Showing posts with label Don Johnson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Don Johnson. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

Blue Steal: REBEL RIDGE

Those of us with a taste for patiently proportioned action filmmaking, of the sort that’s all the more satisfying for a long fuse, will find much to enjoy with Rebel Ridge. Here’s a blood-boiler of a thriller, percolating with righteous anger as it stokes a steady sense of tension and suspense. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is good at this sort of thing—a slow and steady escalation of inevitable conflict. His fine-tuned Blue Ruin, with a fumbling amateur quest for vengeance, or Green Room, with a rock band besieged by neo-Nazis, show a gripping sense of tightly contained menace and looming doom. He brings those skills to Rebel Ridge, in which a perfectly unjust situation gets only more complicated the more those in power feel emboldened to do their dirty work in broad daylight, try to stamp it out instead of doing the right thing. It leaves a man without power no choice but to grab on for dear life and hope for real justice to prevail. The inciting incident finds a good man (Aaron Pierre), a black veteran, stopped by small-town police (David Denman and Emory Cohen) on his way to bail his cousin out of jail. Seeing a fat stack of cash in his backpack, his life savings, the cops take it and scoff at his protestations of innocence. Evidence, they say. Suspected criminal proceeds. Civil forfeiture. He can fill out a form to dispute the confiscation and hope for the best. Highway robbery. The more he tries to get his money back, the more the cops harass him, intimidate him, insinuate he’d be arrested or worse if he even thinks about pursuing this further.

The movie is smart about the ways in which a police force can get high on their immunity and act with impunity, even as their posturing bravado and barking orders barely cover their hair-trigger tempers and easily bruised egos. (Chief Don Johnson is perfectly enraging as a man used to getting his way through mere intimation of power.) And it’s smart, too, about the logic of a crooked cop’s traffic stop escalation, and the ways in which an officer can feel totally safe to pull a gun out and shoot an unarmed man without fear of retribution. This simmering in the background of the film’s slow-growing crescendo gives an edge of danger—even as potentially sympathetic “good cops”—let alone a local courthouse clerk (AnnaSophia Robb), who has her own dangers—are slow to do the right thing out of reasonable fear of their own colleagues. What gives the movie a satisfying kick beyond the social justice angle is its commitment to grubby genre simplicity—a good match of intentions. These cops messed with the wrong guy. Like a low-key, slightly more realistic Walking Tall or First Blood or Jack Reacher, this veteran is more than ready to stand up for himself. The movie’s look and mood is as clean and clear and simple as its setup, holding close on Pierre’s intense eyes and powerful stance, negotiating the frame to maximize the physicality of the blocking. It holds steady in stillness until—wham!—firearms are aimed and fists are clenched. It exercises such admirable restraint—even in its well-earned action finale never turning into a mindless blood-lust—that each punch or gunshot lands with considerable force.

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Cutting Class: KNIVES OUT

One of writer-director Rian Johnson’s greatest qualities is his ability to surprise without sacrificing his trustworthiness as a storyteller. His films are idiosyncratic without being unduly erratic, thoughtfully engaged with their chosen genres without stepping outside of their tropes, capable of grand loop-de-loops surprising audience expectations while making the outcome beautifully air-tight inevitable. He’s a mainstream filmmaker — recently with appealing sci-fi spectacles like moody time-travel assassin thriller Looper and the soulful, satisfying Last Jedi — aware of both the necessary elephantine expressions of recognizable story mechanics and burrowing termite interest of carefully selected specific details. He can take us effortlessly into places we’d never expect, because at every step of the way, we know we’re in good hands. He’s as clever as he is knowledgeable. His new film, Knives Out, is a wickedly well-done murder mystery, indebted indisputably to hundreds of detectives stories of yore, and yet plays out its story so fluidly and delightfully that it feels fresh nonetheless. As the movie begins, an elderly millionaire mystery author (Christopher Plummer) has been found in his study with his throat slit and a knife in his hand. The local cops (Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan) are prepared to call it a suicide when a well-known detective (Daniel Craig, with a melodious Southern accent) steps in to consult on the case. He’s prepared to look at every detail again, and scrutinize every member of the dead writer’s squabbling, privileged family. Sure, the case appears open-and-shut, but he just wants to see it with his fresh eyes, eliminating no possibilities and no suspects. Holmes and Poirot and Dupin would be proud. In Johnson’s hugely entertaining screenplay, bristling with witty asides, barbed feints, and prickly offhand political resonance, the family members are interviewed, with plenty of brisk, bantering back-and-forth editing into and out of interlocking flashbacks sketching in the moments leading up to the mysterious death. So many have motives, and so many witnesses weave in and out of other’s stories, that it’ll take a while to untangle the knotty web, to winnow the suspects' bratty rich-kid motives from those capable of murderous intent.

It’s a terrific ensemble, perfectly cast, every person on screen, down to the smallest one-scene roles, quickly, expertly characterized with energetic shorthand and snappy individualism. There’s the regal real estate mogul daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis), her duplicitous husband (Don Johnson), and their entitled grown boy (Chris Evans); a business-manger son (Michael Shannon) and his glowering alt-right offspring (Jaden Martel); a shallow daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) and her differently-shallow daughter (Kathryn Langford); and, in the center of the madness, a home health aide (Ana de Armas) whose sweetness and good heart made her a kind companion to the late old man, but leaves her on the outside looking in as the vultures circle. Whodunnit is of course the primary question, but as Johnson unravels his tale, the why’d-they-dunnit becomes as interesting. As in all good detective stories, the personalities and the accumulation of clues are as deeply pleasurable as the eventual reveals where the puzzle snaps into place, and Johnson places each new piece on the table with stylish verve. The whip-smart cutting and pace stays just ahead of the characters and just behind the mystery’s solution, while never going out of its way to hide its cards or throw up false tangents to shake off the scent. It all falls into place with a logical snap, each payoff set up, even when you didn’t realize it at the time. The production design — a big house full of creaky staircases and teetering bookshelves and morbid knickknacks — is a handsomely cozy setting, fitting such a tale. As one investigator quips, the old man lived in a Clue board. The camera work is energetic and inspired — and, oh, so beautifully textured — without distracting from the cool logic of the proceedings, while the characters are broad yet warm, at once caricatures yet imbued with all-too-understandable humanity. It’s richly developed, never just a film of pawns in a master-mystery-mind’s game. That’s how well this game is played. This is the best film of its kind in quite some time.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Off the Chain: DJANGO UNCHAINED



Deeply uncomfortable and scarily cathartic, Django Unchained is Quentin Tarantino’s first true Western, finding inspiration from 70’s spaghetti and blaxploitation Westerns for a racially charged fantasy of bloody vengeance. The plot, set in the antebellum Deep South, concerns a hardened slave named Django (Jamie Foxx, steely cool) who is freed by the unassumingly dangerous German expatriate Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter, in order to assist in hunting down wanted slavers. The hunter doesn’t know their faces, but figures that the slave will identify them, seeing as they are the ones who sold Django and his wife (Kerry Washington, damsel distressed) to separate plantations. In exchange for the help, Schultz promises Django not only his freedom, but an opportunity for revenge and reunion as well. This is a film with many scenes of chains and whips inflicted upon stripped, sweaty, beaten bodies. It summons up ugly history to gorily dismantle the shameful institution (if only in some small, personal way) with a force history does not allow.

As one practiced in genre synthesis, Tarantino makes clear his aesthetic influences while recapitulating and recombining until he finds and elevates core attractions of his favorite genres. Here, he makes simple Western mythology out of volatile parts and unexpected juxtapositions. There’s a hint of his mindset of insatiable cultural appropriation in shots of snowy Sergio Corbucci fields; later, we follow a chain of slaves right out of Richard Fleischer's Mandingo. Drawing upon Western tropes by digging into less well-known (or downright disreputable) subgenres, Tarantino uses his film to reveal heroism and nobility in people usually kept off screen. How often, after all, did John Wayne films even seriously acknowledge slavery, a crucial economic engine and political hot button of the very era in which many of his cowboy epics were set? (Or Clint Eastwood. Or Franco Nero. Or, or, or.) Here, the black man is the hero, freed to exact his revenge, patiently working with a foreigner to set a trap for slimy slavers and steal back his bride.

That’s undeniably thrilling. But Tarantino’s approach can be awfully troubling as well. Though necessary, perhaps, the scenes of slavery and brutality sit awkwardly in such a pulpy setting. And yet there’s such a moral force behind it all. Why shouldn’t we get a kick out of seeing a slave determined to wage a one-man revolt through those determined to dehumanize him? Along the way we meet all manner of folk who are both imbued with Tarantino’s love of colloquial verbiage and an easy despicability. There are plantation owners (Don Johnson), vicious slavers (M. C. Gainey), cruel enforcers (Walton Goggins), and colluding slaves (Samuel L. Jackson in an altogether unexpected and especially tricky opaquely complex role). These characters are dancing around the edges of the plot, which ultimately turns its attention on one particularly charismatically nasty slave owner by the name of Calvin Candie who is played in a nice bit of unexpected casting by Leonardo DiCaprio. Calvin owns a large, notorious plantation called Candieland (get it?) that he proudly uses as a base for making money off of his slaves through prostitution and death matches. DiCaprio is clearly having fun (which, come to think of it, is a problem) and makes for a scary funny foil.

What’s disappointing is that the characters (especially the supporting ones) are thinner and the genre play is simpler and more surface-level than the usual Tarantino effort. His sure ear for dialogue turns tinny time and again, with some more overtly comedic set pieces galumphing embarrassingly. A scene in which Ku Klux Klan members avant la lettre argue about the size and spacing of eyeholes in their white hoods is just plain off tonally. Where he usually wields broad material in great crowd-pleasing gasps that don’t cheat fine thematic points and nuanced characterization, here he just has the brusque sensations. However painterly and powerful is an image of a pure white cotton field suddenly spotted with red blood, this is a film in which the human body has exploding baggies of red syrup inside and in which only simple catharsis and horror comes out with the gobs of viscera splattered about. (Though if anyone voices complaint about Tarantino’s approach to violence, let it be said that at least he modulates tone exceedingly well in its portrayal. Violence to slaves is gruesome; violence to slavers is a release.) Unlike his last film, Inglourious Basterds, which told an alternate-history World War II story through perfectly written scenes working on many levels at once, this historical genre picture is fairly one-note. I was occasionally entertained and delighted by the usual pleasures of the genre and certainly unsettled by the intensity of the slavery aspects of the plot, but was disappointed in the lack of deeper engagement or coherent commitment to genre subversion.

And then, there came a time when I found myself glad I hadn’t written the film off as mere uneven entertainment and provocation. There’s a sequence near the end of the picture that’s pure Tarantino, a long sizzle of suspense in which violence and surprise lie ticking, explosion fully possible at any moment. The suspense comes not just from a dangerous situation, but from the dangerous situation that’s almost, but not quite, occurring, existing as mere possibility that is deeply imbedded within character and plot in such a way that the audience knows deep down that this scene will not end with the same number of living characters that there were at its start. This is the kind of smart, writerly standoff that Tarantino does best and has within it an excitement and layered dexterity that I found missing in the rest of the film. Django Unchained frees itself from a bumpy buildup to go out with a (strangely doubled) flourish of flashy, almost frightfully effective and satisfying violence that just about justifies the film's existence and christens Foxx's Django a true new Western hero. Still, as good as it can be and as rousing some of the finale is, I’d have liked to see a sharper, deeper film that could have put to better use the unstable dynamite of its plot elements instead of relying on easy outrage and surface cool.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Schlock and Awe: MACHETE


The latest film from Robert Rodriguez, this time sharing director’s credit with editor and special-effects artist Ethan Maniquis, is Machete. It’s based on a fake trailer that he created to show before Planet Terror, his faux 70’s exploitation film that was half of Grindhouse, his genre double-feature throwback collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. But you don’t need to keep up with all the levels of meta filmmaking at work here to enjoy Machete. Sure, it’s loud and sloppy, simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped, but this movie is alive, ambulatory with a crazed B-movie spirit and chockablock with goofy, groovy grindhouse gore. It’s the type of movie that, when you hear a doctor explaining the length of the human intestine, you know that it will be valuable information in an upcoming action set-piece.

The great, craggy Danny Trejo slashes his way through the film as the mysterious man known only as Machete. He’s out for revenge on not just one, but two clearly defined revenge paths. Machete’s out to avenge the death of his wife at the hands of an evil, samurai-sword-wielding Mexican drug lord (Steven Segal, of course) and out for revenge against a double-crossing political slimeball (Jeff Fahey). Then again, to put the plot so simply is to ignore great swaths of exposition that are occasionally relevant to the forward momentum and ultimately needed for the film’s big shootout climax.

This racing explosion of schlock and awe manages to work in plot threads about a sort of Underground Railroad for illegal immigrants led by Michelle Rodriguez and a government agent who is on her tail and is played by Jessica Alba. There’s also a group of vigilante amateur border patrollers led by Don Johnson and a red-meat xenophobe senator, none other than Robert DeNiro, who whips up his supporters with ugly racism. After all of that, there’s still room enough in the movie for the troubled wild-child played by Lindsay Lohan and the Catholic priest played by Cheech Marin. One of them is playing against type.

The cast gets to riff on their personas just as much as the movie itself riffs on its inspirations. Trejo steps up and ably fills a role to which a career of playing tough-guys has led him. Lohan’s entrance is great, as is her character’s arc, which is a perfect metaphoric blueprint for a comeback. Segal is the most purposefully entertaining he’s been in a long time, maybe even ever. Fahey, fresh off his scene-stealing stint on Lost, is a perfect growly villain, DeNiro is fantastic, if a little underused, and Don Johnson is made exceptionally sinister with his eyes constantly hidden behind gleaming sunglasses.

This is easily Rodriguez’s best film since Spy Kids, though that says more about the weakness of Rodriguez’s last decade of work. Machete is a rush of junky influences with a spirited 70’s vibe. With so many plot threads and character types mingling with the brute-force efficiency of the bloody action beats, the movie is inescapably messy. But those action scenes are more fun than not, hyper and stylish while still perfectly understandable in construction. And the movie’s a wicked satire that’s, you know, about something real, current and tangible and actually dares to draw blood with its bite. This is sledgehammer-satire that moves with a force and purpose that agitates for basic human rights and sensible immigration policy. The satire’s not exactly coherent, and it’s certainly not clearly explained, but it’s sharp and hilarious nonetheless and the images have lingering power. A priest’s bank of surveillance monitors is arranged like a crucifix. A senator’s racist rant of a campaign commercial intercuts footage of border crossings with extreme close-ups of wriggling insects. A heavily armed Machete walks unharmed into a villain’s house because the guards think he’s the gardener. This isn’t exactly great art – it’s not even an entirely consistent piece of action filmmaking – but it has a raw excitement that carried me along and kept me entertained.