Downsizing

Honey, I Shrunk the Plot

Grade: D

Director: Alexander Payne

Starring: Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Jason Sudeikis, and Udo Kier

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 15 min.

Rarely have I witnessed the second half of a film spiral downward so quickly, decisively, and egregiously as Downsizing. The premise is promising: in the not-so-distant figure, Norwegian scientists develop a process called “cellular miniaturization,” in which organic matter can be shrunk to a fraction of its original size; in the case of humans, it’s down to about five inches. The breakthrough is fashioned as a cure for the ills of overpopulation, a 200-to-300-year transition that will end with humankind imposing less strain on finite natural resources.

The incentive for people to undergo the irreversible procedure is that because the expanding, but still-isolated downsized communities utilize less space and resources, modest means in the regular world are compounded in the downsized world. The middle class can suddenly find themselves millionaires living lives of luxury in a land where dollhouses are mansions and toy boats become yachts. That’s the lure for Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig), who learn that their $150,000 in savings converts to $12.5 million in the downsized world. Paul decides to abandon his Middle America woes and move to a gated microcommunity called Leisure Land Estates.

There’s an initial satire of the extremes people will go for the sake of material possessions and upward mobility. Where Downsizing could, nay, should have headed are the cascading mores of a consequence-free culture, introduced by Paul living downstairs from a wealthy hedonist played by Christoph Waltz. There are hints that the downsizing technology is being wielded as a means of subjugation by various countries and factions, and a better film would have further explored how this oppression intrudes into the supposed utobia of the miniature world. Finally, fiscal reality suggests that as more humans downsize, an economic equilibrium would take root and any financial disparity between the large and small worlds will ultimately diminish, if not disappear.

So, in what direction does writer-director Alexander Payne (Sideways; Nebraska) take Downsizing? An ill-defined eco drama, which begins with Jeff meeting Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a one-legged Vietnamese dissident exiled to the downsized world, where she works as a cleaning lady. Jeff feels bad because he broke Ngoc Lan’s prosthetic leg, and instead of fixing it or finding a new one, he tags along with Ngoc Lan’s workaday. A lot of aimless earnestness ensues, punctuated by some problematic humor revolving around Ngoc Lan’s broad broken English.

Eventually, Jeff and Ngoc Lan take a pilgrimage to Norway, where Payne doesn’t just squander his promising premise, but virtually forgets it. Nothing that occurs over the film’s final third realistically has anything to do with the consequences of miniaturizing. Instead, there’s a lot of really bad dialogue and really bad acting in service of a rudderless storyline. It’s both stunning and depressing to watch it all unravel, for a film with such big ideas become so suddenly small.

Horrible Bosses 2

Worst (or best?) episode of "Friends" ever

Grade: C –

Director: Sean Anders

Starring: Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, Chris Pine, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Aniston, Jamie Foxx and Kevin Spacey

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 48 min.

There’s a not-so-fine line between pushing the comedic envelope and blind bad taste. When Jennifer Aniston’s character in Horrible Bosses 2 graphically fantasizes about two 14-year-old boys having sex at camp, it’s a wince-inducing moment that’s hard to walk back.

Perhaps the pubescent parable by Aniston’s sex-obsessed dentist Julia Harris could have been shoved out of our synapses if it took place in isolation. However, Horrible Bosses 2 is a film that opens with an onanistic sight gag and the three lead characters’ names—Nick, Kurt and Dale—being unwittingly conflated into a racial slur, and it closes with Harris expressing her predilection for somnophilia.

In-between are repeated rape references and racial stereotypes. But every sidelong N-word is OK since there’s always a character of color around to chastise it, right? And when a rich prick demeans his Asian housekeeper, the film’s idea of balance is when she secretly soils the boss’ toothbrush with her backside.

The fault lies squarely with writer-director Sean Anders, brought in to replace Seth Gordon, who helmed the surprisingly successful original about three put-upon pals who plot to kill their overbearing bosses. Anders’ most recent directorial credit was the reprehensible Adam Sandler vehicle That’s My Boy, and he was last seen helping sully the screenplays for Dumb and Dumber To, We’re the Millers and Mr. Popper’s Penguins.

Even the film’s title is now a misnomer. Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day) have escaped the clutches of their day-job drudgery to launch a start-up manufacturing an invention named “The Shower Buddy.” But after sinking all their fortunes into churning out thousands of their ablution aids, Bert Hanson (Christoph Waltz), the product’s exclusive millionaire retailer, reneges on their deal in order to acquire the trio’s invention on the cheap once their business goes belly-up.

To save their shirts and company, Nick, Kurt and Dale decide to kidnap Rex (Chris Pine), Hanson’s preening son, and hold him for ransom. The half-baked plot becomes more hairbrained once Rex blackmails the guys into letting him join the scheme in exchange for a handsome share of the money.

The snappy comic chemistry that made the first Horrible Bosses a hit is still there: Sudeikis the horndog oaf, Bateman the slow-burn straight man, and Day the manic mouthmouth. Pine acquits himself well even though his spoiled brat with daddy’s issues seems to be operating on another narrative plain. But Waltz was actually funnier in Django Unchained, and the presence of Jonathan Banks as a police detective only reminded me how I hated the way Mike died in Breaking Bad.

Indeed, it’s telling that anytime the film needs a shot in the arm, it recalls the supporting cast from the first film. Kevin Spacey has a grand ‘ole profane time as a now-jailed Dave Harden, but it’s Jamie Foxx who steals every scene reprising “MF” Jones, a hardened street hood who harbors hopes of opening a Pinkberry franchise.

Unfortunately, Horrible Bosses 2’s sporadic chuckles never congeal into a memorable whole. And with its barrage of gay gags and other egregious overtones, that’s probably for the best.

Django Unchained

Hey, some of my best fashion model girlfriends are black

Grade: B
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson and Don Johnson
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hr. 35 min.

By the end of the mostly heady, sometimes punishing experience of watching Django Unchained, you’ll have a strong inkling why both Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner dropped out after agreeing to appear in Quentin Tarantino’s slavery-set revenge flick. Apparently, the potential benefit of allowing the director to work his renowned career-resuscitating magic wasn’t enough to stomach having to repeatedly refer to actors playing slaves as “n**gers” in the middle of a plantation revival setting.

Tarantino has always reveled in being a cinematic iconoclast, but his latest B-movie pastiche promises to polarize casual fans and fanboys alike. Tarantino applies his raw, increasingly garrulous voice to a mashup that notably includes the Western black bounty hunter tableau of the 1975 blaxploitation film Boss N**ger, the bloody violence of Sam Peckinpah and the original Django, a 1966 spaghetti Western starring Franco Nero (who has a bit part in this iteration), and the grotesque depiction of slavery in the American South captured in the 1971 Italian pseudo-documentary Goodbye Uncle Tom, including a version of the film’s butcherous finale.

Set in 1858, “two years before the Civil War,” Django (Jamie Foxx) is a shackled slave rescued from his chain gang by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German, Doc Holliday-esque former dentist turned bounty hunter who needs Django to collect the bounty for a trio of ruthless brothers Django can identify. In exchange, Schultz agrees to free Django from “this slavery malarky” and help rescue his wife, the German-fluent Broomhilda (Kerry Washington, who shrieks and quivers a lot). Django takes a liking to bounty hunting—another “flesh-for-cash business,” as Schultz compares it to slavery—and the new partners soon track Broomhilda to the clutches of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the debonair but barbarous proprietor of Candyland, a plantation where Candie breeds male slaves for sport fighting.

While Foxx is able, earnest but surprisingly unmemorable, Waltz sinks his teeth into Tarantino’s verbose dialogue, like he did as a Nazi officer in Inglourious Basterds. DiCaprio goes with gusto where Russell and Costner dared not tread, but the supporting cast is highlighted by Samuel L. Jackson’s portrayal of Candyland’s house Negro, whose ceremonial unctuousness masks a malevolence toward anyone would might threaten his master’s house.

Admirers of Tarantino’s audacity, his dexterity with a camera (along with cinematographer Robert Richardson) and his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema will find satisfaction despite a 165-minute running time that could have stood being sheared down a half-hour or so. Structurally, this is one of Tarantino’s most straightforward films. Still, there are a number of glaring plot holes and historical inaccuracies—e.g., the use of dynamite and other weaponry years before they were invented. They’re the sort that routinely crop up in Tarantino’s work and should no longer be waved away as artistic flourish, particularly considering his recent criticism that the 1977 miniseries Roots “oversimplified” slavery and didn’t “ring true.”

Tarantino deserves credit for committing many of slavery’s horrors to film, including bracing scenes of slaves being beaten, eaten by dogs, stripped, smeared with blood, face-branded and pitted in so-called “Mandingo fights.” However, the awful reality of the antebellum South was far, far worse, and Tarantino particularly pulls his historical punches in the depiction of women, limiting himself to allusions of coerced prostitution without the rape and rank sexual abuse that ran rampant in the plantation culture. Apparently even Tarantino knows that unmasking facts must be balanced against public appetites and the MPAA ratings board.

The biggest trouble with Django Unchained isn’t hearing the n-word over 110 times, by some counts. Indeed, such overuse almost acts to neuter the term of its inflammatory function. Instead, while Tarantino claims he wants the film to start a conversation, the real problem is that it doesn’t have very much to say. Setting entertainment amid trying times is nothing new to cinema, but cloaking it with the shroud of truth is Tarantino wanting to have his layer cake and eat it too. It also opens Tarantino up to criticism that he is exploiting slavery’s scourge for pop consumption and self-aggrandizement.

A scene like the metaphorical undressing of the hoods worn by a group of Klansmen is not only overlong, but it’s indicative of the easy, banal chuckles Tarantino deploys throughout Django Unchained under the guise of social satire. It’s small compensation for audiences asked to surrender their racial sensibilities at the theater door.

Inglourious Basterds

I intern your milkshake

Grade: B

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, and Daniel Brühl

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours, 32 minutes

To proclaim Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino’s fourth-best film (ahead of only the indulgent, indolent Death Proof) is not an insult, as each entry in this top quartet exceeds the finest production most directors will ever generate.

Still, the film’s relatively relegated status is interesting since Tarantino’s long-rumored World War II flick has been a pet project dating back to his immediate post-Pulp Fiction years. Like all Tarantino movies, Basterds is largely homage, principally – says the director – as a “spaghetti western but with World War II iconography.” There are also overt allusions to so-called “macaroni combat” flicks – the Italian exploitation war movies of the 1960s, 70s and 80s – as well as French New Wave cinema.

Of course, there is also Tarantino’s distinctive pulpy, madcap mayhem buttressed by an underlying, underrated maturity. Few filmmakers are afforded the latitude Tarantino enjoys to methodically develop scenes and storylines. This freedom sometimes leads to sequences that are rudderless, drifting on with no discernible payoff. However, it also produces gems like the opening, 20-minute long “Chapter One” of Basterds. Armed only with guile and a glass of milk, SS Col. Hans Landa, played sensationally by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-caliber performance, interrogates a French dairy farmer suspected of harboring Jews. The scene reinforces Tarantino’s affinity for Sergio Leone, and it also crackles with QT’s trademark visual and dialogue flourishes. Unlike most filmmakers, the excitement and tension in a Tarantino film largely derives from the fact that you never know how any particular scene will end, and Basterds is no exception.

After the opening act, we are then introduced to the key players for the rest of the interwoven storyline. First is Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a thickly accented Tennessee hillbilly leading a motley crew of eight Jewish American soldiers nicknamed the “Basterds,” whose mission is to comp the European countryside looking to kill and scalp “Nat-zzies.” Later, we meet a Jewish woman going by the name of Emmanuelle Mimieux (Mélanie Laurent), the proprietress of a Parisian cinema that is forced to play German films by Leni Riefenstahl and G.W. Pabst. (In one of the film’s more memorable lines, Mimieux explains that she displays the names of filmmakers on the theater’s marquee because “In France, we revere our directors.”)

In typical Tarantino fashion, these diffuse plotlines gradually intersect around a blazing, bombastic finale set around the premiere of the latest Nazi propaganda film by Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), called A Nation’s Pride, which dramatizes on the heroic exploits of a German soldier (Daniel Brühl) who also harbors affections for Mimieux. QT’s love of cinema is the principal sidelight in Bastards, with characters who provide a virtual audio tour through early 20^th century Weimar cinema.

As in his previous works, Tarantino wrings tension out of the clash of characters with varying class and cultural backgrounds. He distills World War II into one giant race war (not without basis) and takes a baseball bat to Hitler’s vision of the “master race” with irony and volume by conjuring a conspicuously multiculti milieu. American soldiers impersonate Italians; a British lieutenant and film buff (Michael Fassbender) plays a German officer; Mimieux is a Jew masquerading as a Frenchwoman whose lover is her African projectionist. Aldo himself claims to be part-Apache Indian, and the Basterds end up adopting guerilla tactics patterned after Native Americans. Even in the epic opening scene, Landa starts out speaking in French until he and the Gallic farmer compromise by communicating in English.

Of course, the vehicle for all this would-be social commentary is a violent, rollicking fever-dream. And, yes, Tarantino’s nearly unchecked filmmaking freedom again manifests itself in occasional self-indulgence, particularly his infatuation with the sound of his scripts – Aldo acts as Tarantino’s mouthpiece during the film’s anticlimactic coda, declaring that his latest bit of sadistic handiwork “just might be my masterpiece.”

Thankfully, the grotesque use of the Holocaust as a justification for stylized revenge and Tarantino’s brand of comic brutality is largely confined to the film’s second chapter and its misleading trailers. Inglourious Basterds is audacious, entertaining, uneven, and imaginary. It is no “masterpiece,” but it’s far from inglorious.

Neil Morris