A spaghetti western/revenge flick about slavery in the deep south should be a total disaster. It is just such a shocking concept that would require a deft hand, lots of planning, and a rock solid screenplay to even avoid being offensive, let alone succeed as a film.

Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to once again take old filmmaking styles and make them seem fresh, relevant, and sensitive to very dark material. Django Unchained somehow finds this intangible sense of humanity and heart in a very bloody revenge film. We care about characters who barely have two or three lines. The impetus of the story is a character more often seen screaming in pain than forming a sentence.

Django Unchained is the story of Dr. King Schultz, a German bounty hunter traveling throughout America for huge cash gains. He frees Django, a slave, because Django is the only person who can identify his newest bounty. In return for his assistance, Dr. Schultz agrees to help Django find and free his wife who was ripped away as punishment for a failed escape attempt.

A mutual agreement to get revenge is formed

Forget anything you’ve heard about this really being a romance or being over the top schlock. It’s not. It’s hard to have a romance when half of the relationship is barely in the film. The same goes for the shock value. The biggest problem with the film is that the climax of the film is a huge blood bath that just goes on too long with no shift in the stakes.

No, Django Unchained is not really about freeing this woman.

This is how Django Unchained builds its tension. Quentin Tarantino bravely allows the film story to focus on revenge itself. This is not the softer narrative of Inglourious Basterds leading into a huge denouement of historical revisions and vengeance served. Everything that is shown happens to force the audience to want the revenge to happen. We are meant to be angered by how Django is treated in every scene to the point of wanting everyone who even looks at him funny to be destroyed.

Revenge dramas usually show you some shocking set piece at the beginning of the film and let you idly watch as the hero sets up his perfect scheme. Tarantino has subverted the form to force you to fall into this cycle of violence and revenge. There is no glorification here, no attempt to force you to cheer as the body starts flying. This revenge is empty and meaningless in the end for the audience because Django, as a character, is a non-entity.

No, the film is not about this particular plantation own, either.

That is the paradox of Django Unchained. If you blindly buy into the misdirection of the throughline and never question it, you might walk away shocked by what you saw. If you engage with the story and let the anger begin to flow through you as intended, you might walk away shocked by your own response to the film.

Rating: 9/10

Thoughts on Django Unchained? Sound off below.

For a film all about male strippers, Magic Mike sure has a lot of charm, wit, and mostly clothed characters in it. Director Stephen Soderbergh and screenwriter Reid Carolin took real life inspiration from star/producer Channing Tatum to tell an atypical version of the old superstar/apprentice boilerplate.

Tatum’s Magic Mike takes Adam under his tutelage to help Adam make a better life for himself through stripping. Adam dropped out of college after losing a football scholarship and crashes at his sister Brooke’s house. He meets Mike by chance and, by equal chance, Mike falls head over heels for Brooke. Brooke makes Mike promise to protect Adam from the darker side of the city but Adam wants to experience everything.

Magic Mike is a film with a lot of heart and character. The workers of Xquisite and their friends and lovers are good people; they’re just flawed. They try to enjoy life as best as they can while dealing with the reality that they only have what they have because of their bodies. Most of the regulars at the club have addictions of one kind or another and the behavior only gets worse when they get together.

The big twist on the star is born format is the character of Magic Mike. He wants to do something else. Stripping is a means to an end, not the end itself. He saves every dollar he makes to start a respectable business and actually do something with his life. Mike is the star of the club because the money is convenient. He has no problem bringing someone else into the lifestyle because he knows how good the money is. He just knows that living off his body and sex appeal doesn’t actually satisfy him.

This twist is what gives Magic Mike power. There are a whole lot of cliches and tired plot points that begin to take over in the second half. The first half, though, is so wildly inventive, funny, heartfelt, and filled with unexpected but believable character choices that you can easily gloss over the less substantive conclusion.

Soderbergh adds a lot of style to the story that also helps to elevate it. Life is brightest inside the club, but most of the story takes place in the yellow, faded light of day. For so many of the characters, the club is their only source of joy or satisfaction. The real world lacks the same pizzazz and star quality even when the characters are acting like they’re having a good time. It’s a subtle device that really brings out a great sense of tension when the story takes a turn for the cliched.

Magic Mike is a fun, heartfelt drama about a man trying to make a better life for himself. Sure, the male stripper play a big role in the film with all the bumping and grinding you would expect. The film just wisely chooses to focus on character over sensationalism before the first pair of pants are torn away.

Rating: 7/10

Thoughts on Magic Mike?

In Flight, Denzel Washington stumbles around for two hours as a chronic alcoholic, coke fiend, and marijuana enthusiast while slurring out that he’s fine to take the stand in a hearing to determine if his alcohol and drug abuse caused a plane to crash land and kill six people on board. He meets a heroin addict/female savior who tries like hell to get him clean after she OD’d and wound up in the same hospital as him. His lawyer is a cold and calculating man just trying to stop the pilot’s union from taking a financial hit on the crash. His union advocate repeats no less than a dozen times “you can’t drink before the hearing” in his handful of scenes on film. And his drug dealer laughs about the press and comes across as the only realistic and cinematic character in the film.

To say that Flight is a miscalculation is an understatement. Much like an airline pilot forced to flip a plane upside to crash land in a field, Flight feels like the entire cast is flying blind. Perhaps they improvised the entire film and their ability to maintain such consistent key phrases from the big money prize board should be commended.

Unfortunately for that theory, there is a credited screenwriter for this pablum. John Gatins (Real Steel, The Shaggy Dog) literally has the cast circle the drain, danging onto poorly repeated metaphors and plot points for the middle hour of the film until anything interesting happens again. The entire “she loves him so she’ll save him” subplot could be cut with no impact on the structure of the story. It’s just another way to shovel in more addiction story cliches into a film that didn’t need them.

Flight starts off with so much potential. The first 30 minutes are a strong thriller about an ill-fated flight. There’s genuine shock value found in opening this film with a clear look into pilot Whip Whitaker’s daily routine. That he can so calmly assure his flight staff that he’s good to take off in the middle of a terrible storm after what he did is shocking. The tension only builds from there until the plane hits the ground.

Director Robert Zemeckis, stepping away from the unyielding death masks of his decade of motion capture nonsense, manages to sell each individual scene as important. There is something of interest or worth in every scene even if it’s the 37th time we’ve seen Denzel Washington reach blackout drunk phase and fall on the floor next to a pile of cocaine. The plane crash and direct lead-in to the hearing at the end of the film are masterfully built sequences of suspense. No amount of visual wizardry or quality acting can connect the dots in a film that, on the page, has no identity of its own.

Ultimately, this is a case of not selling your best assets. Flight could be a tight legal thriller about where to place responsibility in the wake of terrible tragedy. Is it the fault of the unfit pilot? The ill-maintained plane? An act of God? Or some combination of those and other factors? Those are the most effective moments in the two-plus hour feature.

Instead, Flight is mostly a tired character study into the mind of an addict. It has absolutely nothing new to say about those circumstances. Actually, it does say something new, but saying “coke dealers are awesome” isn’t exactly a feel-good positive message.

Rating: 3/10

That’s one point for every John Goodman as a coke dealer scene. He’s almost worth the price of admission.

Share your thoughts below.

If a 30 year old man who lives in his mother’s basement and smokes pot all day told you everything is connected in the world, would you believe him?

That’s the premise of Jeff, Who Lives at Home, written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass (aka the Duplass Brothers, Cyrus, Baghead). It’s an intriguing concept that plays with audience expectations and the role of the unreliable narrator. If you know there’s no way the main character, Jeff (Jason Segel), could possibly have an accurate view of the world, how do you follow along with a single idea he has the rest of the film?

The humor of Jeff, Who Lives at Home comes from this conceit. Jeff’s family–his mother, Sharon (Susan Sarandon), and his brother, Pat (Ed Helms)–serve as a proxy for the viewer in the film. The action is set into motion because Sharon wants Jeff to actually do something on her birthday. She leaves him a note and five dollars to go pick up wood glue at the Home Depot and fix a broken slat on a door. Pat gets pulled in to force Jeff to actually follow through with something outside of the house. Jeff has other plans. He received a strange phone call asking for Kevin and now is convinced that somehow he must find and help Kevin that day.

The rest of the film is a madcap comedy of paranoia, throwing out stories about secret admirers, fidelity, and the nature of fate in the world. Each individual strand is fine. Taken together, they start to get a bit muddy.

Take Sharon’s story. Sharon, frustrated that her younger son is wasting his life, just wants the simple home repair as a birthday gift. She knows she won’t get anything else. When her frustration peaks, she receives an anonymous instant message on her work computer. The man claims to be her secret admirer who doesn’t care that she’s older or frustrated with her life.

Taken alone, Susan Sarandon makes what’s essentially a one woman storyline (with an assist from a PC) quite compelling. Her reactions to the escalating office fling are hilarious and adorable. I would easily watch a whole movie about this character falling in love with the idea of falling in love.

Sharon’s story is not the whole movie. It’s only a fraction of what happens during the film. At the same time, Pat is in a fight with his wife (an excellent turn by Judy Greer) over the purchase of a Porsche (“surprise,” he says, before she makes her true feelings known). Jeff follows a teenager with the name “Kevin” on his jersey while riding the bus. Pat finds Jeff wandering around a parking lot and starts fighting with him over his status in life. The stories only branch out further from there.

I understand where the Duplass Brothers are going. They want to make a sweet little story about doing the right thing and how the choices you make impact the direction your life will go in. Jeff, Who Lives at Home is quite successful at being sweet.

The problem is that this larger matrix they’ve built up exists only to make an emotional climax on its own terms feel more grand. It’s a poor choice. By the time you get there, everything feels too calculated and twee to feel real or substantial. It’s worse than a slapped on happy ending; it’s a satisfying conclusion ruined by scale and scope.

Rating: 4/10

Thoughts? I had a lot of fun watching Jeff, Who Lives at Home, but felt a little empty at the end. Sarandon is the MVP, but Segel has never been better. What about you? Share your thoughts below. I love to hear from you.

Margaret is, in some ways, a love letter to everyday NYC. The environment writer/director Kenneth Lonergan brought to life onscreen is the New York City I remember from when I lived there. No matter how private your life is, how personal the moment, you will always be surrounded by people. Someone will always see you. Whether or not they choose to be that witness is another story.

Lisa Cohen is a high school student wise beyond her years. In many way, she still acts like a child who wants everything she wants and doesn’t take no for an answer. Yet her ability to conduct herself as an adult and demand respect is unparalleled by anyone else in her life. That is until she plays a key role in the death of a pedestrian in a terrible bus accident. Lisa chooses to see what she wants to see during her fleeting relationship with a cowboy hat wearing bus driver and chooses to lie to the police about what really happened.

For the next two hours and ten minutes, Lisa grapples with the choice she made. Lonergan brings in a bunch of superfluous details–her mother is starting a new relationship, her teachers are growing frustrated with her know it all attitude, she’s embracing the male gaze as a sign of power–but the driving force is the accident. Her memory and choices overtake every aspect of her life until they become the only thing she lives for.

Margaret is a difficult film to watch. The main plot is engaging, but every diversion Lonergan throws in makes it that much harder to follow the story. Everything comes back to Lisa because Lisa is the center of her own universe. She is a self-centered teen who loves hyperbole and relishes every opportunity to throw out a big word and put someone down for not being as smart as her.

What makes the film as watchable as it is in its bloated and meandering flesh is the cast. Anna Paquin is electric as Lisa Cohen. She looks older than a high school student in the classroom scenes, but place her against any adult and she looks like she’s barely thirteen. It’s a brilliant casting choice and Lonergan does everything he can to play up this disparity to isolate Paquin’s performance from everyone else in the film. With the exception of one very emotional scene (she loses the American accent when she’s on the verge of tears), it’s as close to flawless as you can get as an actor.

J. Smith-Cameron, as Lisa’s physically absent but emotionally engaged mother, is pitch perfect in her performance. She has the worst plots thrown at her–the opening of her Broadway show, especially is a distraction that could have been shown once or twice and established the point–yet manages to trick you into thinking every moment she has is important. I’d gladly watch the Joan Cohen feature film from Kenneth Lonergan; I just wish it wasn’t part of Margaret.

Then there’s the wide ensemble with only a few scenes to their names. Allison Janney plays the victim in the bus accident and she should have been nominated for every award during the 2011 film season. What she does with one short scene is what acting is all about. Matthew Broderick and Matt Damon play two of Lisa’s who coddle her a bit too much because of her intellect. The arcs they create with only a handful of scenes do more to define the growth of Lisa Cohen than anything Lisa Cohen does on her own. Kieran Culkin and John Gallagher Jr. (Tony winner, Spring Awakening) play the only friends Lisa has in her age group and find authentic moments in some absurd scenes.

But herein lies the problem with Margaret. All the individual elements–the actors, the design, the editing, the sound, the self-contained scenes–are excellent. They just don’t all add up to much of anything at all. There is a point about 90 minutes into the film where, if the story just stopped, it would be a brilliant film. Lonergan has established all the key story points and put these characters on very clear paths to their destinies. Instead of allowing the audience to define the experience, Lonergan stubbornly ties up every plot point with a big scene regardless of the impact on the overall story.

I want to say all the film needed was some judicious editing, but that’s a big aspect of the production that cannot be ignored. Margaret was shot in 2005. From there, a wide variety of reports have come out all claiming to explain why it took the film until 2010 to be complete. The most pervasive rumor is that Lonergan demanded perfection in the editing room, but his desired three hour cut of the film was not acceptable to the distributor. He had to knock at least thirty minutes out of a film with a 168 page shooting script. That’s a significant change.

So, if this is the carefully edited, screen tested, satisfy the distributors edit of the film, how do you reconcile the odd diversions within the tighter focus? I think the problem comes from having to spend too much time with the story. To Lonergan, what he kept in is essential to his vision of Margaret. To a film audience that doesn’t know what the full version of the story is–how he actually intended to tell it–it feels a bit misguided.

I liked what I saw. I just wish that Lisa’s story was the clear focus the whole way through. That’s what I wanted to witness.

Rating: 6/10

Thoughts on Margaret? I’d actually love to see Lonergan adapt this for the stage. I think a nice three act structure and the constraints of a physical set could do wonders to bring this story alive. The one drawback would be the cast size. If you move everything indoors, you don’t need the constant flow of traffic to create NYC. You’re still dealing with full classrooms of active participants and all the friends, relatives, and players in the accident that drives the narrative. I’d be interested in seeing how that could come together.

What about you? Sound off below. Love to hear from you.