Foxy - My Life In Three Acts

Only Here For The Grier

Foxy - My Life In Three Acts
by Pam Grier and Andrea Cagan
Springboard ISBN: 978-0446548502

I first became aware of Pam Grier when I saw her in the films Foxy Brown and, my personal favourite of hers, Coffy. I later became aware of her in all kinds of films like Mars Attacks, Ghosts Of Mars and Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, loving the ‘strong woman’ type of character she portrayed in the majority of the films I’d seen her in. About a year ago I became aware that she’d written (with the help of Andrea Cagan) an autobiography, Foxy - My Life In Three Acts... so I managed to get a hold of a really good condition, ex-library copy of the now out of print hardback edition of her book.

Now as I’ve said before, some autobiographies are great and fascinating accounts of the writer’s life and, others... well, they aren’t all that. This one, as it happens, is absolutely all that and goes the extra mile too. It seems bizarre that one can find entertainment value in a series of anecdotes about a person’s life experiences, especially since Miss Grier has had her share of tough times over the years but, there you have it. This one blew me away and I couldn’t put the thing down. It’s fast paced, inordinately interesting and has a lot of unexpected surprises tucked within its pages.

I don’t know how easy it must have been for the writer to talk about the two rapes she suffered... once when she was six years old by a bunch of boys and another at the age of 18 in what I can only describe as... a bad date gone wrong... but it shows right from the outset that she’s not one to hide things away and mince words, that’s for sure.

The book is chaptered and then split into three sections (or acts, I guess) entitled The Early Years 1949-1970, ‘Fros and Freaks 1979-1989 and Finding The Balance 1990-present (where ‘the present’ is roughly ten years ago). And it’s filled with fascinating stuff and also demonstrates a good sense of humour when she refers to a car turning over on the motorway with her in it at the age of three as... her first stunt. Everybody in the car was just fine and without a scratch... apart from a goldfish being carried which was presumably thrown from its bowl.

I was surprised to hear that, between the ages roughly of about 6 and 8, because she was the daughter of an airbase father and so would be constantly moved around with the family, she came to live over here in the UK at Swindon for a couple of years. This would have been the early to mid-1950s when London and other places in England were still trying to recover from all the bomb damage of World War II. But she absolutely loved it over here by the sound of it. Where, in America, the whole family was segregated and treated like second class citizens because of the colour of their skin, here they were accepted and Pam’s education in those years is something she really seems to look on as some of the most valuable experiences of her life. Which is nice. I also smiled to myself when I learned her first movie at a cinema was Godzilla (the 1954 one so, my guess is she saw it about 1955 or ‘56 in its US version).

She doesn’t, like a lot of film-makers writing about their lives, give much specific detail about the actual making of her movies and, to be honest, most of them are not even mentioned... but she does have some nice anecdotes from some of them. So her early films with Corman and AIP where she was shipped out to the Philippines are something which, unlike certain other actors and actresses of the time, she viewed as valuable lessons because you couldn’t get that kind of education and experience out of a book. And talking about an education... she kind of fell into acting almost accidentally, it seemed. Her only interest in the opportunities that were thrown her way when she joined up with those AIP, low budget exploitation pictures was about saving the money for her college fund. She wanted to get more educated although, I have to say from her attitude and eloquence talking about how she learned to dissect things like classical music and jazz when she was around 7 years old, I’m not sure she was desperately in need of much extra educating.

The book also shatters some silly myths by revealing, for example, her strong friendship with Tamara Dobson (of the Cleopatra Jones movies), when the media were trying to turn them into rivals (as pretty much the two leading ladies of blaxploitation, is my guess). But even when she was shooting movies, in between jobs you’d find her working in a drug store or some such to just keep the money coming in for her college fund. Somewhere around the middle of the book, though, as she gets more and more successful and famous, the talk about the college fund stops although, as the book goes on, you realise she does appreciate the pursuit of a good education and she is always finding new things to learn about and enrich her life with.

The other thing you find out is about her various lovers over the years. In the span of the book, she has about five significant others. I’m not going to mention the last couple but there are some amazing things in the book about her first three, more famous ones.

Her first big love decided to take up the Muslim religion and revealed his new name to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Bruce Lee fans and basketball followers will surely know this tall guy). However, after attempting to study the religion in the interest that she could convert and become his wife... well, Pam didn’t exactly take to it and you can certainly see why (and if not she makes it crystal clear).

Second big love was the even more famous stand up comic Freddie Prinz, who I’d only heard of through his dying fairly young but he’s something of a comedy legend. Again, though, there seems to be a pattern of tragedy in the path of Mr. Grier’s love life at the time and they all, in one way or another, treated her quite badly (and certainly not just the famous ones in that respect, either).

Her third big relationship was Richard Pryor. There’s a gripping ‘three strikes and you’re out’ accounting of the final period of their relationship including Pam being diagnosed with some vaginal problems which turned out to be because Pryor had ingested so much cocaine by that point that his semen was impregnated with it. It’s entertaining but tragic when she recounts how performing oral sex on him would make her lips go numb for the amount of drug residue on him. I’m probably explaining that badly but, you know, read the damn book, it’s fantastic.

It tells a little bit about the lead in to working with directors like Tim Burton and the bizarre chance meeting with Quentin Tarantino which helped land her Jackie Brown (completely unexpectedly) and also the big, long period in her life when she was fighting off cancer (and was once again treated quite badly by a boyfriend because of it). Not to mention a good amount of time talking about a show she did for a while which I’ll now need to check out sometime called The L Word. And there’s always lightness mixed in with the darkness, like the time she was thrown out of a nightclub with John Lennon and a few others after Lennon started throwing punches around. There’s even a photo of the apology card he sent her the next day.

Perhaps my favourite story, though, is how her horse started galloping uncontrollably (she’s a pretty good rider) on the set in the Colosseum for the Corman movie The Arena. One of the many places she and the horse went hurtling destructively through was the set of a new Fellini movie being made at the same time. Fellini was delighted by the chance encounter to meet her (and she him, of course, she’s a pretty cool film appreciating lass too, it turns out) and they ended up spending that lunch period together.

Of course, that’s just my personal highlight gleaned from Pam’s rich and wonderful book. Other readers will have their own but, even though she never reaches all her dreams (romantically, at least), her epilogue leaves the reader with a certain sense that she has found some peace, optimism and enlightenment during the course of her life. Which is a good space to be in, I imagine. Honestly, I’ve got nothing bad to say whatsoever about Foxy - My Life In Three Acts. If you like the actress then you’ll surely want to read this as it’s both one of the breeziest but also one of the more substantial, in terms of the content it covers, of the celebrity autobiographies I’ve read over the course of my life. So glad I picked this one up. Absolutely brilliant and it turns out the paperback is still in print. Seriously worth investing some time in, if you haven’t done so already.

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood

Bruise Lee

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood
UK/USA/China 2019 Directed Quentin Tarantino
UK cinema release print

Warning: Even the presence of a spoiler warning for this movie would constitute a spoiler so you can see the kind of Catch 22 situation I am in with this... so let’s just say that, yes, there is a spoiler here.

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is the... well, since I don’t seem to be as mathematically challenged as the Hollywood marketing machine, let’s just call it the ‘latest’ movie directed by Quentin Tarantino, who also wrote it. It’s a film I had been looking forward to for a while since, although I find the director a bit hit and miss, when he’s on form he does create absolute masterpieces of cinema (such as Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds) and a film doing the ‘Manson murders’ and set in Hollywood in 1969 seems like a match made in heaven.

And, as a film it’s kinda entertaining but it’s also somewhat less than I was expecting from it, although I do reserve the right to change my mind on this one because, like some of the best Marvel movies of recent years, it might be that my brain needs to have longer to process it and it’s quite possible that if I ever do see this one a second time, I might like it a lot better than I did before.

Saying that, I still had a fairly good time with this movie... after all, one of the chief pleasures of watching a movie by Tarantino is spotting all the visual and audio references to other peoples movies and, as you can imagine, this film is filled to the brim with them in a much more overt manner (if such a thing is possible when it comes to Mr. T) than any of his other works.

The film follows fictional movie star Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and his stuntman/driver/best friend Cliff Booth played by Brad Pitt. It also follows real life Sharon Tate played here by Margot Robbie, who was of course the most noted of the victims of the slaughter by the hippy followers of Charlie Manson on that grim August night in 1969.

Now, while I loved both all the references to various movies which the film is littered with and, frankly, loved the film and TV shows created to slot into this era by Tarantino for the Rick Dalton character (I especially loved the authenticity of his Italian secret agent movie although, on reflection, it maybe looked a little more like a ‘polizei’ movie than the specific strand of Italian spy movies it was emulating). However, it has to be said that there was practically no story on this one and its all over the place in terms of the way elements of the characters are revealed...

Now I’ve got no trouble with this usually, especially coming from Tarantino. As he’s demonstrated in a few of his movies, he can do this kind of slowly developing story image put together out of myriad scenes which tell something intrinsic about the characters very well and he usually does it in an effective manner which is a joy to watch. However, this particular hodge podge of scenes involving the various main characters and people such as Bruce Lee or Steve McQueen are... well, they’re all still a joy to watch individually but for some reason they never really forward the story that much. At least that’s how it seemed to me. The reason being, I think, is as I said in the paragraph above, there is no story, as such. And everyone knows the outcome of the Manson murders, right?

Okay... spoiler coming up.

I had a couple of conversations with different friends on the lead up to the release of this film about what I thought was going to happen because people keep telling people not to ‘spoil’ the movie and, frankly, it’s hard to spoil a movie when you know how historic events play out. So, this led me to believe that, just as he completely rewrote the end of World War Two in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino would change the outcome of events as they happened in real life and create a ‘new ending’ for Sharon Tate and Manson’s followers. Indeed, asides from the obvious tribute to Sergio Leone in the title, it would also suggest a certain fairy-tale quality to the narrative being presented here and suggests that there will be a certain amount of, shall we say, ‘deviation’ in terms of how things are left. And... yeah. I totally called it, this film left things exactly as I thought they would leave them when I heard about this project so... the film’s two main male protagonists are injected into history and, of course, change it in the way that very few people other than Tarantino would do without some kind of logical alternate to the ending, or lack of, of certain characters... such as in the movies From Hell or The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot (which I reviewed here).

And yes, it’s kind of a double edged sword in terms of the education of young movie goers everywhere when you present fiction as implied facts like this. I work at a college and know a lot of the kids think the war ended when Hitler was machine gunned down in a cinema and... I'm pretty sure that a lot of those same teenagers will be checking the IMDB after this to see what films Sharon Tate has been in recently too. It’s not fair that ignorance of history should block cinematic art like these Tarantino flicks and it’s no reason to censor the art in any way but... a disclaimer at the end might help clarify things to a certain section of the audience maybe. You know... like a statement saying that in real life Sharon Tate, her friends and unborn child were brutally slaughtered by the followers of Charlie Manson... something like that.

Anyway, other than this and despite the kind of directionless, almost spectator sport of 'picking out little details on the screen' kind of nature of the film, there are still some sequences which demonstrate Tarantino’s absolute mastery of the art. Two scenes spring to mind, both featuring Brad Pitt where, frankly, even though I’d worked out exactly how they were going to play out before they finished, were nevertheless almost excruciatingly suspenseful to watch and this is where the director really shows why we go and see his films time and time again. One is where Brad Pitt goes to check out an old friend on a ranch (I won’t say more) and the other is when a bunch of hippies invade a house towards the end of the picture. I’d liken them to the scenes with Alfred Molina in them from Boogie Nights in terms of just how insanely intense they are here and, as always, Tarantino has a way of taking things which we take for granted as fetishised instruments of death and reminding us that they are, truly, very dangerous.

And that’s me about done on this one. The common Tarantino needle-drop approach to the music was less appealing to me this time around (and it really shouldn’t have been since I love that period in music) and, although there is the obvious Manson reference to The Beatles White Album in the dialogue, you don’t actually get to hear any of it in the movie. Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is probably not a film I would recommend to anyone but the most cine-literate of my friends, truth be told but I expect it will grow on me in time and might even be worth a Blu Ray purchase at some point in the next few years. Nothing more to say except... stay on for the end credits.

The Kill Bill Diary

Bill Death Do Us Part

The Kill Bill Diary
by David Carradine
Methuen ISBN: 9780713687781

Well this is a really breezy book and, as a result, this is probably going to be a really short review.

It’s not breezy because it has no substance... although, to be fair, in terms of full on details about the shooting of Kill Bill (Parts One and Two as it came to be), there’s isn’t a great deal of substance to be found in details of the actual production of the film. But that’s not the reason it’s so.... well... as I said, it’s just a pleasurable breeze to read through. No. The reason is because David Carradine is such an accomplished writer and has one of those useful writing styles that feels like you’re just sitting in a bar next to him, listening to the man talk. It’s a joy to read and... oh yeah... not without some interesting observations and stories, for sure.

This journal is split into a prelude, followed by a long Part One and then a shorter Part Two. I’m guessing the structure is meant to mirror the release pattern of the movies to some extent. In the prelude, Mr. Carradine tells us how he met Quentin Tarantino (the writer and director of Kill Bill, should anyone here be in doubt) and how he wandered into a long courting session in terms of chance meetings over the years to gain the role of Bill, the man everyone is talking about in the movie and who remains mostly absent from the first film. Or half of the film, depending on your opinion of the number count listed on the various Tarantino posters over the years.

And that’s the thing, this isn’t just about the shooting of Kill Bill... it’s also about the preparation for Kill Bill such as the rigorous, all day training sessions lasting many months that some of the cast, including Carradine, were put through to get in shape for the picture. It also looks at Carradine’s daily life throughout the whole period from pre-shoot to a gruelling selection of worldwide publicity tours for both films and shows him as someone who is, it has to be said... a bit of a cool cat.

Now I’m not someone who is that familiar with Carradine’s work. I never used to watch his famous TV show Kung Fu when it was on in the early 1970s but I do remember having a Kung Fu magazine with a big, fold out poster of Carradine that hung on my wall during that period. I don’t exactly know why my parents got it for me but... I suppose they used to like the show so, there it was in my room and the man used to watch over me while I slept, I guess.

I was aware of him, though, in a very interesting film I saw on television in the 1980s called The Silent Flute. I remember I really liked it and, decades later, I bought a Region 1 US DVD release of the film by Blue Underground under an alternate title, Circle Of Iron. Carradine remarks on the title changes of that film himself in this diary and, as it turns out, the man was a bit of an artist and all round free spirit. He made that flute in that film, as he has made a fair few over the years. He used to play them with his group until his untimely death a few years after Kill Bill and I was startled to discover, via this book, that the flute he uses in Kill Bill is, indeed, the same flute from The Silent Flute. In fact, as I discovered from reading this, one of the things Tarantino does to get people settled into his movies, especially when they are written for a specific person, is to have his art and costume department go around to the actor’s house and borrow loads of stuff from said actor's rooms and wardrobes in order to get everything reproduced by the various studio people. This is so that the actor will feel comfortable on set, half of which will be replicas of what he already has laying around... and be able to get into the role. I suspect Tarantino doesn’t do that with everyone mind but, it’s certainly what he seemed to be doing with Carradine.

And, like I said, its a very relaxing read and I learned a lot about Carradine. Enough, certainly, to make me want to read the autobiography he wrote many years before this one. I’ll have to get myself a copy of that at some point in the future. He comes across as a man very much at peace with himself and very much in love with his wife Annie, which makes his death a little down the line even more tragic and regrettable. He also had a very honest and straight forward attitude towards life, at least that’s how he came across in this book and not as the ‘crazy person’ he quotes from another famous writer/actor who read his earlier autobiography. Although I suspect that’s also true. Also quite witty at times such as when he describes one of a few times his car dies when he’s on the way to somewhere...

“Then I start to smell burning Bakelite, one of my favourite aromas. Especially in the morning. Smells like... expensive repairs.”

I’m sure most of my readers will have no trouble placing the movie quote Mr. Carradine is paraphrasing here.

As far as insight into Tarantino himself goes... well, he comes off fairly well, if a little demanding of his crew. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with Tarantino myself in that, I really like a lot of his films and think many of them... Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds especially... are great works of art. However, whenever I see him interviewed he always comes across as way too full of himself and arrogant to the nth degree. Having said that, every time I read a first hand account from some actor or director or musician who has spent time with him, it always comes across that they always click straight away and fall in love with the charm of the guy right off the bat, using the common language of movies. So I think the only way I’m ever going to find out what this guy is really like is to hang out with him and have a conversation sometime. So, yeah, that’s probably never going to happen so I shall continue to admire his art from afar and, probably not have much good or bad to say about him other than what I can see from what he puts on the screen. Carradine, of course, absolutely loved him and it's evident on many a page that he believed (and he was possibly correct) that he was working on the best film of his career. And I’d probably have to take Carradine at his word in terms of how Tarantino is because Mr. C comes across so well in his words.

There are also, as you’d expect, encounters with other celebrities of the movie world and he has a lot of good things to say about many of his co-stars on Kill Bill. Uma Thurman and Michael Madsen both come across incredibly well, for instance. And Harry Knowles gets a few mentions (not to mention some reprints of his Kill Bill set reports from Aint It Cool News in this tome) too. There’s an interesting sentence at the end of one of the chapters about Knowles and I can’t tell if Carradine meant it in a joking way or if it was a bit of a put down of the man but, I guess I never will know now. Also, there are a few instances in the text where, obviously since the film was made by Miramax, Harvey Weinstein gets a mention. It’s interesting how a general 'off the cuff' remark made by Carradine describing people present on a night out can now, in retrospect, be seen in something of a different light since the whole ‘me too’ movement got going but it seems pretty clear to me that Carradine was certainly unaware and, possibly, naive to some of the things going on during those years. If he had been aware... no telling what he might have done, I guess.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about The Kill Bill Diary except, oh look, it didn’t turn out to be too short a review after all. I think you’ve probably go the gist of what I’m trying to say here though. As in... David Carradine, with a witty and laid back observational style that cuts through life sharper than a Hanzo sword, wrote a very ‘easy on the eyes and intellect’ journal of his experiences in making Kill Bill with Quentin Tarantino. It’s entertaining, fun and definitely worth some of your time if you are into such things. Definitely pick this one up if are. Read it.

The Hateful Eight (aka The H8ful Eight)

This Film Has Not
Yet Been Hated

The Hateful Eight (aka The H8ful Eight)
2015 USA
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
70mm Ultra Panavision Roadshow Version.

This was my birthday trip this year.

On the occasion of my 48th Birthday I, and a merry band of six of my friends, met at a pub and then went to see the only 70mm Ultra Panavision Roadshow print in the UK of Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, playing at the ODEON in Leicester Square. Apparently, apart from the obvious difference that this version is actually proper film stock rolling through projectors, this Roadshow version has some differences in some sequences which were extended to show off the print in 70mm (I’m guessing this stuff all takes place within the first 30 minutes of the movie), an eight minute intermission and a beautiful overture by Ennio Morricone, part of his original score for the film.

That last being something I thought I’d never hear of when it comes to the scoring of a Tarantino movie, who regularly uses a lot of Morricone’s (and others) old scores to needle drop his films with. Although, having said that, the director does also insert assorted cues from other Morricone scored films here too, such as Reagan’s Theme from Exorcist II - The Heretic and various pieces from his mostly unused but commercially released score to John Carpenter’s The Thing... the former also being a movie which stars Kurt Russel holed up with some people in the middle of a snowy wasteland. I can’t quite place where the Exorcist II track was used in the movie but there is a set of sequences in the second half of the film where Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character looks the dead spit of Linda Blair in certain horrific scenes in the original movie, The Exorcist, which I thought were very blatantly referenced, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was dropped in there at some point. Will have to go back and dig the soundtrack out and re-listen to it... there’s not much good to be said about Exorcist II - The Heretic other than Morricone’s score, though, I reckon.

So anyway, okay, we have a partially new Morricone score which certainly harkens back to his early successes in the Spaghetti Western genre and which sounds incredible but... it doesn’t make this movie a Spaghetti Western and, although the spectacle of the “blood and snow” element of the film combined with Morricone’s score certainly recalls to mind the look and ambience of Sergio Corbucci’s classic movie The Great Silence, I think The Hateful Eight owes a little more to the feel of Altman’s McCabe And Mrs. Miller and perhaps more of a tonal similarity to the Revisionist Western cinema of Sam Pekinpah than anything else. Tarantino himself cites Carpenter’s science fiction/horror remake of The Thing as being why he wanted to write this one and there are certainly big elements of that movie in this in terms of the “locked in to keep the elements out while the paranoia inside runs rife” aspect... indeed, I felt sure towards the end of the movie that he was going to go the whole hog with one of the Jennifer Jason Leigh character’s possible premises of what will happen next and use pretty much the same ending as Carpenter’s ‘let’s wait and see’ style ‘down note’ on this one. He doesn’t but, by that point in the movie, he might as well have done, to be honest.

That being said, the postmodern eclecticism that almost defines the cinema of Tarantino isn’t so overbearing in this one that it becomes anything to detract from the director’s visual and written verbal style and, although in some ways the film almost seems like a remake of his first movie Reservoir Dogs for a lot of the running time, it’s an extremely entertaining run through and his casting is dead on, as usual. Samuel Jackson is perfect channeling, I can only assume quite deliberately, the look and visual mannerisms of Lee Van Cleef’s character Colonel Mortimer from the 1965 western For A Few Dollars More and Tarantino completes the reference by also giving Jackson’s character a military rank. Kurt Russel, in contrast, in terms of his voice and delivery of his lines, seems almost intent on revisiting the vocal talents of John Wayne but it seems to work pretty well and is a standout contrast from some of the other actor’s choices in the movie... as is Tim Roth in an almost dual voice role which, frankly, I’m not going to go into too much for fear of spoilers. But I will say that The Hateful Eight is one of the few films where I’ve really started to appreciate the acting talent of Tim Roth, for sure. I would like to have seen a lot more screen time given over to Bruce Dern in this movie but you can’t have everything, I guess, and he’s always a great actor to have around, anyway.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is absolutely amazing, as I’ve always said about her, but one of the main criticisms levelled at this film, it seems to me, is the amount of brutal, probably misogynistic violence levelled at her character. Well this is true and the film does get quite mean spirited and extremely grisly in the second half. It’s pretty violent and, misogynistic or not, I think it’s mostly justified in that this is the right kind of tone that you would get from the characters as they are portrayed here. I was more concerned with the use of the ‘N’ word during the film, which is excessive to the point when it seems to me that people just wouldn’t use it as much as they do here if any of the characters have a grain of common sense between them, which they mostly do... although, at the end of the day, none of these characters are really, in any way, likeable. This use of the racial term, which is highly sensitive these days, bothered me a little more than the anachronism of the term ‘pen pals’ which the script flaunts at one or two points.

My other main problem with the film stems from the opening of the second half, directly after the interval on this Roadshow version. The film is split into chapters like Kill Bill and Tarantino does use his common modus operandi of releasing one of those chapters in a different order to the way it actually occurs in the chronology of the piece... and that’s fine. It serves a purpose in the order it’s in to build up suspense and allow a surprise moment in the chapter leading up to it. He also does a little time-slip to put in some extra details by way of a semi repeat of the ending of the previous chapter before the interval... which is again fine and although it reminded me of the ‘cheating’ openings of various cliff hanger serials of the 1930s through to the 1950s, again I think it was the right thing to do because it fulfils something cinematically by showing the audience the credibility of not noticing something through distraction (especially when you load the dice and keep the camera completely away from it Quentin). However, Tarantino puts himself in the picture as a voice over narrative giving a recap of sorts at this point and, frankly, it’s totally unnecessary and smacks of spoonfeeding the audience perhaps because he wanted to get himself in there somehow. I really think it would have been better to just replay it without comment and let the visuals do the work on the mind of the spectator at this point but... hey ho... different artist, different ideas. It’s a minor quibble and doesn’t really intrude too much on the action.

Another big niggle with this movie is that it claims to be in Cinerama, running the old Cinerama logo at the start of the picture but it really isn’t... it’s that fake, cheapened down format rebranded as Cinerama a couple of years later in that it isn’t three cameras shooting simultaneously and then giving vertical line joins as the projectors sew them up together again on the presentation. It’s the very nice but ultimately single lens 70mm Ultra Panavision version of the brand. Even the Roadshow programme for The Hateful Eight, which is similarly designed to mimic the style, somewhat, of an old Cinerama programme... doesn’t get as blatant as the movie does in proclaiming it to be Cinerama. It’s as much of a Cinerama movie as something like 2001: A Space Odyssey was... which as far as I’m concerned is not true Cinerama, no matter how much the Marketing people try to label it as such.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about The Hateful Eight. Long but spectacular looking, perfectly performed, outstandingly scored and mostly entertaining. Certainly a lot better than the director’s previous film, Django Unchained (reviewed here), in my opinion. Definitely a must-see if you’re a fan of this guy's work, although anyone who thinks The Hateful Eight is really “The 8th Film by Quentin Tarantino” as it says on the credits is possibly high on crack or just too lazy to count. If you’re going to see this one, though, I would especially try and seek out this 70mm Ultra Panavision print of the movie if possible. It’s quite spectacular looking and worth paying out for in terms of both fiscal resources and time allocation.

And thanks to Kerry, Teresa, Dave, Chris, Ross and Peter for coming to see this one with me on my birthday. Much appreciated.

Adios amigos.

Django Unchained

Strange Fruit, 
Underneath The Django Tree

Django Unchained
USA 2012
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Playing at cinemas now.

In the words of Colonel Hans Landa, the main antagonist of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained is... "not too terrible."

That is to say...

I quite like the movies of Quentin Tarantino as a rule. Not too sure about the personality of the director himself but, while the films can, it has to be said, be a little hit and miss in some areas, they’re usually worth watching at some level, at least, and certainly Django Unchained flourishes at a certain level here. It’s no coincidence I use the word “level”, either, because most Tarantino films exist for a certain section of the audience (and I include myself in that particular section) as more of a giant game/puzzle than an actual movie. They are just an audio/visual hit list of famous (and some not so famous) movie references and the thrill and wonder of seeing a fresh movie from this director can primarily be seen at the “game level” as a half decent pub quiz loaded with film questions. And that’s often where the pleasures of these particular movies best exist.

Django Unchained is no exception and as soon as the movie started to the strains of the title song of the original Sergio Corbucci Django movie, I was sent immediately into “game mode” and, sure enough, like many Tarantino films before this one, more than half the movie seems to play out to cuts from old CD soundtracks in my personal library... including, of course, many much loved spaghetti western scores.

It’s not quite the spaghetti western movie everyone was expecting it to be, however, and right from just the movie’s title and poster campaign, which uses the typography from the original 1966 Django movie (and many rip off sequels, no doubt), Tarantino seems to announce that “the game” is afoot.

Lets have a look at this for a second...

A film which is actually only half spaghetti western in its make-up (but that half was pretty good) is called Django Unchained, uses the same kind of typography as the original Django, uses one of the original title song recordings (from the English language version of the film), uses a heck of a lot of spaghetti western iconography in it (and therefore also the trailer) and even goes so far as to cast Franco Nero, the original Django, in a cameo scene and give him a joke line about how you pronounce the name Django... well you kinda expect this to be a continuation or possibly a remake of the very first Django movie, right?

Nope. Against all those expectations, Django Unchained is not a continuation of either Django or Django Strikes Again (the two “official” Franco Nero Django movies) or even Takashi Miike’s recent Sukiyaki Western Django (which featured Tarantino as one of the main characters) however, I’m onto Tarantino’s game here. And this is how it starts, I believe...

When Kill Bill was released, the Japanese edition had several more gory sections in it (plus some alternate shots) and some extra shenanigans involving the final fate of one of the characters that was curiously absent from the US and International print of the movie. Why was this? Well... many people say that he didn’t want any extra censorship issues... to which I say, “Nah... he would have had those issues if the extra footage was included or not”. Tarantino’s game here is he, as a die hard movie buff, knows that a lot of the various exploitation movies from the 60s, 70s and 80s had a lot “harder” cuts in Japan than they did in their international versions. Hammer films famously had extra gore in their Japanese versions, for example. Fans of various movies would then have to jump through hoops to get the extended, harder editions of their movies and this is probably something that someone like Tarantino would feel a certain sense of nostalgia for. So he went ahead and created his own “Japanese edition” for the Japanese market, so fans could go nuts hearing about it and going out of their way to get hold of copies (I remember the feeding frenzy at the time of the Japanese DVD release to get certain editions of these movies).

So...

When the original Corbucci movie Django came out in 1966, it was almost as big, in fact I think it was bigger, than Sergio Leone’s famous first movies in the Western genre which he reinvented and reinvigorated with his personal stylistic flourishes. Django was big and everyone wanted in. Many “unofficial” sequels and prequels were quickly released onto an unsuspecting market, almost all of which had nothing to do with the original production team. Added to this were many movies which just took the name, Django, and just retitled the original film so it had Django in the title... whether there was any character who vaguely answered to that name in the movie or not. In terms of unofficial Django movies all released in a period of only a few years... I think we’re talking literally hundreds. The Sabata and Sartana films also, I believe, spawned many unofficial sequels in much the same manner (if I’m inaccurate on that point, keep watching the comments section for this article as I’m sure I know one guy who will jump in and correct me).

So really, what I’m saying is... Tarantino probably never wanted to make a Django movie in the first place... his game was he wanted to make another of those “fake Django” movies and unleash that onto an unsuspecting audience. That, I believe is what happened here.

Now, anyone expecting a full on spaghetti western here is going to be mistaken. True, there are a lot of the trappings of those movies in here... enough to make the first half of the movie Tarantino’s “mini-spaghetti” and on many levels that works really well. There are some great moments in here. Some of them even seem like they originated in this movie... I think... yeah, I’m sure some of those sequences are less referential than others but, who cares, the script on this one sings along and is a joy, in the hands (or mouths) of some of the actors, to behold. And, as I made clear earlier, it’s nice to play “spot the reference” with these movies anyway...I loved seeing a training montage shot to the strains of Riz Ortolani’s score for Day Of Anger, for example, although I didn’t quite see how the context of that sequence related to the original movie as no betrayal or rivalry is evident in this movie as that use of music might suggest. The relationship between the two lead protagonists in Django Unchained are not like that of Giuliano Gemma and Lee Van Cleef in that earlier movie.

There are a lot of moments in this film that, I dunno, don’t quite make sense in internal logic (as is often the way with a Tarantino movie) but are fun little moments to pick out anyway. For example, the snowbound landscapes from the first half of the movie where Django pairs up with a German bounty hunter are obviously quite referential to another of Sergio Corbucci’s key westerns, The Great Silence... but Morricone’s score from that movie seems curiously absent from these sequences and whereas the “bounty killer” in The Great Silence was played by a steely eyed, Klaus Kinski as a brutal antagonist, the German bounty killer in Django Unchained is played with much gusto and charm by the inimitable Christoph Waltz who is similarly steely in certain scenes but who is definitely one of “the good guys” when it comes to this movie.

And as he did with the role of Hans Landa in the earlier Tarantino movie Inglorious Basterds, Christoph Waltz quite literally waltzes off with all the scenes he’s in... as interesting as Jamie Foxx and his colleagues may be to some movie viewers (I’ve not actually seen Jamie Foxx in anything other than in a role in the Robin Williams vehicle Toys, and I don’t remember him in it... but I know he’s quite well thought of), it is always Christoph Waltz who you can’t help but watch in these scenes and when he is absent from certain portions of the film... that’s when things get a bit dull in places.

Leonardo Di Caprio, is another actor I’ve not seen in much and, although I can see that he’s an absolutely brilliant actor, I’m not the biggest fan of him and find him quite a boring actor on some levels myself. Unfortunately for me, and possibly the movie, he is also playing a quite unsympathetic racist and exploiter of his fellow man and, this coupled with his general drab personality, means that some scenes tended to drag for me.

In fact, the whole second half of the picture seems to drag in a fair few places and, although that might have been the intention, it really didn’t do much for me. And I like films with more talking and less action in them, quite often.

It’s been said that film making, and I think we’re just talking about the stereotypical view of US film making here, I suspect... is all about cause and effect. It’s often frowned upon or seen as something to not do to have scenes which don’t add anything to the general narrative thrust of the picture and it’s not a prescription I would prescribe to personally, when talking about movies in general. Early on in his career, Tarantino was praised for making films which had no extra fat and which told a story where every scene shown mattered,,, that’s hardly the case with the films we see by him now and the quirky indulgence of a director to take as many tangents as he or she wants from the storyline is always fine by me. That’s all part of the art of movies... as long as you remember the trick is to not be too boring. Django Unchained could, in my opinion, have done with a lot of trimming to get the running time down and to eradicate various scenes which dragged. In fact, I’d have removed great sections of the last third if it had been me.

But of course, it’s not me, it’s Tarantino... and he should be allowed, as an artist (and he is an artist and a damn good one sometimes) to be free to put exactly what he wants on the screen for the audience. Just as it’s the right of that audience to reject, accept, enjoy or hate what is up on the screen in front of them. Django Unchained, for me, was a movie that was just a little too long and not quite oiled enough to be as vastly entertaining as his great movies like Inglorious Basterds, Kill Bill and Jackie brown. 

Unlike those movies just mentioned, the movie strains to become something more than the sum of it’s celluloid drenched, movie referencing, post-modernistic parts... but you know what?

That doesn’t matter either because it’s still worth watching.

Fans of the specific movie genres referenced in this film are going to have fun spotting and hearing the references... and even people who don’t know or don’t catch the references should have fun too. And after all, good or bad, films like this one are always worth taking a look at so you can have some kind of opinion on them, right?

Django Unchained is playing at assorted cinemas and flea pits across the UK now. Check it out if you have the time.