The Other Woman

We can make it through this movie,

if we just stick together.

Grade: C –

Director: Nick Cassavetes

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, Kate Upton, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Don Johnson, Taylor Kinney and Nicki Minaj

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 49 min.

Buttressing once again the axiom that the apple often does fall far from the tree, director Nick Cassavetes (son of John Cassavetes, a pioneer of American independent filmmaking) somehow conceives a movie exalting female empowerment that actually furthers the opposite aims with The Other Woman.

Want to conjure sympathy for the wife of a cheating husband? Don’t make her a grating, borderline psychopath. Want to conjure sympathy for the unwitting mistress who feels equally used by this two-timer? Don’t make her a prickly urbanite who is callous toward the feelings of the aggrieved spouse just because the mistress was, in fact, unwitting. Want to make a character played by Kate Upton into a three-dimensional person? Don’t make repeated blonde dumbbell jokes and refer to her at one point as ‘The Boobs.’ Thankfully, Upton’s vacuous acting is barely noticeable when juxtaposed against the rest of this pervasively poor film—good for her, bad for the rest of us.

Carly Whitten (Cameron Diaz) is a leggy, fashion-conscious, Columbia-educated Manhattan lawyer (right…) with an assistant who looks, talks and dresses like Nicki Minaj (Nicki Minaj). Carly also has Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), the boyfriend of her dreams until the night Carly dresses like a sexy plumber to surprise Mark at his Connecticut home, only to have Kate (Leslie Mann), Mark’s wife, answer the door. Carly scampers away, content to chalk this up as another bad romantic episode in her life and never see Mark or Kate ever again (though, Carly apparently keeps Mark in her phone contacts list since his name continues popping up every time he calls or texts her the rest of the film). However, Kate melts down and, her mascara perpetually smeared, tracks Carly down to her job and apartment. Her purpose isn’t angry confrontation, but instead some badly enunciated notion of connecting with her husband via getting repeatedly drunk with his erstwhile mistress.

Anyone suffering from Leslie Mann overload from just her Judd Apatow offerings should know that The Other Woman is pure, uncut Mann in all her uneven, hit-and-miss zaniness. For every gag that works, there are a baker’s dozen that fall flat and last way too long.

As Kate and Carly embark on a college-appropriate revenge plot involving Nair in the shampoo bottle, laxative in the whiskey and estrogen in the morning smoothie, they discover that Mark has moved on to Amber (Upton), a younger, curvier edition. That leads to some admittedly amusing moments when Carly realizes that she has become not just the other woman, but also the older one.

The three would-be foes join forces to prolong the plot and exact inevitable comeuppance. But with Cassavetes falling back on endless pratfalls and other sight gags like Mann peeing in an open bathroom (her go-to move) and a scatological bathroom sendup involving Mark more befitting a Farrelly brothers farce, the only thing more insulting than the single-cell humor are the clumsy attempts as “meaning” and “emotion.” A maudlin montage involving Kate tossing her wedding ring into the ocean and all three woman cozying together on the beach feels like it was lifted from an entirely different (albeit equally bad) movie.

There’s discernable chemistry between Mann and Diaz that would work well outside this unholy mélange of 9 to 5, The First Wives Club, and John Tucker Must Die, scrubbed of any residual wit, charm and purpose. Forget The Other Woman—this duo needs other material.

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.