The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

So, what do you remember about your

parents before their planet exploded?

Grade: B –

Director: Guy Ritchie

Starring: Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander, Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Debicki

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 56 min.

Several years ago, Quentin Tarantino said he was extended, but turned down, several offers to direct a film version of the 1960s television show “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” In a way, he finally got his chance.

Guy Ritchie, one of the most notably post-Pulp Fiction-inspired auteurs, applies his Tarantino panache to the U.N.C.L.E. spy thriller adaptation, finally in theaters after over 20 years in development hell. Slick and ultra stylish, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s narrative nonetheless lacks a certain I-don’t-know-what. Watching the film is rather like admiring an exotic sports car with sleek lines and luxury features, only to discover a straight-twin engine under the hood.

Set in the early 1960s, Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill, well, Superman), a former WWII profiteer turned CIA agent, and sullen KGB lackey Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer, once cast as Batman in George Miller’s aborted Justice League film project) are Cold War adversaries forced to join forces to track down an International Criminal Organization™ dabbling in stolen gold and loose nukes. The scoundrels have kidnapped a German nuclear scientist, whose daughter, Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), is the key to locating him and THE BOMB.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is a gorgeous film, with Ritchie’s sublime camerawork and kinetic editing bound by an eclectic soundtrack that borrows from Roberta Flack, Ennio Morricone, Nina Simone, Rita Pavone and many others. It’s “Mad Men” meets a “Vogue” magazine cover, with Vikander—having quite the breakout year—and Elizabeth Debicki, as a baubled and bangled baddie named Victoria, ably serving as sassy fashion plates.

While the actors are well-cast (save for Hammer and his Ruskie accent), the quippy script is droll without much sense of urgency. Although the world’s fate supposedly lies in the balance, Solo and Kuryakin quibble over whether you can accessorize a Paco Rabanne belt with a Tapu. There are several striking sequences: set to a Peppino Gagliardi ballata, Solo sits in a truck and sips Ruffino while a motorboat chase carries on in the background; a torture scene overseen by a Mengele-esque madman; the Dutch angles of Victoria lying atop a couch parallel to a prone, drugged Solo.

But if there’s such a thing as excessive cool. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. has it. Speedboats, race cars, Italian playboys, three-piece suits, Hugh Grant … it’s all there. What’s not there are genuine emotions and engaging action, from a confusingly edited backroads buggy chase to a mundane, detached climax. It’s a film to luxuriate over—like visiting an art gallery, you’ll enjoy much of what you see, but you won’t really feel like going back.

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.

POM Wonderful presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Tell me, just how safe is the 2011 Mini Cooper?

Grade: C –

Director and Starring: Morgan Spurlock

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 30 min.

There’s rich irony behind Morgan Spurlock making a documentary about the virulent infiltration of product placement into movies. Few films, and certainly no documentaries, have benefited more from brand integration than Super Size Me, Spurlock’s ballyhooed doc debut in which the filmmaker ate nothing but McDonald’s food for a month to illustrate the grip obesity has on America.

While this particular product placement was not necessarily for McDonald’s financial benefit, it was integral to the film’s popularity. The interest level in Super Size Me would not have been nearly as stratospheric had Spurlock just filmed himself for 30 days eating grandma’s apple pie and scarfing down cheeseburgers off the backyard grill. Taking on Mickey D’s gave the movie its moxie.

Seven years later, Spurlock is aghast to find marketing everywhere, even on the silver screen. So, the grand idea behind POM Wonderful presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is that Spurlock will produce a documentary about product placement in films (and society beyond) that features his efforts to solicit corporate sponsors willing to pay to place their products throughout his “docbuster.”

Camera crew in tow, Spurlock visits the boardrooms of beverage producers, hotel chains, car makers, gas stations, clothiers, and a shampoo made for both human and equine use, offering everything from commercial airtime during the film to conventional product placement during Spurlock’s many interviews, which are often held in close proximity to sponsoring planes or convenience stores. A deodorant conspicuously sits in front of Quentin Tarantino during his chat with Spurlock. And, yes, Spurlock sips a certain brand of pomegranate juice every chance he gets.

The gimmick is cute enough, but a true dissection of the issue at hand requires a ruthless, razor-sharp scalpel that Spurlock does not wield. Instead, he buttresses the film’s bona fides with celebrity cred, talking with consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Friday Night Lights director Peter Berg, Lost producer J.J. Abrams and others in between the blather of industry insiders and the particularly execrable man-on-the-street encounters that do nothing to illuminate the narrative. (“Is there truth in advertising?” is one banal topic of conversation that goes nowhere.)

Spurlock ventures out for an excursion to a Florida school system that’s selling ad space on property fencing and inside buses to generate needed revenue. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, the only empirical evidence he offers to gauge the effect of the city’s ban on outdoor advertising are random citizens remarking how they’re not as distracted as they used to be.

The film’s most eye-raising moment also illustrates futility. To demonstrate the science of “neuromarketing,” Spurlock undergoes an MRI to show how his brain reacts to certain commercial stimuli. It’s spooky, Clockwork Orange stuff, but Spurlock does not go the extra step to detail exactly how companies employ this technology to fashion their marketing plans.

The clever, truly satirical heart of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is that despite witnessing the purpose and mechanism behind the products placed throughout this film, viewers will still be more prone to try out the shoes, shampoo, and, of course, fruit juice being openly peddled.

Yet, while Spurlock rhetorically wonders whether he’s “selling out or buying in,” these semantics disguise the film’s true moral dilemma. It takes money to makes movies, including documentaries for which both the production costs and funding sources are lower. After Super Size Me, which grossed over $20 million worldwide off a $65,000 production budget, Spurlock spent much more to make his follow-up, Where in the World In Osama Bin Laden?, which only earned around $650,000.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is Spurlock’s vehicle to access the corporate quick money needed to finance his latest cinematic vanity project. In return, he attempts to insulate himself from criticism by meekly dressing down the very profiteering he’s exploiting. It’s a huckster’s dream: Spurlock makes his movie, the sponsors promote their brand, and the film distributor pockets a tidy sum. The audience is the one left holding the proverbial shopping bag.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at Indyweek.com - http://goo.gl/bvwXr

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