Atlanta's Plaza Theatre Presents Nine Days of Tarantino

by Tony Dayoub

Tied to the release of Quentin Tarantino's ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Atlanta's historic Plaza Theatre and the Atlanta Film Society are hosting a special retrospective of his previous eight films. It started this past Thursday with screenings of Reservoir Dogs, a 25th anniversary screening of Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2. Next weekend sees screenings of Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight.

Movie Review: Fury (2014)

by Tony Dayoub


Writer-director David Ayer crafts another fine look at the way shared violent experiences form a tenuous brotherhood among men with Fury. Set in the final days of World War II's European Theater, the movie follows a Sherman tank, christened "Fury," and its battle-hardened crew led by Staff Sergeant Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt). Among Wardaddy's crew are the God-fearing "Bible" (Shia LaBeouf), wisecracking "Gordo" (Michael Peña), and the crude "Coon-Ass" (Jon Bernthal). After losing one of their drivers, the tight-knit unit is saddled with a virtual rookie plucked from the clerical corps, Private Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman). Norman is our way into this predictably episodic depiction of the horrors of war, one that becomes a surprisingly stylish and at times contemplative suspense film punctuated by short, intense bursts of violence.

Double Vision: Tony Scott's Spirit Possesses Ridley Scott's The Counselor (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

The rumblings of a critical debate (or is it grumblings?) have already surrounded Ridley Scott's The Counselor. A script by Cormac McCarthy (The Road) helmed by the director of Thelma and Louise should have been a sufficient enough marketing opportunity for 20th Century Fox to capitalize on as they rolled it out during awards season. And yet the studio held a press-only screening Tuesday night before its opening, a move which signals they're likely as mystified about how to handle the film as critics are in trying to build a consensus around it. Given how peculiar it is, this is not surprising. The Counselor is in many ways an anomaly for Ridley Scott.

CONTINUE READING AT ROGEREBERT.COM

NYFF51 Review: 12 Years a Slave (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

What makes 12 Years a Slave so incisive isn't that it is a particularly apt depiction of slavery. It's that director Steve McQueen makes the viewer feel like it is. In his previous film Shame, McQueen got us to identify with a lascivious sex addict. In 12 Years, his third film (and his third entry in the New York Film Festival), McQueen does something quite ingenious by choosing to follow the true story of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor). In electing to tell of the ordeal of an educated, free African American from the North, kidnapped and sold into slavery, he makes Northup's fear and outrage our own.

The Week in Review: Richard Matheson, World War Z and Maniac (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

Between a well earned vacation down in my hometown (which just won the NBA Finals, people), Wendy Davis's Texas filibuster and the Supreme Court rulings rightfully dominating the conversation online this week, I just haven't felt up to posting anything major. (If a blogger posts a movie review online and no one is around to read it, does it still make a cogent argument?) Still, the world keeps turning, so here's some stuff worth mentioning if only in brief.

Movie Review: The Tree of Life (2011)

by Tony Dayoub

Walking out of the sold-out Friday night screening of The Tree of Life felt a bit disconcerting. For nearly 2 1/2 hours an entire auditorium of strangers, my wife, and I sat raptly as we eavesdropped into one man's soul, as facilitated by director Terrence Malick. Though its central character is the adult Jack O'Brien, the actor who portrays him, Sean Penn, appears onscreen for, maybe, no more than a quarter of an hour. That is because, as with many of us, O'Brien dwells on the formative events of his youth. So instead, it is Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, as Jack's parents, and Hunter McCracken, as Young Jack, who carry us through most of the film. Told in stream-of-consciousness, The Tree of Life unfolds at a deliberate pace on a large–some might say cosmically so–canvas, so that by the film's conclusion one feels as if one has lived an entire lifetime during the film's relatively short time-span. This is not a criticism.

The Movies...They Play Better in My Head Than They Do Onscreen

by Tony Dayoub

So last night I had quite a vivid dream, which is strange since I rarely recall my dreams at all. As they usually do this one took the form of a movie, one in which my point of view is in the middle of all the action but with a sort of detached omniscience allowing me to see multiple angles... think of an action movie if it were not just in 3D but as immersive as Star Trek's holodeck, yet none of the participants can see you. Get it?

Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds

by Tony Dayoub



"We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us, and the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, at our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans will be sickened by us, the Germans will talk about us, and the Germans will fear us. Nazis ain't got no humanity! They need to be destroyed." - Lt. Aldo Raine

Happy Monday everyone. Hope you all had a great weekend. Let's get down to some way overdue business, and discuss the big movie this weekend, and perhaps this year, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. I saw it at noon on Friday, but held back on discussing it here for two reasons. One was my desire to contemplate the film a little longer than I usually do with other movies because it is complicated enough to merit such pondering. Notice I say complicated, not profound... more on that later. The second reason is because I plan on discussing it in toto, spoilers included. So anyone who hasn't seen it, please skip the rest of this post, go see it (requirement: you must see it in a theater), and come back once you have. Trust me, whether you end up liking the film or not, this is one flick that every movie lover should add to their lexicon.


Basterds is a World War II triptych with three protagonists: Nazi S.S. Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) a suave snake who has earned the nickname of "Jew-Hunter" for his ability to ferret out Jews hiding throughout occupied France; Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) is a young French Jew who manages to escape Landa's clutches before he massacres her family; and Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is the commander of a band of Jewish soldiers, nicknamed "the Basterds" by the Germans for the brutal retribution they carry out against them, always leaving scalped Nazi corpses behind. Eventually each protagonist's storyline crosses paths in curious ways, even if they themselves don't always meet, until synchronicity strikes at the end of the film, with Shosanna exacting her revenge on the Nazi elite at a movie premiere in a theater she owns, which also happens to be where the Basterds have decided to wipe out Hitler and his goons.

Much has been made of Tarantino's highly fictitious postmodern Holocaust revisionism for, as some say, irresponsibly playing fast and loose with facts and casting the former victims as vengeance seeking "perpetrators" no better than their Nazi executioners. However, unlike the recent District 9, which tries to trick the viewer into passivity by deceiving him with the faux-documentary look at Apartheid, Tarantino clearly instructs us from the beginning to look at Basterds as an alternate history, a fantasy, by beginning the movie with the words, "Once Upon a Time... in Nazi-occupied France..." He continues to encourage a dissociation from any reality by rooting his story in the history of film versus the history of the world. For instance, most if not all of the soundtrack is made up of musical cues from other films (and anachronistic ones at that). David Bowie's theme from Cat People (1982) is heard as Shosanna "gets into character" before the climactic movie premiere. Italian Western themes are also ubiquitous. And I just about had a heart attack after I heard the "Bath Attack" theme from Sydney J. Furie's B-movie, The Entity (1981), when Shosanna is reunited with Landa midway through the film. Truth be told, I might feel differently about the "exploitation" of the subject if I had any Holocaust survivors in my family. But I don't. And from my perspective, it doesn't look or feel like Tarantino is being disrespectful of the historical facts.




Instead, by inverting the players in his drama, Tarantino is simply presenting this violent parable as a reframing of history to highlight the ease with which genocide occurred, calling into question whether the complicity and collaboration by many Germans can truly be justified by the loyalist fervor that was promoted by the Nazi propaganda machine. In this case, it is the audience that is complicit in the cathartic joy of vengeance, cheering the "Bear Jew" (Eli Roth) when he whacks one Nazi soldier with a baseball bat, delighting at Bridget Von Hammersmark's (Diane Kruger) rage-filled dispatch of a young soldier after a personal insult, and reveling in Shosanna's laughing visage onscreen and aflame as the theater burns with the Nazi High Command locked inside. Tarantino is creating an alternate propaganda here. This last image of the burning theater more than anything recalls the evil of the gas chambers (its setting accusing moviegoers, us, of participating in the same celebration of killing the Nazis did), and any pleasure we take in the film's climactic destruction of the Germans complicates our usually automatic dismissal of any justifications heard in the past by Nazi apologists who say they were swept up by the populist frenzy at the time since we, the viewers, are also guilty of the same.

It just may be that some critics are right in accusing Inglourious Basterds of luridly exploiting a horrid chapter in humanity's history. But at least it does so without hypocrisy.

Movie Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - For Your Consideration, Meet Joe Gump?

Was there a more eagerly anticipated post-summer movie than David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? Your intrepid writer was himself caught up in the emotional trailer, set to the strains of Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns. Never mind that its evocation of one of my favorite films, Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), makes me an easy mark. Or that it is based on a short story by one of my favorite authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Or that Fincher is one of my favorite directors. The film seems to be tailor-made to appeal to the cinema cognoscenti. And is it any coincidence it was released on Christmas Day, allowing it to play for the requisite week in 2008 for it to be nominated come Oscar time? I was crestfallen after reading Glenn Kenny's review of the film, especially because of the close association he makes between this film and Robert Zemeckis' detestable Forrest Gump (1994). Then it all came flooding back to me. The last time I was this bowled over by a trailer, it had been the one for Gump. I finally saw the movie, despising its facile look at history through the eyes of a dim-witted, folksy, ping-pong champion. But most especially I hated Zemeckis' use of flashy, self-conscious visual effects in scenes like the ones where Gump interacts with JFK or John Lennon. Just hire a frickin' actor for Pete's sake. His insertion of actual footage of these legends actually pulled one out of the film, not into it. The trailer for Button was designed in much the same way as the one for Gump, spotlighting much of the same emotional drama and visual spectacle. Compare both below: As Mitch Lewis, points out in a comment posted after Kenny's review, Eric Roth's screenplay even seems like an attempt to rework his own previous script for Forrest Gump. Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is a man aging in reverse, born old, getting younger over the course of the film. He falls for a childhood sweetheart, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who he leaves behind for adventures on a tug boat in the high seas during the war. But with Fincher's usual touch of darkness, the film works to transcend those limitations. While cockeyed optimism is the flavor of Gump's outlook, Button has a melancholy pessimism enshrouding it, a certain inevitability if you will, that is haunting. Death and the respective shape it takes for each character hangs like a spectre over the film. Whether it is Daisy, on her deathbed, telling Benjamin's story in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina rages outside; or the tugboat's Captain Mike (Jared Harris) defiantly driving his vessel into the rapid-firing shells launched by a German U-boat, Button's unasked question concerns how one faces certain death with dignity. In fact, Fincher's often fog-shrouded images usually underscore the serenity of a peaceful death, echoing another iconic Pitt-starrer, Meet Joe Black (1998). Here are some examples: Like Joe Black, Benjamin is a cypher, a receptacle for all the lessons he gathers on his journeys from the many lonely travellers on their personal journeys to their end. Pitt's portrayal of Benjamin is wonderful, capturing the poignancy of old age and fusing it with the vitality of youth, in much the same way he did in Joe Black. He beautifully projects childlike wonder when he first joins the tug; at the loss of his virginity in a brothel; at the deep connection he makes with a diplomat's wife (Tilda Swinton) while on his journey. But there is a certain cover-boy quality of blankness he is also able to tap into as the youthful-looking Benjamin rapidly declines towards his cruel death, so effective in a scene where he reunites with Blanchett late into the last third of the film. Benjamin's ultimate fate, performed by a mere infant (with the help of some stunningly subtle visual effects) is most unkind to this gentle sojourner. I repeat, the visual effects are subtle. Unlike Gump's intrusive depictions of real-life figures, the magical disappearance of wrinkles on Pitt's face (and the careful preservation of his real-life scar) are easy to overlook. Similar effects of youth have been misused by lesser directors such as Brett Ratner, in the opening scene of X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). Fincher wisely uses this effect only in low-lighting situations that both add to the mood and help diminish the dissonance of the effect itself. Yes, there is the generous use of fanciful-looking CGI to create fake landscapes. But it seems to fit within the confines of the tone Fincher is trying to set with this modern fable. If the film has a fatal flaw it is that it seems a little too calculatedly mindful of Oscar. Like the Frankenstein monster that was Forrest Gump, Button sews together all the qualities that usually appeal most to the Motion Picture Academy: epic scope and length; life-spanning story; protagonist with a disability; unrequited romance; heartfelt reunions, etc. This gives the film a certain polished sheen that somehow renders it a bit hollow. But Fincher's visual artistry, and Pitt's impressive range serve to lift The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, if not to the level of a cinematic crown jewel, then at least to that of a minor gem.

Movie Review: Burn After Reading - Snapshot of Our Sad State of Affairs

by Tony Dayoub



The Coen Brothers' latest Burn After Reading is a movie I've been meaning to get around to reviewing. I saw it on opening weekend, and my knee-jerk reaction was a less than enthusiastic response to the film. But I couldn't blame the film or the directors for failing to meet expectations set by its marketing people. I decided to wait a week, to allow the film to reveal itself to me. And if you've seen the film, you might be surprised at what my thoughts are.


Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is a low-level CIA analyst who resigns after being demoted for an alleged drinking problem he denies. Turns out he's pretty much a lush. And why shouldn't he be. He has trouble adapting to the monotony of daytime TV. He has little to fill his tape recorder with as he dictates his memoirs (or as he calls them, "mem-was"), and his marriage to the ice-cold Katie (Tilda Swinton) is slowly disintegrating.

Katie is demanding even of Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a married federal marshal who has a peculiar side project he's working on in his basement. See, Katie is on her way to ending her relationship with Osborne, a move Harry's been pushing for until it becomes reality. A paranoid serial philanderer, Harry usually goes for unavailable women, to keep it simple. But his m.o. has backfired this time. And when he goes on his 5 mile runs, he senses someone following him. Could it be Linda and Chad?

Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) are two gym instructors who have found a misplaced disc with Osborne's private information. They decide this is their ticket to fortune, and try blackmailing Cox. But Cox refuses to play their game. The two amateur spies are not holding anything of value to anyone but Cox, as they soon discover when they try selling the info to the Russians. But Linda, who is banking on extensive cosmetic surgery to lift her spirits, is determined to see her plan through. And Chad, a Type-A thrill junkie, is definitely along for the ride.

My immediate reaction was that this was no Raising Arizona, to be sure. The movie trailers promised a madcap comedy in the vein of that movie or The Big Lebowski. This was anything but. First of all, the film is more of an ensemble piece than the ads indicate (Pitt and McDormand are definitely not the protagonists). Carter Burwell's score is an exceedingly melodramatic one, a sort of espionage-tinged counterpoint to the inanity of the goings-on. It sets the mood for a kind of shell game where the Coens put one in the uncomfortable position of trying to figure out if we're watching a comedy, who the hero is (there isn't one), and what is so important about the disc in question that leads to all this mayhem.

Credit the Coens for their deceptive use of the disc as the ultimate MacGuffin. The directors use the mayhem incited by Cox's disc to explore the current sad state of the human condition. The Coens have reached a nadir in their estimation of humanity. Not one person in this movie is exempt from being self-absorbed, ridiculously unintelligent, or exceedingly greedy. Fargo, at least, had the surprisingly crafty Chief Marge Gunderson (also McDormand) one could root for. Even the darker No Country For Old Men, had Sherriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a decent man one could relate to. But the only characters that one may be able to sympathize with in Burn are the CIA Greek chorus played by David Rasche and J.K. Simmons, and even they show signs of limited intellect.

Don't take this the wrong way. I'm now convinced this may be one of the Coens' most successful and subversive movies. It is the absolute perfect way to explore themes that reside in our current collective consciousness. In a world where the righteousness of our wars are questionable, our constitutionally protected right to privacy has been squashed, and our financial markets are on the verge of collapse, what is a more apt allegory than this laughable story. Just like all the characters in this film, our political leaders are pointing fingers, watching their backs, and attempting to cover their asses from culpability. Pitt's performance may seem like it belongs in another movie's. But doesn't our president's conduct also seem that way, too?

Years from now, when we get to the end of our current state of affairs, and take a look back to sort it all out, we'll be the Greek chorus wondering how it happened, and what it all ultimately meant in the greater picture. And just like the two CIA officers, we'll probably share the same exchange:

CIA Superior: What did we learn?
CIA Officer: Uh...
CIA Superior: Not to do it again.
(pause)
CIA Superior: I don't know what the fuck it is we DID, but...

Movie Trailer: Burn After Reading

by Tony Dayoub



Here's the trailer for the Coen Brothers' upcoming film, Burn After Reading, scheduled to open on September 12th.


This one should be less in the vein of their Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, and more like Raising Arizona. It's about two gym employees who try to blackmail an ex-CIA official after finding his diary.

The stellar cast includes George Clooney (Leatherheads), Brad Pitt (Babel), Frances McDormand (North Country), John Malkovich (Eragon), Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), and Richard Jenkins (Six Feet Under).

Click on the picture above for a look at the trailer, and let me know what you think.

Movie Trailer: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

by Tony Dayoub



This is probably the best trailer I've seen for a movie since the one for Forrest Gump. Don't take that to mean anything. I ended up passionately hating that film. But I do know many out there that consider it their favorite movie.

I have high hopes for this one. It reunites Brad Pitt with his greatest director, David Fincher, who directed him in Se7en and Fight Club. Based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, click on the picture above for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.