Captain Phillips + J. Edgar

I've been suffering from a a splitting headache since Friday. It has something to do with our recent weather here. Some sort of odd pressure system. The mornings begin packed with fog, which then burns off by afternoon, leaving us with bright sunshine. While I have experienced sunny January days in the past during my 20 years in the Emerald City, what is unusual is the fog. Our fall was also unusual in that there were two straight weeks of  these foggy mornings followed by sunny afternoons. Puget Sound area autumns after October are normally just wet and dark.

In any event, waking up with a splitting headache each morning for the last three days does not lend itself to sitting in front of a monitor typing at a keyboard. Today, the cabeza feeling a little better, I'll attempt to get caught up with some posts.

First, some quick-hitters on movies I have seen recently. After viewing all seasons of Breaking Bad in order and then polishing off Luther (Series 3), I decided to watch some feature-length Hollywood film. It is always helpful in terms of ascertaining the spirit of an age to see what is being extruded by the dream machine. I used to have this as a regular feature of the blog, a Sunday-morning comment on whatever recently-released-to-DVD Hollywood film that I had streamed from Amazon the night before. But then Amazon raised its prices and its offerings shrank. So I stopped watching movies and stuck with streaming cable television series like Spartacus and Homeland.

Last night I watched Captain Phillips (2013), starring Tom Hanks and directed by Paul Greengrass. Greengrass catapulted to stardom based on his directorial work on The Bourne Supremacy (2004), the second installment in the Bourne film franchise. Captain Phillips follows the docudrama format of the film Greengrass completed after The Bourne Supremacy, United 93 (2006).

United 93 was a good film, though it buffed up the national security machinery to look like an expensive car commercial. Captain Phillips is not so good. The performances of the Somali pirates are superb (Barkhad Abdi has been nominated for an Academy Ward for his portrayal of Muse the pirate captain).

While there are vague references as to the reasons why the Somali youth are pirates -- they are cogs in a larger criminal enterprise; their waters have been fished out by corporate factory trawlers -- this film in the end is nothing more than an advertisement for the U.S. Navy.

An elite G.I. Joe team of Navy Seals (they're clean cut this time; no beards and keffiyeh as in Zero Dark Thirty) parachute in and mop up the mess with their cutting-edge technology and their deadly sniper rifles. The darkies are made to go bye-bye in a spray of blood, and the traumatized Tom Hanks/Captain Phillips ends the film being ministered to by a beautiful, strong, angelic, milk-fed Navy medic in an immaculate emergency room aboard the destroyer USS Bainbridge. You see, all is right in the world. American military might bestrides the globe.

If you want to see a better Greengrass film, see Bloody Sunday (2002).

Friday night I suffered through the first half of J. Edgar (2011) -- the dark, torpid Hoover bio-drama directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo DiCaprio -- before throwing in the towel because of my headache. I resumed the following morning in the dark. The movie hopscotches back and forth in time from the Palmer Raids to JFK's assassination to the Lindbergh kidnapping to Hoover's campaign against MLK, Jr. to his gangster wars campaign of the 1930s  The movie is bloodless with no coherent statement about Hoover's FBI and the role it played in America.

Hoover's COINTELPRO; his role in sculpting the Warren Commission Report; his close association with organized crime bigwigs and right-wing captains of industry -- all go completely unmentioned or are alluded to only in passing.

Mostly this movie is a gay love story. The lovers are J. Edgar and his abused companion, Associate Director of FBI Clyde Tolson. It is as if Eastwood shelves good storytelling in order to out the paranoid, megalomaniac, top lawman commie fighter as nothing but a poor queer.

Don't see this movie.

Django Unchained

Django Unchained was my streaming selection last night. It had been available on Amazon for over a week but only in the HD format and only to purchase. But last night for $4.99 I was able to see what all the fuss was about.

Quentin Tarantino has been pilloried in the media for the movie's violence; his interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy went viral:

Tarantino also tangled with the media and Spike Lee over his abundant use of the word "nigger" throughout the film. Samuel L. Jackson's refusal to answer a reporter's question on the use of the word unless the reporter say it himself also went viral:

Before sharing my thoughts on Django Unchained I should say that I am Tarantino man. Reservoir Dogs (1992) was the Easy Rider (1969) of my generation. Prior to that I hadn't seen a movie that accurately portrayed the way young men really talk to and deal with each other. The way the film's narrative is radically scrambled between past and present captures the way we actually encounter the world; after Reservoir Dogs this becomes a common storytelling practice in mainstream movies. But most of all I identified with Tim Roth's character, Mr. Orange. Most of my buddies liked Mr. Blonde or Mr. White. Having just divorced my wife, I kept my wedding ring in a bowl of pennies; I had a picture of the Silver Surfer on my wall. So when I saw that Mr. Orange kept his wedding ring in a spare change container and had a picture of the Silver Surfer on his wall I was amazed. I knew exactly who he was. He was me.

For all the hubbub about the violence in Django Unchained, I found it less extreme than Inglourious Basterds. But as Thomas Frank pointed out, that movie was about Jews killing Nazis and therefore acceptable. The only thing distinctive about the violence in Django is the amount of blood which flows profusely like so many burst jars of spaghetti sauce.

The power of the movie is not in its pulpy gore but in its timely depiction of the slavocracy. We are all niggers now, governed by a Dixiecrat Congress at the behest of bankers and corporate captains of industry. That's why Django is a perfect accompaniment to Lincoln. The performances of Christoph Waltz and Leonardio DiCaprio are inspired, as is Samuel L. Jackson's. My only criticism of the movie is that at two hours and 45 minutes it's too long. Once Waltz and DiCaprio disappear from the screen in the last half hour, Django really starts to fall apart; that, and the film descends into outright farce.

But all in all it's rollicking entertainment which accomplishes the amazing feat of capturing the perverse brutality of slavery (in particular with the mandingo fighting sub-plot) while plucking an intuitive chord of connection with our contemporary social-political predicament (UFC entertainment for the underemployed masses; plantation-owner-type wealth for the 1%).