Notes from the Underground

Hello again. Excuse me as I begin to wipe the cobwebs off this little corner of the Internet. Today, I have at long last renewed my domain for Panned Review. When the domain lapsed in July, I was unable to renew it because Google’s process is deep and mysterious, like a Christopher Nolan movie. And like Nolan, I would try to explain it to you better, only I don’t fully understand it myself. At any rate, it was not a simple one-click solution. In the midst of this, my feelings about writing movie reviews were all a-flutter, partly due to personal reasons, partly because trying to write movie reviews for fun can be a challenge when you teach English full time, and there are papers to grade and books to read. On the other hand, I’ve gotten to contribute a few pieces to another blog, Filmview, run by my friend Konstantinos Pappis. So the question loomed: Should I continue this long-running blog or not? For now, the answer is yes. I’m also happy to say that a new project is in the works: a podcast. More information about that when it’s available. For now, I’m enclosing some mini-reviews of movies I’ve seen this year but never wrote about.

Atomic Blonde – Those who say a female James Bond is out of the question are quickly proved wrong by this fast-moving, neon-enameled comic book of a movie, in some ways a companion to John Wick. In both films, the action scenes are extremely well-choreographed and the tension is almost always punctuated by some little bit of humor. Atomic Blonde is ultimately a unique and fascinating movie all on its own, even if the premise (an American spy facing off with Russians in Germany during the end of the Cold War) has already been trod endlessly. Charlize Theron delivers a convincing performance as Lorraine, a mysterious woman whose allegiance is never clear to us. Theron’s performance is icy and sharp, yet vulnerable, a combination that few Bond actors have ever been able to master, and James McAvoy makes for a worthy love interest/villain. But what strikes me most about Atomic Blonde is that it’s one of the most visually interesting movies I’ve seen in a long time. I found myself tuning out the dialogue (some of which was too functional and technical at times) because I was so fascinated by the images. And of course, it’s awash in 80s references, from the music to the costumes, and resembles, in its most exciting moments, a music video right out of the the early days of MTV. Directed by David Leitch. Also starring John Goodman.

Kong: Skull Island – Kong: Skull Island feels like it was made by people who obsessively watched Apocalypse Now, mining it for inspiration, but their commitment to showing the audience a good time is such a welcome thing that the film's ostentatious references to Vietnam movies hardly bothered me. Especially when so few movies like this (take note, Jurassic World) feel interesting or have any personality. Skull Island takes place in the 70s, so its strikingly ethnically diverse cast feels almost anachronistic. This motley group of scientists, soldiers, and other hangers-on embarks on a doomed expedition to the ends of the earth: Skull Island. The island is essentially concealed inside a dangerous hurricane-force atmosphere. And it's home to an ancient indigenous tribe and a variety of ghastly prehistoric monsters, not to mention the great King Kong. Kong once again feels like a lovable beast, one we truly care about, and while the film’s overstuffed Vietnam commentary may be somewhat forced and obvious, it sure does make for a colorful entertainment. Samuel L. Jackson plays a bomb-crazy colonel with the usual ideas about colonialism; Brie Larson is a war photographer, Tom Hiddleston a rogue adventurer, and John Goodman a government wonk. With John C. Reilly, who's genuinely touching as a WW2 soldier who's been stranded on Skull Island for 30 years, a godlike prize for the natives. It's a hodgepodge that works. Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts.

Mother! – Darren Aronofksy is not a director after my own heart. I disliked Black Swan immensely, and I found Mother! pretty insufferable too. Jennifer Lawrence plays the young wife of a struggling poet, (Javier Bardem). This once happy couple lives in a beautiful country estate, the home Bardem’s character grew up in, apparently. They’re expecting a baby, and Lawrence’s character is wrapped up in redecorating the whole house, which is a bit of a fixer-upper. That’s when their domestic tranquility is shattered by the appearance of a strange couple, played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer. The movie descends into a kind of domestic nightmare as increasingly bizarre things happen and the wife feels alienated from her husband, whose commitment to hospitality borders on the pathological. It’s a surreal experience, one that may titillate some viewers with all its literary references (to the Bible, Dante’s Inferno, among others, and its more general pap about the artist’s struggle). But Jennifer Lawrence spends the entire film reacting in horror to the admittedly horrible things happening to her; I much prefer Lawrence when she’s strong or funny (like her deliciously arch performance in the otherwise middling American Hustle). Mother! is also a maddeningly ugly film, visually speaking, a far cry from the rapturous beauty of the film below.

Suspiria (1977) – I’ve already reviewed Suspiria, but I must take a moment to rave about the experience of seeing it this October on the big screen, at Jacksonville’s own Sun-Ray Cinema. Before the movie began, we were treated to a brief intro by star Jessica Harper herself, which she recorded as a little gift to the fans. I’ve never considered myself a devotee of Suspiria, because the film’s plot is so haphazard. But seeing its garish colors on that massive screen turned me into a believer. The point of Suspiria is that it’s a chaotic, nightmarish experience, a frenetic symphony of artistic terror. Dario Argento doesn’t have the time, the patience, or the desire to nail every detail of the plot together, and why should he when he’s capturing a film this beautiful and terrifying? The horrifying double murder, minutes after the opening credits, is one of the prime examples: We never know where the threat is coming from, or what the threat is capable of. And the unreal, dazzlingly ornate set designs, which are more like the acid trips of an art major than actual movie sets, reinforce the feeling of otherworldliness. Suspiria has energy and vitality and spookiness to spare, and I’m so happy I got to see it with an audience.

Wind River – A surprisingly effective mystery-thriller, set in a desolate, snow-encased town in the Wyoming wilderness. Elizabeth Olsen plays a hotshot FBI agent who teams up with a somber, intuitive tracker (Jeremy Renner) to investigate a very cold case – the rape and gruesome murder of a young Native American woman, whose body was found deep in the mountains. Wind River becomes less about whodunit and more about the ways a place can be so hard and harsh that its conditions wear on your very soul. And yet, Wind River never feels like an inhuman film. The characters that populate it are interesting and all too human, only they’ve been living in isolation too long. The film takes a surprising turn at the end, revealing to us everything that happened, via flashback. It feels jarring at first, but director Taylor Sheridan’s focus is on the people, not the scintillating, pulpy surface story. That’s what makes Wind River such a satisfying movie. The standoff scene, between Olsen, several other agents, and a handful of methy bad guys, is tense and well-constructed. And Jeremy Renner, as always, lends a certain anchor-like presence. I can never not enjoy him in a movie.

"I Am Not Your Negro"

I Am Not Your Negro is a shattering experience: it confronts us with the pathology of racism that haunts this country and our very souls. The blood-soaked soil cries out for centuries of injustice, and we have too often closed our eyes and our ears, turned away, shouted with the blissful ignorance of privilege that “nothing is wrong” and “things are better now.” How do I know we have done this? Because I know my own words and my own thoughts. I know that my first instincts when I have seen black strangers in the streets is one of suspicion or fear; I know this in the assumptions I have made all my life about people based on their dark skin, their clothes, their speech, their music, their culture, their anger, their stories, inventions, I believed; exaggerations. Paranoia.

How do I Know?

The film draws from the writings of James Baldwin, one of the most powerful, incisive, poetic voices of the 20th century. Baldwin was acquainted with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. But Baldwin had escaped to Paris for a while, and returned in the 1950s, when he was convicted that to remain in Europe while his brothers and sisters were fighting for basic human rights was the mark of a coward, a refusal to pay his dues. So Baldwin returned, and we see numerous clips of lectures and interviews in which James Baldwin speaks with breathtaking clarity and honesty about the “racial problem.”

Too often, white people have relegated the discussion of race to black people, as though it were in their domain, because they’re the ones crying “racism.” Baldwin reminds those of us who have the luxury of being able to forget, that we must search our hearts and look honestly at what we find.

Directed by Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro, which is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, combines the words of Baldwin (a mind which becomes increasingly comforting in its truth-telling) with images of civil rights leaders marching, of “black bodies swaying from the trees” (to quote the Abel Meeropol poem “Strange Fruit”), with clips from various movies in which black people are played as sexless, powerless cartoons, or banal symbols, or sometimes, human beings with flesh and beating hearts; with images of Ferguson and other recent atrocities.

But in some strange way, the most powerful and disturbing images are the images of white culture in all its gaudy cheerfulness. When Baldwin holds the mirror up, it’s as though he's exposing us to the fact that we’re all like Stepford Wives, blissfully anesthetized to the horror that we’ve become, completely unaware that our lives of relative comfort and boredom and ease, even our very discontent from having such untroubled paths to walk, all of it has been built on the backs of our black brothers and sisters, all of it has been built on a lie that we believe in equality, but do nothing to fight injustice; This is a lie we told ourselves first, and then spent centuries beating into them, perhaps until we could forget that we had, as Baldwin points out with such earth-shattering power, made ourselves into monsters. “For I have the advantage,” Baldwin insists, “For I have seen your face. And I know you better than you know yourself.”

Tarantino's Latest Film is Sick, Demented, Fun. (If you're up for it.)

The very mention of Quentin Tarantino’s name is loaded with associations and expectations. For some, Tarantino is a cinematic god. For others, he’s an irritant. Like J.J. Abrams, Tarantino is a nostalgia pirate, making movies that riff on specific films and genres he loves. But Tarantino is a better filmmaker, and even a “lesser” entry like The Hateful Eight is something to behold. There’s so much pressure to be a masterpiece, that it’s hardly fair to hold The Hateful Eight up to such an impossible standard. If you like the style of Quentin Tarantino, you’re likely to enjoy his latest joint; if you find his work maddening, steer clear.

The Hateful Eight may be the sickest Quentin Tarantino movie yet. Or, maybe I’ve just forgotten how sick all the previous films were. Eight is sort of a combination Western and Agatha Christie yarn, set on a blizzardy night in the Wyoming wilderness in a rickety old haberdashery, where a group of strangers is snowed in. Among them is John Ruth (Kurt Russell), a bounty hunter nicknamed “The Hangman,” who’s escorting a salty murderess named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the small town of Red Rock, where she’ll be hanged for her crimes. Russell is a pop culture legend, having created some of the best tough guys in action movies of the last thirty-ish years. As John Ruth, with his face hidden behind an unkempt wilderness of hair, he’s gruff and withered, but still tough as nails and still utterly likable, even when he elbows poor Daisy in the face (on multiple occasions).

Leigh’s performance as Daisy is probably the best in the film and the least show-offy. She’s like an older, weather-worn version of Ally Sheedy’s character in The Breakfast Club: she’s a quiet flake who can take just about anything that’s given her, and she’s constantly winking when her aggressors aren’t looking.

Daisy and John Ruth are on a private stagecoach when they’re stopped by Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Mark Warren, another bounty hunter. Warren fought for the Yankees in the Civil War, and he’s a controversial figure, having deliberately killed white soldiers on both sides of the fight. Unlike John Ruth, who always sees his captive criminals are given proper hanging justice, Warren has no scruples about collecting his bounty with a corpse. When we meet Warren, he’s sitting atop a pile of frozen dead swindlers, waiting for a ride into town.

Samuel L. Jackson exhibits such exuberant brio in his performances that he may be impossible to dislike. His acting in The Hateful Eight isn’t particularly different from his acting in Chi-Raq, or any number of other movies (including my personal favorite Tarantino film, Jackie Brown). But like many of the great stars, it’s Jackson’s personality that we love. The way he talks directly to us (even when he isn’t), the way his grandstanding and speechifying commands our attention and tickles us, is some kind of pure Hollywood pleasure. Jackson here does not disappoint, and even when he’s on the brink of physical agony, he's delightful.

Hateful Eight may be Tarantino’s nastiest effort. As the title suggests, nobody in this film is lovable. (It looks as grim as Robert Altman's wintry Western McCabe and Mrs. Miller, only the nastiness is canned, far less authentic.) Many of the characters have charming attributes, but those attributes are really the personalities of the actors coming through: Jackson’s smart-ass-cinematic-emcee quality, Russell’s charming-tough-guy, the way Jennifer Jason Leigh uses her eyes as obscene gestures directed at anyone and everyone. Tarantino newcomer Walton Goggins may have the most genuinely good character to play: his name is Chris Mannix, and he’s allegedy the new sheriff of Red Rock, stranded in the snow and awaiting rescue when John Ruth’s lucky stagecoach happens by and whisks him away. Mannix brims with foolhardy machismo, and it’s utterly charming: First you can’t help but feel sorry for him because you know he doesn’t know whom he’s dealing with; later you feel sorry for him because you actually like him; and by the end you may feel something like affection for him.

Tarantino doesn’t skimp on the gab in Hateful Eight, either. At times, the talking lulled me into almost-stupefaction. But the movie is just interesting enough in those moments to work. And it builds to a satisfying—if deeply troubling and disturbing and gory—finish that will not disappoint fans. Hateful Eight may be the least urgent of Tarantino’s later films, but it’s a terrific entertainment, and it’s beautifully shot (by Robert Richardson) and scored (by Ennio Morricone). And that cast is hard to beat.

With Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, James Parks, Demian Bichir, Bruce Dern, and Channing Tatum. Written by Tarantino.

Chi-raq

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Spike Lee’s latest joint, Chi-Raq, the most exuberant, audacious, urgent film I’ve seen all year. Lee’s films haven’t always charmed me, despite his consistently strong work as a stylist and a social commentator. Perhaps part of the problem is that I’ve never seen them in the moment, until now. Chi-Raq is a modern-day riff on the Greek play Lysistrata, by Aristophanes. With rhyme and verse and music, Lee dramatizes the very real pain and violence rampant in the streets of Chicago, glibly renamed Chi-Raq by residents who live in their own version of terrorism right here on American soil. Spike Lee goes all in with Chi-Raq.

This film is a great big stick of dynamite, destined to offend as many people as possible; it’s both a comedy and a tragedy, a musical, a manifesto, a battle cry, and a lament. The “star” of the film (there are many characters that might share this title) is Lysistrata, played by the radiant Teyonah Parris, girlfriend of an up-and-coming hip hop artist who calls himself Chi-Raq, but without the irony. He embraces the violence, and is one of the gang leaders who live and die by the gun. Lysistrata refuses to see past the façade of fame and glory and music, until several violent attacks hit too close to home. Then she meets Miss Helen, a neighbor who spends most of her time reading. She’s a self-contained social activist just waiting for circumstances to unleash her and call her to action. Miss Helen convinces Lysistrata to do something about the violence, and Lysistrata unites the women in her community, convincing them to go on a sex strike. “No peace, no piece” is their motto, and their decision erupts across the globe as women from every tongue join in the fight against violence by denying sex to their men.

Along the way, we get Samuel L. Jackson, spruced up in colorful suits and a hat, as our emcee, narrating the film with his usual wink-and-a-smile charm and his brash, commanding presence. And we get John Cusack in an unlikely but powerful performance as a white minister of a black church, serving the community he grew up in. Cusack delivers an intense monologue-sermon-eulogy during a funeral for a 7-year-old girl. (She was killed in the midst of a recent episode of gunplay between gangs.) Cusack’s sermon is at times a grand-standing lecture on the statistics of gang violence and racial injustice, at times a riling call to action. Lee is deliberately ambiguous here: The emotionally-driven service is by turns a show-stopper and a place to mourn out in the open, in a community. 

Chi-Raq is in many ways a throwback to some of the more influential work of Luis Bunuel and Jean-Luc Godard. In Weekend (an insufferable movie), Godard often pointed the camera at people so they could rant about the evils of capitalism and other assorted topics. Lee uses his camera similarly. Chi-Raq is a really good rant of a movie, but it's more than that. In Chi-Raq, these moments of sermonizing are just part of this movie’s garish, delightful, indignant brio. Lee celebrates the various possibilities of movies, never holding his movie hostage to the constraints of realism or plotting. Some may call it uneven—and there are moments when the film doesn’t totally hang together—but Chi-Raq is ultimately a masterful piece of filmmaking. It evokes extreme emotions, and the performances are big and powerful and in your face.

Angela Bassett's performance emerges as possibly the best in a slew of standout performances. Bassett has such power in her voice, and she commands the screen in every scene she's in. And Teyonah Parris is like a gift from the gods. She's a stunning beauty, she's witty, and like Angela Bassett, she can part the seas with a word or a look. 

Of course, Chi-Raq isn’t for everybody, but it should be. The film's brash discussion of sexual politics and its complicated dissection of racism in America is inflammatory, but that's kind of the point. Moreover, Spike Lee doesn't enshrine his movie in moral rectitude. He's not here to play by the rules or tow any lines, which is why Chi-Raq is a gaudy, messy, blistering movie. And it's alive. So, so alive. Those who criticize Spike Lee for turning the movie into a farce in the second half are missing the point (and missing a bold and wonderful move of a talented director). The mark of a great movie is that it can hold an array of emotional experiences without losing its footing, without compromising its characters or its values. And moreover, that it takes chances where conventional movies play it safe. Chi-Raq blissfully flies too close to the sun, and what a beautiful flight it is.

Do the Right Thing

In Do the Right Thing (1989), writer-director-star Spike Lee uncorks enough rage for five movies. It's about racial tensions in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn boiling over on a hot summer day. The local deejay (Samuel L. Jackson) proclaims that it's the hottest day of the year, and the relentless, sticky heat seems to bring out the inner-rage of every member of the neighborhood, except for a status-quo-loving Uncle Tom type (Ossie Davis) who fancies himself the moral compass of the local black community, but whom the rest of the community laughs at, when they aren't ignoring him completely.

Spike Lee plays Mookie, a pizza delivery boy whose boss Sal (Danny Aiello) is stubbornly proud of his Italian heritage. Giancarlo Esposito plays Buggin' Out, a ranting patron of the pizzeria who harps on the fact that Sal only decorates his restaurant with pictures of famous Italians. He argues that since Sal's clientele is predominantly black, Sal should put a few prominent black people on the walls too. There's also a guy named Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), who wanders around the neighborhood with a boom box on his shoulder that plays Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" on a loop. Radio Raheem seems to be incapable of expressing his rage except in disturbing the peace with his loud music. Mookie, meanwhile, is always dawdling during his delivery runs, sometimes visiting his girlfriend for a little T&A. If these sound like stereotypes, well, that's because they are.

I found much of the movie grating: Lee seems to have one way of expressing anger, which is by having his characters shout at each other, often incoherently. And while there is one scene in which this technique is effective (where the men are shouting amidst Raheem's boom box, which he turns up louder and louder, escalating the tension), much of it feels too repetitive, too chaotic, and too unappealing. Perhaps it's a realistic depiction of life in the city. (I doubt it.) But realism isn't the only thing that matters in narrative, and the scenes of people screaming their heads off distance us from the characters and the film.

And yet Do the Right Thing is undeniably powerful. If ever a movie tapped into the pure emotion of racism, this is it. The film is all jagged angles, loud noises, jarring music, and intense people invading your space, forcing you to notice them. It has a kind of red-hot brashness to it, and this Spike Lee cultivates with masterful precision and intensity. He may not offer much in the way of solutions (even the ending, with conflicting quotes by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, fails to suggest a way around mindless in-fighting between races), but in terms of showing us just how ridiculous these conflicts can be, he succeeds. It's a shame that he had to do so by relying on so many stereotypes. Nobody in Do the Right Thing feels like a well-realized character. They're cartoonishly violent and excitable and stabby. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of the stereotypical loud black lady in the theater: it doesn't show us why thinking in stereotypes is flat-out wrong. It doesn't give us much of a reason to move beyond the limitations of such one-dimensional characters. (There is a kind of sweet exchange between Lee and Aiello at the end that feels a little more complex, but Lee doesn't do much with it. He uses it to sweeten what may already be too sour to begin with.)

Django Unchained

There's something unsettling about Quentin Tarantino's project of providing wish fulfillment revenge fantasies, first to the Jewish people in Inglourious Basterds, then to the American slaves, in Django Unchained. Watching one of Tarantino's films almost always gives me the impression that this director is full of himself, because his movies are so audacious. But it's hard to be too concerned with these thoughts, because Tarantino's movies are generally so much fun to watch. (Jackie Brown remains my favorite.)

The plot of Django Unchained is this: a German bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz, played by Christopher Waltz (who was so deliciously evil in Inglourious Basterds that you can't help but wonder if he's going to turn bad in this one too) enlists the help of a slave named Django (silent 'D'), played by Jamie Foxx, to find three white men who are wanted for murder. Dr. Schultz works for the government, and is legally permitted to kill any of his targets as long as he produces their bodies. Django worked on a plantation under these men, who once beat his wife ferociously after she and Django tried to escape. Eventually Dr. Schultz and Django form a partnership, after Schultz gives Django his freedom, and they decide to rescue Django's wife, now working a plantation in Mississippi.

This plantation in Mississippi is run by Calvin Candie, and it's called Candieland. The name itself suggests the genteel, gruesome horrors of slavery. When we finally get to Candieland, where we know the film will play itself out in full faux-Shakespearean fashion (Tarantino is maybe the comic book Shakespeare of our time), it's the most terrifying visual in the movie: the cotton jutting out of the fields like white dollops of foam; the slaves working in the punishing Mississippi sun; and Leonardo DiCaprio, never more villainous and enjoyable in his entire career, as Calvin, the Southern gentleman with a murderous temper, who gets his kicks watching black men fight each other to the death.

Django Unchained is the most suggestively violent of the Tarantino movies. The director holds back here more than usual, presumably to demonstrate a little good taste. He's already walking on egg shells by making a movie that tries to retroactively punish white racism, and if you can allow yourself to enjoy its maniacal plot, you're likely to have a good time. The camera, more often than not, looks away from the violent acts, or at least, the most violent parts of them. The suggestion is powerful enough. There's the expected bloodbath, near the end. That's the cookie, the reward for the initiated, who perhaps sit through Tarantino's talky, long-winded plots just for those ten minutes of gory violence. But as much as I was filled with anticipation and suspense for that scene to come, the rest of the movie is what's more enjoyable (although the long-windedness takes a toll: they could have shortened it a bit, I think.)

The performances in Django Unchained are the film's strongest assets: Jamie Foxx turns into some kind of 1850's blaxplitation superhero. His performance is smooth and assured, and his indignation both righteous and horrific. Waltz is a charming participant, perhaps incredulously caught up in the story, but like any good bad movie, necessarily out of place. He's a wonderfully engaging actor, and all the scenes where he talks his way out of being shot by various farmowners and sheriffs and villains, are deliriously funny and amusing. DiCaprio is wickedly good, playing a part that's truly distinguishable from so many of the banal-important roles he's played before. He's colorful, capturing that weird mixture of Southern gentleman-Gothic torturer.

The South, like every other place figured into a Quentin Tarantino film, becomes the director's playground, where he employs any and every ingredient that interests him. Thus we get a movie set in pre-Civil War America full of 20th century Westerny songs as background music (and a few rap songs, too). The anachronism works well for this kind of pop-history-carnival ride. It's not a perfect film, and it's not the director's best film, but it's a fun movie, and I'm always grateful when movies aren't afraid of showing us a good time.

With Kerry Washington (as Broomhilda--Tarantino must have been waiting 20 years to use that name), Samuel L. Jackson (perhaps the most hated character in the movie, as the self-loathing head-slave, and Mr. Candie's right-hand-yes-man), Walton Goggins, Don Johnson, Laura Cayouette, Dennis Christopher, James Russo, James Remar, Tom Wopat, Cooper Huckabee, M.C. Gainey, Bruce Dern, Ned Bellamy, Jonah Hill (who has a cameo in one of the funniest scenes: a pre-KKK nighttime attack that isn't very well-thought-out by the participants), Tom Savini, Robert Carradine, Michael Parks, and Quentin Tarantino. Written by the director. 165 min. ★★★½

Out of Sight

Out of Sight (1998) is a crime comedy that's intermittently clever and dumb. It's got George Clooney, though, as a bank robber who's tired of prison and ready to retire, if he can make a final score that's large enough to sustain him. Director Steven Soderbergh demonstrates his ability to make fun movies here: it's sort of a breezier, less show-offy version of a Tarantino movie, with an interest in developing a relatively straightforward --but layered-- story, rather than twisting it like a pretzel. I'm not so much criticizing Tarantino's movies as noting the difference between this film and say, Jackie Brown (both movies, incidentally, come from novels by Elmore Leonard). Out of Sight is content to be entertaining without being overly clever. Soderbergh is a more conventional director than Tarantino, you might say. He knows how to transcend conventional movies and turn them into something fun and unique, and that's largely what he does with Out of Sight. It has so many funny, quirky moments that are fresh and interesting, and yet it never feels like something so disdainfully self-aware as a Tarantino film.

There are moments when you wonder if the screenwriter, Scott Frank, wasn't paying attention to his material closely enough. He lets characters do things that seem illogical, even stupid, for the sake of advancing the plot in a certain direction. The movie is almost gleefully disinterested in being realistic. You admire its casualness. Clooney has that sort of casual charm to him, and he's perfect for this movie. Jennifer Lopez, as the marshal who falls in love with him, isn't a great actress, but she does have a sense of comic timing, and she's a great beauty too. Her character downplays her obsession with "bad guys," even though she must know she's lying to herself the way the movie is lying to itself, playfully. This heist-farce was made purely for entertainment. But it has enough smarts not to be totally mindless, too.

The supporting cast is a dream: Ving Rhames as Clooney's partner in crime, a tough, weathered criminal who nevertheless confesses his crimes--sometimes prior to committing them--to his ultra-religious sister, a bookkeeper for a televangelist; Don Cheadle as a fellow criminal, who agrees to join forces with Clooney and Rhames to break into the safe of a Detroit millionaire, played by Albert Brooks, who did time with them in Florida (presumably for embezzlement); Dennis Farina as Lopez's father, also in the business; Catherine Keener as one of Clooney's friends in the outside world: a former magician's assistant. She figures in a very amusing scene in which an escaped criminal, played by Luis Guzman, comes to her door to kill her, unaware that Lopez is already there questioning her about Clooney's whereabouts. Keener is another actress with a remarkable comic sensibility: she's subtle, too, never forcing herself on the camera or the audience. She lets her character's intelligence sink in gradually; Steve Zahn plays a moronic stoner who comes to Clooney's assistance (sort of), half-heartedly, and gives away more than he realizes whenever he encounters Lopez, who knows how to work him; Viola Davis as Cheadle's girlfriend; Michael Keaton as Lopez's married lover, an FBI agent who has a great scene with Farina in which he sneakily calls him out on his behavior; Nancy Allen, as Brooks' girlfriend; and, in a cameo appearance at the end, Samuel L. Jackson, as another convict.

Jackie Brown

Pam Grier's belated tour de force. The tall, ravishingly beautiful Grier was the Queen of Blaxploitation in the 70s, appearing in such films as Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1975), the latter of which I recently reviewed. Grier's acting has only gotten better over the years. She seemed wasted in Foxy Brown. Her acting wasn't forceful enough to grab the movie and take charge, but by 1997, and perhaps with the help of a director who respected her as an actress (Quentin Tarantino), she was ready to make her career performance.

As the title character in Jackie Brown, Grier is confident, strong, vulnerable, and always in control. Her character, Jackie, is an airline stewardess who works on the side for an illegal arms dealer named Ordell Robbie (played with relish by Samuel L. Jackson). Once she's pressed by the police to rat on Ordell, he decides it's time to silence her for good. But Jackie manages to take control of the police and Ordell with a "sting" operation she masterminds, somehow convincing both sides that she's working for them.

Jackie Brown is usually not the first movie people mention when citing their favorite Quentin Tarantino film. It's not as flashy as Pulp Fiction or as offbeat as Kill Bill. But in its controlled, sustained mission to tell a good story, Jackie Brown is a success. The characters who populate this movie's world are delightfully good at being bad. Jackie may be the least guilty, but her calculated mastery of circumstances seemingly designed to squash her, indicates a strong will and a genius for working situations to her advantage--it's something she's bottled up inside all her life, waiting to be let loose. The director sets all this into motion--these unstable characters and their greedy motivations--and we get to watch it unravel.

The reason people enjoy Tarantino's movies is that he enjoys ripping off the gritty, low-budget crime and action flicks that he grew up on. But because Tarantino seemingly started off as a filmmaking rock star, he's been able to get big money productions made (or at least, modestly big productions compared to the slapped-together-with-spit B-movies of the 1970s), with popular actors. Hollywood likes to think of him as their part of the effort to acknowledge low culture. But Tarantino improves on much of the material he seems to have canonized in his own mind. If you go back and watch Foxy Brown, you'll see a movie that's not very exciting for all its action: the fight scenes are staged ineptly, the acting is unimaginative (even Grier seemed like she couldn't find her footing), and it all boils down to a strangely unappealing revenge fantasy. Jackie Brown isn't really out to get even. She's just sick of being kicked around by a system that has nothing for her but condescension. (One of the cops implies that she ought to be grateful for her measly 16,000 dollar-a-year job).

Somehow, Tarantino takes the material he fell in love with and transcends it. His movies are a glossy imitation of something cheap and poorly done and generally available only in bootlegged form. There were movies like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. and the blaxploitation movies like Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones and Shaft, and car-chase movies like the energetic Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (which we see on a television in Jackie). All of this has been internalized by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, and the tropes of those genres have resurfaced in his movies and the movies of directors like him (such as Robert Rodriguez), and audiences are either re-experiencing something to which they attach a great deal of nostalgic value, or are simply getting a kick out of these "low" movies. (Jackie Brown cost 12 million dollars but made 72 million at the box office).

Jackie Brown emerges as Quentin Tarantino's best movie, I think, because of Pam Grier and what she brings to the film. Her performance is controlled but not robotic, and she knows how to be funny, and how to lubricate her sentences with profanity (and Tarantino the writer knows how to write juicy dialogue). Grier and Jackson make for a wonderful anti-duo. Jackson slips into his role with such ease. He's dangerous but appealing at the same time.

The supporting cast of Jackie Brown includes Robert De Niro, as a junkie who becomes Ordell's right-hand-man; Michael Keaton and Michael Bowen as two cops who are trying to nail Ordell; Robert Forster as a bail bondsman who becomes Jackie's partner and possible love interest, and Bridget Fonda, as Ordell's blonde live-in junky girlfriend, who revels in challenging his self-proclaimed authority.