Golden Globes

Photo: The Golden Globe

A few quick things about the [see title]:

--Yes, I can be a big fan of football games and yet still watch the Golden Globes.  (In fact, I was told recently that I know the sport perhaps a little too well.)  One of my favorite high school memories is about when I tackled someone so hard and so immediately after the catch, that he literally said, "What hit me?"  And I actually replied, "I did."  Don't judge.

--Someone needs to make sure Mel Gibson didn't have a stroke at the Golden Globes.

--Maybe he was stunned at Jodie Foster's speech?  I mean, he knew they were always going to be just friends, right?

--Anne Hathaway's comments about Sally Field were tremendously classy.  Field wouldn't have had better things said about her if she'd actually won the award for her role in Lincoln.

--I want to look as good as Jodie Foster does when I'm fifty.  And I don't want to have to spend any money or to have any procedures to do it.  Hey, it can happen.

--Sofia Vergara's Diet Pepsi ad ran maybe 27,000 times during the broadcast.  Not that that's a bad thing.

--Michael J. Fox's kid looked like Michael J. Fox playing Marty McFly's kid in the second Back to the Future, if you follow me.  You know, when his coat's sleeves extended past his hands and his voice was so high and cracking that only dogs could hear it?

--Mel Gibson and Tommy Lee Jones had the most memorable faces of the night.  I'll bet Mel hasn't risen from the chair yet, or closed his mouth.  And I'll bet Jones still looks like he's just bitten somebody's face off.

--Jodie Foster managed to exude class even while she was babbling and verbally floundering about.  And her speech ended very, very well.  And I'm sorry to hear her mother has dementia.  Been there.  Not fun.

--The Globes' director very wisely put Selma Hayek on camera as often as possible.  She appeared almost as often as Sofia Vergara's commercial.  Incidentally, I love saying Sofia Vergara's name, though I'm sure I'm butchering it and my accent is way off.

--I don't care too much about who wins or loses at these things, though I still haven't gotten over Saving Private Ryan's Best Picture Oscar loss.

--I never heard of Jessica Chastain before Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (which Ebert said recently was the best picture of all time, from any country) a few years ago, and now she's in everything.  Loved her speech, too, when she said that she'd been an also-ran and behind the scenes for so long, she can't believe she's made it.  Gives ya hope, ya know?

--Though the comment about torture and being married to James Cameron was funny, I'm getting very tired of people saying whatever they want about whoever they want, especially when that person isn't there to respond.  Maybe Cameron is as much of a jerk as everyone says, but that doesn't mean he deserves to be called that on camera to literally billions of people throughout the world.  Just because you can, that doesn't mean you should.

--Bill Murray looked like he'd just stepped out of a Dickens novel.  Maybe he's shooting such a movie?

--The most courageous thing Jodie Foster said was how incredibly lonely she sometimes is.  (I mean, we all knew the other thing, right?)  Read a full transcript of her speech from latimes.com here.

--Quentin Tarantino very suddenly got big.  (Read my review of Django Unchained here.)

--The Globes are always very amusing, but does absolutely everyone have to get plastered?

Django Unchained

Photo: Movie poster from its Wikipedia page

Any Tarantino flick is worth seeing, and this one is no exception.  Though worth seeing, however, I can't say it was on par with his latest and greatest.  In fact, this one was the biggest disappointment for me since Jackie Brown.  Of course, a disappointing Tarantino film is still a good film, but Django could have been so much better.  One of the most glaring examples of this is that the dinner scene here tries to maintain the same unbearable tension as the basement bar scene in Inglorious Basterds, but it doesn't come close.  There is tension, of course, but not to the elevated levels of Basterds.

It went wrong when Waltz's character, King, shot DiCaprio's, which was naturally followed by King himself being obliterated.  And then all Hell broke loose.  This didn't work for me on many levels, not the least of which is that it simply isn't in King's character to do it.  He himself reminded Django what they were there for, to not lose sight of their goal--to free his wife.  They were clearly about to do this, even if it wasn't in the way that they intended.  And they were about to walk away with her; DiCaprio's character was too much of a Southern gentleman to shoot someone in the back after a business transaction.  And a handshake after a deal was, for God's sake, actually how transactions were socially, if not legally, finalized in the South back then.  Heck, even Mikey and Frankie of American Pickers do that today.  The contract is the legal law, but the handshake is the social law, and in that part of the country, they're equally important.  You can't do business with someone whose hand you can't shake.  It's a gentleman's agreement--even if, nastily enough, you're dealing in slaves.  (This was undoubtedly what led to King's repugnance about shaking his hand.)

This was followed by an even more unrealistic plot event: after shooting the iconic plantation owner--and about twenty of his men--Django gets sent to work at a mine for the rest of his days?  That's not the slavery south I've read about.  He'd have been whipped until dead, or hanged, or attacked by dogs, or even dragged to death by a horse or carriage.  Sent to work in a mine?  With three dumb hillbillies in charge of him?  Not bloody likely.

Of course it's all a cartoon.  Of course Tarantino wants to cinematically wipe out slavery in an orgy of firepower and fire, just as much as he wanted to wipe out Hitler and the Nazis with firepower and fire--and Inglorious Basterds was clearly not realistic or sensible, either.  So Django had to be able to get back to the plantation house to bring it all down.  I get that.

The difference, though, is that Inglorious Basterds' ending stayed true to its own twisted universe.  Everyone stayed true to their own twisted personas in that parallel universe of unreality.  Here, they don't.  King's character was all about logic and sensibility, and a heckuva scary guy, too, when he wanted to be.  And a fantastic, quick shot.  Would he stare at the wound he made in the white flower, or would he turn and fire upon someone he would know was going to immediately fire upon him?

Django is actually Samson unchained, of course, in this movie, so he has to be the one to knock the building of slavery down with everyone in it.  I get that.  He, and Tarantino, and perhaps even the audience is in need of that purge, just as we all were in need of purging Hitler and his crew at the end of Basterds.  Understandable.

But not like this.  How, then?  I don't know, but it's not my job to know.  That's Tarantino's job.

So go see it, because it's a Tarantino film, and it's memorable, and it's well-acted and well-directed and well-designed and well-choreographed and it's, well...well-done.  It's very well-done.  And so maybe I'm spoiled by Tarantino by now.  I want something more from him than just very well-done.   The first 80% rocks, and the last 20% is the purging, I guess, and it's very well-done--but it doesn't rock, and it doesn't jibe with the rest of the film.  It's almost two different films in that way, unevenly broken into an 80/20 split.

But you still have to go see it, of course.  So go do that.

P.S.--While standing in line to buy the tickets for this movie, a guy walked around saying that the 6:40 showing of the movie Lincoln was sold out.  I am thrilled to hear that an important and high-quality movie, with such a rare, slow pace, was still being seen by American moviegoers. 

Happy New Year

Photo: Sydney, Australia, celebrating New Year's Day in 2007, from "New Year's Day" page on Wikipedia.

Really simple blog entry this time: Happy New Year to all my readers, and to anyone who happens to stumble in.  Here's to better health, better happiness, better times.

And if you'd like to leave a wish for everyone, please do so below.  I'd be glad to hear from ya, as would everyone else who reads this.  Emails are cool, too.  Thanks again to all my readers and followers for sparing some time with me here.  As my time is very limited, I'm sure yours is, too.

2013's first real entry will be a review of Tarantino's Django Unchained, coming soon.  But until then, I thought I would start a comment thread, each comment but a few words long, of what we would like 2013 to bring to us.  After seeing mine, feel free to put your own.

And Happy New Year!!!