades Bigelow's last military opus did, this film feels much more personal and artistic to me than the underwhelming and over-praised Oscar-winner The Hurt Locker. Zero Dark Thirty leans to the political right, but I don't care--it has a strong, intelligent, female point of view, and in these days of Sarah Palin and Sorkin-esque executive bimbos, that's something worth celebrating, no matter from which side of the aisle the voice originates.


Film Stack Rating: 4/5

Zero Dark Thirty is rated R for scenes of torture, violence, and strong language. 

Review: Gangster Squad (2013)

While audiences and reviewers wring their hands over Zero Dark Thirty's use of torture to combat terrorism, up drives Gangster Squad--a fully-loaded love letter to police brutality from Ruben Fleischer, director of that delightful gun-toting, double-tapping Twinkie advertisement, Zombieland. 

And you know what a love letter to police brutality is: it's a lot of bullets from a lot of guns.

I actually loved Zombieland. What's painful about Gangster Squad isn't that it's a terrible movie, because it's not--it's often really exciting and thrilling and funny--it's that with a better writer and director, it might have been a classic. There are polite nods in Gangster Squad to superior films like L. A. Confidential and Chinatown, but there's an inescapable silliness to the over-the-top writing and extreme violence (complete with, yes, Matrix-style slow-motion of bullet shells dropping to the floor and Christmas tree ornaments shattering) that drag the proceedings down into generic action film territory.

A lot in Gangster Squad reminds me of better films: Jon Polito shows up as a rival of Mickey Cohen's, and his big scene echoes a pivotal scene in the far superior Miller's Crossing; Michael Pena shows up to play a gunslinger-in-training, but he's not nearly as good as he is in End of Watch (itself a much more sophisticated piece of LAPD propaganda); and the whole thing never steps out of the shadow of Brian de Palma's Al Capone takedown film, The Untouchables.

It's too bad, because Sean Penn steps into the ring and plays infamous Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen with the energy of a man set to prove that his boxing days are far from over. Penn's Cohen is a pitch-black performance, soaked in evil brine, and he burns with such an intensity the film cannot help but find a grim momentum. Josh Brolin's do-gooder doppelganger, Sergeant O'Mara, has a knack for violence and a physical appearance that suggests a commonality between criminal and cop born out more by weapon choice and haircut than by screen presence; while I've liked Brolin a lot in past films, he's boring here, and badly outclassed by Penn. Brolin is likewise upstaged by the film-stealing Ryan Gosling, whose bad-boy cop Jerry flirts with disaster by intentionally courting Cohen's girlfriend Grace (why are they always named Grace?), played vacuously by gun-moll standee Emma Stone. Yet Penn and Gosling are so good in their roles that they almost make the film worth watching. They almost make you care.

Almost.

I love a good violent movie, but there are too many hackneyed plot contrivances here. I give it a few points for the moment Brolin's nagging wife decides to help him choose the recruits for his gang of above-the-law vigilantes, but even despite a few other mild tweaks to its all-too-standard tropes, Gangster Squad remains formulaic, despite its talented lead actors.


Film Stack Rating: 3/5

Gangster Squad is rated R, for lots of violence and language. 

Review: The Queen of Versailles (2012)

What I never knew about extraordinarily wealthy people like David and Jackie Siegel, the subjects of Lauren Greenfield's fantastic 2012 documentary, The Queen of Versailles, (which I caught up to last night via Netflix instant streaming) is just how much they let their pets defecate in the house. When you have a staff of nineteen, apparently scooping up the waste is easier than training the animals.

And I can't think of a better statement about the way we Americans live now. What's shocking about this film is not its excesses; it's the familiarity of those excesses.

The arc of the film follows the Siegels as they struggle to keep their Titanic-sized lifestyle afloat after the collapse of the housing market in 2008. Eventually, they have to layoff the bulk of their staff, and, while the shit doesn't quite hit the fan, it certainly does pile up on the floor around it.

The Queen of Versailles is an extraordinary documentary for several reasons. It's a great indictment of American addiction to consumerism (the Siegels often look like the country's wealthiest and most accomplished hoarders), however the film is never malicious to those it depicts. I found myself surprised at how much I liked Jackie, as well as Victoria, her daughter, who seems grounded and well-intentioned. There are even moments where I felt certain Jackie is playing up her seeming out-of-touchness for the cameras: a sly smile at a car rental agency where Jackie inquires what her driver's name is (drivers, she pretends to be shocked to learn, don't come with ordinary rental cars) show a woman having fun, not at all afraid to poke fun at herself.

But most of all, the film shows how much the Siegels represent a pattern seen throughout the world they inhabit; they reach beyond their means in the same way the people they sell timeshares to reach beyond their means. The Siegels make reference to bankers lurking like vultures around a casino the Siegels built but can no longer afford (purchased with money garnered from a mortgage for a $100 million-dollar house David Siegel could have paid for in cash--but why do that when you can make more with the cash than it would cost to pay the interest on a mortgage?), but in this world, everyone ends up carrion.

"My father always wanted a real concrete house," says the nanny, who is working to amass enough money for her family in Puerto Rico but seems instead to have lost her family to time. "He got a concrete tomb."

Her statement echoes. At times, the Siegels' place itself seems more tomb than home. By the film's end, David Siegel is all-but-unreachable in his den, buried among stacks and stacks of boxes and papers, staring unhappily at a large-screen television, seemingly as cutoff from his family as his hired help is from theirs. He seems like a man who desperately wants the cameras to go away and leave him to his misery, because what he thought would be a film about the construction of the largest single-family house in America has turned instead into an examination of that very building's hollow, unfinished guts.

The Queen of Versailles is that remarkable look at the very wealthy that left me free of envy, thinking instead, "I hope I can at least learn to live better than that." 

And for their sake, I hope the Siegels do, too.


Film Stack Rating: 4/5 

The Queen of Versailles is rated PG.