STEALING PULP FICTION: What The Hell Is This Movie?

STEALING PULP FICTION
(Dir. Danny Turkiewicz, 2024)

So I haven’t been babbling ‘bout movies in a while because I’m finishing work on a book project, but I’ve been wanting to get back into it so I decided that I’d view, and review a new film that’s opening today in select theaters, and debuting on digital platforms. It’s a heist comedy about a couple of quirky, dorky guys who plot to steal Quentin Tarantino’s personal 35mm print of his 1994 classic PULP FICTION.

The leads are somewhat familiar faces as Jon Rudnitsky was a featured player on Saturday Night Live a decade ago, and Karan Soni plays the Indian taxi driver in the DEADPOOL movies. We are introduced to them in a prologue that is identified with white on black titles as “Pun-Themed Businesses.” This is a Seinfeld-ian exchange over drinks at the 321 Club in Los Angeles, where the duo propose ideas about an oyster bar called “Ah, Shucks,” and a royal-themed oxygen bar called “Air to the Throne.”

Yeah, this opening bit sets the tone – for better or for worse – and we go from there to accompany them to a midnight showing of PULP FICTION at a Tarantino-owned theater, and over burgers after the screening, they hatch the idea for the theft of the film reels, which they plan to sell (“It’s as valuable as gold,” Rudnitsky says).

The constantly quipping duo decide they need a third so they rope in their eye-rolling friend, Elizabeth (Cazzie David), despite the fact that she hates Tarantino (“He is misogynistic, foot-fetished freak, who doesn’t let the women in his films speak”). Then there’s the surprising addition to the caper of Jason Alexander, the only real name in this movie, as the guys’ therapist, who is going through marital problems, and it’s odd to seem him try to match Rudnitsky and Soni’s weird energy in the most un-George Constanza manner he can render.

Now this way this whole deal plays out is really dumb, and feels on-the-fly, improvised, and oddly self-satisfied, and just when I thought it couldn’t get any stupider, boy does it.

This largely happens when an actor (Seager Tennis) playing “Quentin Fuckin’ Tarantino” (that’s how he’s credited) shows up, who is made to look like him with a prosthetic chin, and is portrayed as angrily obnoxious, which reduces who is supposed to be celebrated here into a grotesque caricature.

Okay, I’m tired of writing about the plot. I was pretty baffled, and stupefied by this flick, which has a really short running time of only 78 minutes, even though it’s padded with things like unnecessary tennis, and on overly long dance scene finale. That last part is actually one of the funnier things in the film as the laconic Elizabeth character just stands there unengaged, with her arms folded while everybody around her makes a fool of themselves on the dance floor to Tina Charles’ “I Love to Love.”

You know, actually the film’s soundtrack, which of course riffs on Tarantino’s love of ‘70s soul, is pretty good with its use of Keith Mansfield’s 1969 instrumental “Funky Fanfare,” you know, the snazzy music that was used for the “Our Feature Presentation” title cards with the psychedelic background back in the day.

Thing is, the thought I kept having while watching STEALING PULP FICTION is what the hell is this movie? It’s such a goofy, half-assed endeavor dominated by the smug-ass Rudnitsky, who seems high on his own vibe, and it doesn’t really have anything to say about Tarantino’s masterwork that it can’t even dream of holding a candle too. But it is breezy, and watchable if you are looking for an hour and a half of idiocy, which is the only way I’d ever recommend it.

These guys – writer, director Turkiewicz; Rudnitsky, and Soni – do have some spunk in this junk, and I didn’t walk away disliking them, but damn, whatta really stupidly strange experience this is. I mean, nice try I guess, but how about making a real movie next time?

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Blog With A Cause Revisited: What Happened To The THREE IN THE ATTIC House?

One thing I’ve been bad about since I started this blog back in 2004 is following through on some series ideas. I start off with a post that I announce will be the beginning of a new series, then maybe do a second post then I let the series fall through the cracks.

Well, inspired by a thread on Facebook, I decided to revisit a subject from ages ago. Back in the late 2000s, I lived in the historic district of Chapel Hill, N.C. (my home town), and got involved in a small movement to save a house from demolition. The house, the Edward Kidder Graham House on the edge of the UNC campus, that served as the set of an obscure movie from the ‘60s: Richard Wilson’s bizarre 1968 comedy THREE IN THE ATTIC.

The movie concerns Christopher Jones as an unfaithful boyfriend whose three girlfriends (Yvette Mimieux, Judy Pace, and Maggie Threttlock) him in their sorority attic to punish him with more sex than he can take. I wrote about it in The Chapel Hill Newspaper, and on this here blog (read Part 1 & 2). In the summer of 2008, Ernest Dollar (executive director of the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill) asked me to host an outdoor screening of THREE IN THE ATTIC at the Horace Williams House (where I was the Caretaker).

Trouble was that the film was out of print and hard to find on video. I located a bootleg DVD of the teensploitation flick, and we showed that on a big bed sheet in the backyard. The audience appeared to really enjoy it as they laughed a lot throughout.

I introduced the movie by saying, “Durham has BULL DURHAM, what do we have? PATCH ADAMS (filmed in Chapel Hill in the late ‘90s)? No, we have THREE IN THE ATTIC!”

But what I never followed up on is what happened to the Edward Kidder Graham house. I moved to Raleigh in 2009, so I lost track of whether it attracted a buyer. I learned later that it was sold to Molly Froelich in 2010, and she started on the grand task of restoring the house. In 2013, it was sold to Martin and AraLu Lindsey, who finished the restoration. I have no idea if the flurry of activity around the house that the Preservation Society stirred up had anything to do with it, but I’m glad we did what we could to raise awareness of this cool historic home/movie location.

In the years since, THREE IN THE ATTIC has been re-issued on DVD along with its soundtrack (pictured at the top of this post). Although the DVD has gone out of print, the movie is available on Amazon Prime. In 2019, Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD, which is set in 1969 as it deals loosely with the Manson murders, has several references to the film. Firstly, a THREE IN THE ATTIC TV spot shows on Brad Pitt’s television at his squalor-filled trailer.

Among other advertisements for the film we see this glitzy Pantages Theater marquee:

Finally an excerpt of Chad & Jeremy’s “Paxton Quigley’s Had the Course” from THREE IN THE ATTIC plays at one point and is featured on the soundtrack of ONCE UPON A TIME. Seems that this many shout-outs would greatly suggest that Tarantino is a fan of the largely forgotten film.

Such a fan that Tarantino offered Paxton Quigley himself, Christopher Jones, a part in PULP FICTION, but Jones turned it down apparently because he didn’t want to have to order Maynard to wake up the gimp. Since 1970, the James Dean look-a-like Jones’ career largely went quiet with his last film being Larry Bishop’s MAD DOG TIME (1996). He passed in 2014.

So the odd little legacy of THREE IN THE ATTIC keeps on keepin’ on. It’s no classic, or even really a cult classic, but it is a funny curio that captures Chapel Hill in the late ‘60s. I’m glad the house was saved and renovated whether the film had anything to do with it or not. And, of course, I sure hope they paid special attention to the attic.

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ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD: The Film Babble Blog Review

Now playing at an vintage cinema palace near you:

ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD
(Dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film as director contains all of the elements that moviegoers have come to expect: snappy hipster dialogue, an ultra cool soundtrack of both classic and obscure pop and soul songs, eye-popping cinematography, stylish editing, multiple shots of women’s feet, and, of course, reams of gory, in-your-face violence.

Except for a sequence in Italy, the film is mainly set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, in which actress Sharon Tate (the pregnant wife of filmmaker Roman Polanski), and three of her friends, were murdered by members of the Manson family.

But Tarantino’s largely concerns the friendship between the fictional cowboy star Rick Dalton (a moody Leonardo DiCaprio), and his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (a smug Brad Pitt). Dalton was formerly the lead of a Western television series called Bounty Law, but has been reduced to playing guest star heavies on a bunch of various TV shows.

The film also follows Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) as she attends a screening of her next to last film, the Dean Martin comedy spy movie, THE WRECKING CREW, at the Bruin Theater. Meanwhile Booth picks up a hitchhiking hippy girl named Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), and takes her home to the Spaun Movie Ranch, where Charlie Manson, who doesn’t appear, and his hoard of followers reside. Booth is skeptical of the set-up as he used to work on the ranch and a visit with the ranch’s blind owner, George Ranch (Bruce Dern) doesn’t quell that.

Despite his doubting hesitation, Dalton, along with Booth travels to Italy to make several Spaghetti Westerns, and ends up marrying Italian actress Francesca Capucci (Lorenza Izzo).

When they return to Hollywood, the time of the murders approaches (times appear on the screen), and the killers approach in dark silhouettes that resemble the sinister shots of the four figures in the driveway in Jordan Peele’s US from earlier this year.

The climax is thrilling and funny in turns, but it might make the folks who found the instances of the intense, bloody, brutal action in THE HATEFUL EIGHT hard to stomach. It’s also an re-writing of history that recalls Tarantino’s sixth film, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS in its concept of wish fulfillment.

As usual, Tarantino has assembled an excellent ensemble that includes Al Pacino as producer/agent Marvin Schwarzs, Emile Hirsch as Jay Sebring, one of the victims of the murders; Timothy Olyphant as James Stacy, another Western actor; Dakota Fanning as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, and Kurt Russell as stunt coordinator Randy (Russell also doubles as the film’s narrator). But ultimately it's the terrific DeCaprio and Pitt whose movie this is.

ONCE UPON A TIME…is very enjoyable in stretches, but it has too many sequences in which characters just hang out (like in JACKIE BROWN, Tarantino wants us to hang out with the characters), and it has a rambling nature in which some scenes just go on and on – like the Spahn Ranch scene, for instance.

This is far from Tarantino’s greatest work, but it’s way better than his worst (meaning that it’s way superior to DEATH PROOF). With movie posters, lobby cards, and glossies covering nearly every wall, and segments from fictitious films rendered in the grainy, gritty film stock of the ‘60s-‘70s, the auteur filmmaker’s latest shows off his love of movies. It celebrates the era in which the golden age of cinema gave way to the exploitation movies that Tarantino takes many cues from.

Its effect is mostly infectious, but it doesn’t have much to say beyond “look kids, I can still bring it as a badass basher.” That’s great and all, but it’s way too meandering to come anyway close to being a masterpiece.

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Film Babble Blog's Top 10 Movies Of 2015 (With Spillover)

As the Academy Award nominations are going to be announced tomorrow, I thought it was finally time to unveil my top 10 movies of the last year. I saw over a hundred movies on the big screen in 2015, and I found it to be a good, not great, year for film. 

There are a number of notable films I haven’t seen yet, but, of course, you can never see ‘em all. So let’s get right to my favorite motion picture picks of '15, in descending order:

10. ROOM (Dir. Lenny Abrahamson)

Like I said in my review last fall, if Brie Larson doesn't get a Oscar nomination for her harrowing role as a woman who’s been held captive in a backyard shed for five years taking care of her five-year old son (the result of a rape by her abductor), I'll be very offended. The kid (Jason Tremblay) was pretty “on” too.

9. THE MARTIAN (Dir. Ridley Scott) Astronaut and can-do acheiver Matt Damon sciences the shit out of his predicament of being stuck on Mars, and it makes for an inspirational epic of cerebral sci-fi. Read my review here.

8. INSIDE OUT (Dirs. Pete Docter & Ronnie Del Carmen)

It's been five years since a Pixar film made my top 10, and this one definitely wins a placing because, as I wrote last summer, it pulls every heartstring there is.

7. THE HATEFUL EIGHT
(Dir. Quentin Tarantino)

The “Eighth Film by Quentin Tarantino,” as it's identified in its opening credits (who else does that?), is his most divisive work for sure, but its bloody Western mix of THE THING with RESERVOIR DOGS, with a splash of Agatha Christie, really entertained the bejesus out of me. Here's why.

6. ANOMALISA (Dir. Duke Johnson & Charlie Kaufman)

A stop-motion emotional masterpiece from the guy who brought you BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, ADAPTATION, and SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK. And it's the second film on my top 10 that has Jennifer Jason Leigh in it! My review of this delightful yet unnerving piece of high art will be posted when it opens in my area later this month.

5. CAROL (Dir. Todd Haynes)

Todd Haynes' film follow-up to one of my favorites of 2007 (I'M NOT THERE) is a sophisticated, complicated, and immaculately artful look at a lesbian love affair in the oppressive era of 1950s New York City. The performances by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are as pitch perfect as their setting. Read my review.

4. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
(Dir. George Miller)

As I wrote in my review last May, George Miller's fourth entry in the MAD MAX series is a “brutally brilliant blast”; “an orgy of fire-breathing cars, pole-swingers, chainsaws, steampunk thugs, and gas fire explosions all given a heavy metal soundtrack by a masked musician with a flame-throwing electric guitar atop a vehicle piled with amplifiers.” And it's even more awesome than that sounds.

3. SICARIO (Dir. Denis Villeneuve)

As modern action movies go, as much as I loved MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, this superbly dark cartel counterinsurgency thriller got to me more. The terrifically intense turns by Emily Blunt and Benicio Del Toro have a lot to do with that. My review.

2. THE REVENANT
(Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu)

Leonardo DiCaprio deserves (and will probably get) the Oscar for what he went through in the punishing wild here, but I predictTom Hardy will at least get a nomination too for his supporting part. The film itself, as well as Iñárritu, may also get nods, but coming after last year's win for BIRDMAN, I wouldn't bet on it. My review.

1. SPOTLIGHT (Dir. Tom McCarthy)

Tom McCarthy's fifth film, his follow-up to last year's infamous Adam Sandler flop THE COBBLER (WTF?), which focuses on the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team into the scandal of child molestation and systematic cover-up within the Catholic Church, is a clean, precise procedural about a extremely messy, and unsettling subject. 

The perfect storm of an excellent cast including Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, and Liev Schreiber; a sharp, involving screenplay, along with its top notch editing, score, and Masanobu Takayanagi's cinematography all collide together to make this my #1 movie of 2015. I'll be shocked if the Academy doesn't reward multiple categories for this one. My review.

Spillover: In no particular order, here's a bunch of other 2015 favorites:

LOVE & MERCY (Dir. Bill Pohlad)

THE BIG SHORT (Dir. Adam McKay)

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON (F. Gary Gray)

AMY (Dir. Asif Kapadia)

THE END OF THE TOUR (Dir. James Ponsoldt)

Legacyquel Tie: STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS (Dir. J.J. Abrams) / CREED (Dir. Ryan Coogler)

STEVE JOBS (Dir. Danny Boyle)

THE WALK (Dir. Robert Zemeckis)

EX MACHINA (Dir. Alex Garland)

THE SALT OF THE EARTH
(Dirs. Juliano Ribeiro Salgado & Wim Wenders)

WHILE WE’RE YOUNG (Dir. Noah Baumbach)

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION (Dir. Christopher McQuarrie) - Hey, it's a lot better than SPECTRE!

So, those are my picks for 2015. Let's see what Oscar has to say about it tomorrow morning.

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F*** The Haters, Tarantino’s THE HATEFUL EIGHT Is F***-in’ Great

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
(Dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2015)

Before “The Eighth Film by Quentin Tarantino,” as it’s identified in the opening credits (what other filmmaker does that?) properly begins, there’s a title card reading “Overture” accompanying an image of a silhouette of a stagecoach pulled by a team of horses, with snow-covered mountains in the background.

As composer Ennio Morricone’s intense minor melody slowly built, I found myself staring into the graphic until the shadows on the mountains became more and more ominous. One even started to resemble a lurching figure with a knife drawn, others looked like pools of blood, winding snakes, etc. This perfectly set the sinister tone for the three hour film following.

Tarantino’s Western opus, which is now playing exclusively in a limited Super CinemaScope 70mm Roadshow release (it begins a regular theatrical release in digital on January 8th, 2016), also features a 12-minute intermission, so it’s obvious that the filmmaker is reveling in giving us an old school cinema experience.

But, being Tarantino, it’s still sprinkled with his distinctive post-modernist stylings, meaning that it’s profane as f***, ultra gorey, and brimming with racially-fueled attitude.

Set in Wyoming, several years after the Civil War, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is broken up into a handful of chapters, recalling PULP FICTION except that there’s no prologue or epilogue.

In the first chapter, “Last Stage to Red Rock,” we are introduced to Tarantino regular Samuel L. Jackson as Major Marquis Warren aka “The Bounty Hunter,” Kurt Russell, who previously starred in Tarantino’s GRINDHOUSE half DEATH PROOF, as John Ruth, who is another bounty hunter dubbed “The Hangman” because he doesn’t kill his captures (he prefers to watch them get hanged after handing them over), and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Daisy Domergue aka “The Prisoner,” a wanted fugitive in Ruth’s custody.

Jackson’s Major Warren, who’s transporting the bodies of three of his bounties, hitches a ride with Russell’s Ruth on his stagecoach as it turns out that the two men had met before. Ruth recalls that Warren has a letter from President Lincoln in his possession, and asks to read it again, but Leigh’s uncouth, rednecky Domergue spits on it, causing Warren to slug her and she and Ruth tumble out of the stagecoach as they are handcuffed together.

Chapter Two, “Son of a Gun,” introduces Walton Goggins (The Shield, Justified, DJANGO UNCHAINED) as Chris Mannix of the infamous Mannix Marauders as Ruth tells us, who also hitches a ride with the crew, who claims, to Ruth’s disbelief, that he’s travelling to Red Rock to be appointed the town’s new sheriff. We get more inklings of back stories as the slickly racist Mannix tells Ruth a tale about how, after the war ended, Warren burned down a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in a prison escape (Warren: “The whole place was made of kindling…so I burnt it down”) killing 47 men which caused the South to put a reward on his head.

So there, we have half of the eight, and what Tarantino deems relevant info about their reputations, and Chapter Three, “Minnie's Haberdashery,” rounds out the rest - Demián Bichir as Bob (“The Mexican”), Bruce Dern as General Sandy Smithers (“The Confederate”), and a couple of RESERVOIR DOGS, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen, as Oswald Mobray (“The Little Man”), and Joe Gage (“The Cow Puncher”), respectively. 

Ruth, Warren, Domerque, and Mannix arrive at the chapter’s title stagecoach stop to find that Bichir’s Bob is looking after the place while Minnie is visiting her mother – or so he says.

The rest of the movie takes place in the log cabin interior of Minnie’s with the most elaborate Mexican standoff that Tarantino has ever mounted. When we come back from the intermission, there’s suddenly a narrator (an uncredited Tarantino) who tells us that during the last scene, somebody seen only by Domergue poisons the coffee (Chapter title: “Domergue Has a Secret”), so we’ve got that mystery to chew on (along with the puzzle of who’s in secret cahoots with who), and we get one of the writer/director’s patented time juggling so we get to see what was happening during the same time as the setup.

In a flashback chapter, “The Four Passengers,” that would be too spoilery to describe, we have a few moments with the only other women in this brutal boy’s club: Tarantino’s trusty stuntwoman Zoë Bell, the motherly Dana Gourrier (as Minnie), and the lovely Belinda Owino. This segment also prominently features Channing Tatum, but damn if I’m gonna tell you how his character factors in.

I won’t go into the particulars of the big ass finale, “Black Man, White Hell,” but will say that it sure packs a bloody wallop.

Leigh’s Domergue, who gets her face bashed in so much throughout the film by Russell’s Ruth that she’s a disgusting, blood-soaked mess (with convincingly broken teeth too) way before the end, can be difficult to look at in ginormous, 70mm close-ups, but the actress owns the role with such intensity that I could never look away.

It’s cool that this is the second ultra violent Western that Russell has starred in this year - the great BONE TOMAHAWK being the other. The guy seems at confident ease with this sort of material (having the classic ‘90s Western TOMBSTONE in his background surely helps) and really rocks the thick, gray handlebar mustache. 

And, in his 6th Tarantino film, Jackson stands out yet again. With his sharp, smart delivery, Jackson's Major Warren has many of the film's most amusing lines and moments, and was one of the only characters I cared about getting out of the cabin alive.

It’s fitting that Madsen and Roth are on hand as the Tarantino joint this most echoes is RESERVOIR DOGS with its one-setting, and aforementioned Mexican standoff scenario. I wouldn’t put this in the same class with that outstanding debut or its classic follow-up PULP FICTION, but I enjoyed it more than his last few films, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS and DJANGO UNCHAINED, and I liked those films quite a bit.

It already appears that THE HATEFUL EIGHT may be Tarantino’s most divisive movie yet. I’ve seen critic friends post that they thought it was a cinematic masterpiece, and seen others declare that it’s one of the year’s worst movies.

But I was intensely entertained throughout its three hour running time – I can understand folks thinking that it’s way too long and talky, but I found the dialogue, deliciously laced with evil undercurrent, to be consistently involving (as well as funny as f***), and I devoured how Tarantino through the sharp lens of cinematographer Robert Richardson made the spare scenery so immersive.

I also don’t agree about the charges of misogyny that have been leveled at it. Like almost all the men here, Leigh’s Daisy Domergue is a scary, murderous outlaw, and the actress nailed it in a recent Q & A when she said “She’s a killer. She’s gutsy and her whole identity is, ‘Yeah, give me what you’ve got, it doesn’t mean anything to me. Hit me again, I don’t give a f**king sh*t.’”

So in that spirit, I’ll sum up by saying f*** the haters, Tarantino’s THE HATEFUL EIGHT is f***-in’ great. See it in 70mm if you can.

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New Releases On Blu Ray & DVD: 4/16/13

Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation Western revenge romp DJANGO UNCHAINED, starring Jamie Fox, Christoph Waltz, and Leonardo DiCaprio, heads the pack of new releases this week with a Two-Disc Combo Pack (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet) edition, or a single disc DVD version, if you don’t have a Blu ray player. 

Special Features: A smattering of featurettes: “Reimagining the Spaghetti Western: The Horses & Stunts of DJANGO UNCHAINED,” “Remembering J. Michael Riva: The Production Design of DJANGO UNCHAINED,” “The Costume Designs of Sharen Davis,” “20 Years in the Making: The Tarantino XX Blu-ray™ Collection,” and “DJANGO UNCHAINED Soundtrack Spot.”

Tarantino’s specialty label Rolling Thunder Pictures takes advantage of the home video release date of DJANGO with a Triple Feature Presentation of Ho Meng-Hua’s THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (a.k.a. GOLIATHAN, 1977), Arthur Mark’s DETROIT 9000 (1973), and Jack Hill’s SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975). Each film is presented with scratchy prints, and there is no bonus material, but if you’re a fan of grimy grind-house cinema, it’s a neat DVD-only single disc deal. 

Having seen all three films (SWITCHBLADE SISTERS screened in Raleigh as part of the ongoing Cinema Overdrive series at the Colony Theater in 2010), I can say that there is a fair amount of schlocky fun to be had, but I have more than a feeling that Tarantino is so much more amused by this sleazy stuff than I am. 

The cool retro release of the week has to be the Criterion Collection’s Blu ray Special Edition of Alec Cox’s REPO MAN. The 1984 cult favorite, which I wrote about seeing on the big screen in 2009 (Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of REPO MAN, 3/19/09), has been given a Cox-approved new high-definition digital restoration, commentary featuring Cox and other cast, interviews with Cox, Richardson, and Zamora and more cast, deleted scenes, the complete “cleaned-up” television version of the film (!) prepared by Cox, trailers, and a booklet featuring an essay by critic Sam McPheeters. Nice! Oddly, the DVD edition is a 2-disc set while the Blu ray is a single disc. Usually it's the other way around.

This being an ever lamer Blu ray and DVD release date than last week, there’s not much to report on. Two movies I haven’t seen, the French CGI-animated feature, Bibo Bergeron’s A MONSTER IN PARIS, that got good critical notices but little attention, hits both formats, and Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s 2011 martial arts thriller DRAGON gets a Blu ray release, but beyond that I’d be hard pressed to point out anything very interesting. Check out Amazon’s list of today’s releases and tell me I’m wrong.

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Quentin Tarantino To Direct And Star In CITIZEN KANE Remake

Even in a world with so many remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings, Orson Welles’s 1941 classic CITIZEN KANE seemed to be safe as a sacred cow that nobody would even think of touching…until now.

Wunderkind writer, director, and sometime actor Quentin Tarantino has just announced that his next project will be a remake of Welles’ masterpiece, considered by many to be one of the greatest motion pictures ever, and that it will be his final film.

“I want to make one last epic statement as a film maker and then retire, and what better way to go out with a bang than to prove that I can make a better movie out of what people think is the best movie ever?” Tarantino told Empire magazine. “My version will blow Welles’ out of the water, and it’ll be in IMAX 3D. Imagine the shards of the snow globe coming right at you! It’ll be awesome.”

The casting of himself in the iconic Charles Foster Kane part will surely be controversial, but his selection of Christoph Waltz to play Jedediah Leland, a role previously inhabited by Joseph Cotton, means that the Academy should just go ahead and engrave his name on another Oscar.

Further shocking film fans, Tarantino claims, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, that he’s never seen the original film in full. “I’ve seen parts of it on the monitor at Video Archives, the video store I used to work at before hitting the big-time, but I always had to go help customers and missed parts of it.”

Tarantino says he will view the movie once, but then never refer to it again. “I want my own vision to take over; I don’t want to make a shot-by-shot remake like Gus Van Zant did with PSYCHO. Man, that really sucked!”

So crazy that it just might work, Tarantino’s CITIZEN KANE is slated for a Christmas 2014 release.

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Holiday Season Cinema Roundup 2012 Part 1

This hasn’t been the strongest holiday movie season I’ve experienced (how could it be without the Coen brothers or George Clooney?), but it’s a pretty strong one with a few entertaining epics, a couple of decent comedies, and one big overwrought musical competing for movie-goers attention.

So let’s take a look at what’s currently playing as the year is ending:

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK 
(Dir. David O. Russell)

Although it must be stressed that this is ultimately a best-case scenario rom com, this tale of a bio-polar Bradley Cooper getting together with Jennifer Lawrence as a neurotic widower has a punchy screenplay that’s energetically (and very loudly) delivered by the leads, including Robert De Niro, in one of his most invested performance in years, as Cooper’s Philadelphia Eagles superfan father. Chris Tucker, who keeps popping up after repeatedly escaping from Cooper’s former mental institution, adds to the film’s already plentiful laughs. Director and screenwriter Russell's last film, 2010's THE FIGHTER, was a winner as well, so here's hoping he's on a roll.

HITCHCOCK 
(Dir. Sacha Gervasi)   

Sacha Gervasi’s (2008's rock doc ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL) second film as director boasts a stellar cast - Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collett, and Danny Huston – but a not so stellar story. The conceit that every good idea that went into the making of the classic 1960 thriller PSYCHO came not from the Master of Suspense, but from his wife Alma falls flat in the midst of these fine actors being put through T.V. movie-ish motions. Read my full review here.

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Dir. Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson takes us on another sweeping slog through Middle Earth in this prequel set 60 years before THE LORD OF THE RINGS series. Martin Freeman, best known as Tim on the mockumentary sitcom The Office [UK], stars as Bilbo Baggins who reluctantly finds himself on a quest with an unruly band of dwarves to overtake what looks like the Paramount mountain. I saw it in HFR (Higher Frame Rate) 3D, but, although it looked exquisitely sharp, it wasn’t as immersive an experience as I’d heard. Probably would’ve been just as well off with the 2D version.

There are some amazing heavily CGI-ed sequences, including battles and chases inside an elaborate underground city that comes off like THE TEMPLE OF DOOM times 100, but you can really feel its length (169 min.), and the idea that this is just part one of another trilogy seems to come more from greed than pure inspiration. 

But that's too cynical of me. This is really for the legions of Tolkien fans who can’t get enough of this stuff and will love spending more time with Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, and getting cameos from Frodo (Elijah Wood), and Ian Holms as the older incarnation of Bilbo who presents the story as a flashback. What I enjoyed most was Bilbo's cave encounter with the slimy creature Gollum (once again beautifully played by motion-capture specialist Andy Serkis), which is nicely faithful to the original Tolkien text.

 DJANGO UNCHAINED 
(Dir. Quentin Tarantino)

Tarantino’s blaxploitation Western is also a long-ass film (165 min!) that could’ve been served by better editing (sadly his long-time editor Sally Menke died in 2010), but it’s still a hugely entertaining epic that tackles revenge, slavery, and possibly contains the most excessive use of the “N-word” in cinematic history. 

Jamie Fox stars as a slave who gets freed by a former dentist played by Christoph Waltz who offers Fox a new job as a bounty hunter. Together, they set off to rescue Fox’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the plantation of the brutal yet charming Leonardo DiCaprio. The film drags a bit in DiCaprio’s company, which includes Samuel L. Jackson as his cruel conniving house slave, but when its “on” it's a blast. Read my full review here.

Coming soon: Part 2 of Film Babble Blog's Holiday Season 2012 Roundup.

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Tarantino's Overlong DJANGO Is Off The Chain

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

DJANGO UNCHAINED (Dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

Three years after his revisionist World War II epic INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, Quentin Tarantino is back with this blaxploitation Western, which tackles slavery, revenge, and how many times the “N-word” can be said in a 2 hour and 45 minute movie.

Almost as if he’s atoning for playing an evil Nazi in BASTERDS, Christoph Waltz portrays an abolitionist-minded bounty hunter who frees a slave named Django (Jamie Fox) from his sinister masters (James Remar and James Russo) in the deep south of 1859. 

Waltz recruits Fox to join him in his bounty hunting (“Kill white people and get paid for it? What's not to like?”), and they set off to rescue Fox’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of Leonardo DiCaprio as a brutal yet charming Mississippi plantation owner.

Tarantino takes his sweet time getting to DiCaprio’s plantation, as Fox and Waltz make their way across the terrain, beautifully shot by cinematographer Robert Richardson. At times the film comes off like a collection of comedy sketches loosely strung together. One scene, in which a Colonel Sanders-looking Don Johnson as another villainous plantation owner named Big Daddy argues with his men about the badly cut slits in their proto Klan hoods, feels like it could’ve been an outtake from BLAZING SADDLES.

Dinner at DiCaprio’s, with his house slave (an intensely invested Samuel L. Jackson), is also leisurely paced. Fox and Waltz, under the guise of slave traders, are trying to pull the wool over DiCaprio’s eyes and liberate Washington, but Jackson sniffs them out. This is one of those slow burning sequences that can only end in bloodshed, but Tarantino drags it out too much, which calls attention to how slim the narrative is.

The Spaghetti Westerns and ‘70s grindhouse movies that Tarantino is forever paying homage to didn’t have very layered storylines either, so that’s not too terrible an issue, but it’s sometimes tedious how he cares more about hanging out with his characters than putting them into challenging scenarios.

From the retro Columbia studios logo to the RZA’s “Ode To Django” that plays during the end credits, DJANGO UNCHAINED feels like a Tarantino movie through and through. It’s a profanity-laced dialogue-driven violent action comedy with well chosen cameos (look for Jonah Hill, The Dukes of Hazzard’s Tom Wopat, Tarantino (you knew he'd show up, right?) and the original Django himself, Franco Nero), set to a hip soundtrack (a mix of Ennio Morricone, hip hop, and even a little Johnny Cash), that could only come from the twisted mind of the 49 year old former video store clerk.

Fox puts in a solidly stoic performance as the title character, interacting superbly with Waltz, both obviously having a blast with Tarantino’s way with words. DiCaprio, sporting a devilish goatee, also appears to be having fun, but he’s not given a very interesting character. DiCaprio doesn’t come off as despicable as he’s supposed to be. It’s Jackson who takes that honor.

And, of course, it's a boy's club, so don't expect much from the women present - Washington, at least, makes her presence known.

DJANGO may be more for Tarantino fanatics than casual movie-goers, so if you don’t have much tolerance for the man’s particular brand of abrasive cinema, you won’t be won over. Fanboys will be picking it apart and poring over the inevitable much longer director’s cut (a four hour version may be released to theaters depending on the box office of this one) for years, but I doubt many of them will think its Tarantino’s best film.

So anyway, it's pretty a pretty ballsy move for the Weinstein Co. to release this movie, maybe containing the most excessive use of the N-word in cinematic history, on Christmas Day. It's a move that proves that, these days, a Tarantino movie, however crude the content, is a tent-pole event.

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Blu Ray Review: HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (Dir. Jason Eisener, 2010)

This is the second, and with hope the last, movie to be spun off of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s fake exploitation double feature GRINDHOUSE (2007). Like last year’s MACHETE, it’s based on one of the trailer parodies that were the best part of that failed experiment. Also like MACHETE, it’s a lame ass excuse for a film that should’ve remained a 2 minute piece of funny filler.

One of the only things the Canadian made HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN has got going for it is Rutger Hauer (BLADE RUNNER, THE HITCHER) as the title character. Hauer is intensely invested in his part, actually taking it seriously, while the movie around him is grueling and ugly. It's a simple story of a man who gets off a freight train in a ficticious hellhole of a city where gangs rule the streets, the cops are corrupt, and every woman is a prostitute.

There's a vicious slick-backed Brian Downey as the crime lord in charge who declares war on all the homeless after Hauer's attempt to clean up the streets with a newly acquired shotgun. One of the few laughs in the film is the headline: "Hobo stops begging, demands change."

The hobo befriends a hooker with a heart of gold (Molly Dunsworth) who, of course, he'll have to defend in the ginormous violent orgy of blood that concludes the film.

The conclusion cant come soon enough as this is one of the most unpleasant and least entertaining film I've seen since, well, MACHETE. There's little sense of fun or satire here, it's just a series of sick scenes with disgusting dialogue (like "First I gotta wipe this guy's ass off of my face") and pointless imitations of cheap '70s and '80s filming styles, or lack of styles more accurrately.

I know some folks enjoy this kind of carnage, but I couldn't stand seeing shots of Hauer eating glass, a schoolbus of children getting torched, or any of the irritating tortuous actions of Downey's amped-up sons Nick Bateman and Gregory Smith.

It's feels futile to call this a horrible movie, because that's what its trying to be - a purposely sleazy piece of cinematic crap, you know like they used to make and the kids used eat up. But as GRINDHOUSE and MACHETE have shown, the kids aren't eating up this stuff. They both flopped bigtime and HOBO has only made a third of its 3 million dollar budget so the phony exploitation thing really isn't flying.

Maybe now they'll give up the grindhouse and we can all move on.

Special Features on 2 Disc Collector's Edition: Digital Copy, Shotgun Mode (Behind The Scenes Interactive Movie Feature), Commentary with Jason Eisener and Rutger Hauer, Commentary with Eisener and writer John Davies, producer Rob Cotterill, and David Brunt, "More Blood, More Heart: The Making of HOBO AND A SHOTGUN", Deleted Scenes, Alternate Ending, Video Blogs, Camera Test Reel, Fangoria Interviews, Redband Trailer, and other stuff I'm too tired to type.

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ENTER THE VOID Now Streaming On Netflix Instant

Now available on Blu ray, DVD, and Netflix Instant:

ENTER THE VOID (Dir. Gaspar Noé, 2009)

After beautifully bombastic credits, which Quentin Tarantino called "Maybe best credit scene of the decade...one of the greatest in cinema history", we see Toyko through the eyes of Nathaniel Brown, a young American drug dealer.

The camera acts as his vision, we only see Brown's face when he looks in the mirror.

Brown smokes a few hits of dimethyltryptamine, aka DMT, and his mind goes on a surreal CGI journey resembling the "Beyond the Infinite" climax of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY or the wormhole from STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE.

A friend (Cyril Roy) comes by Brown's apartment and accompanies him through the neon drenched streets to a club called "The Void" in order to do a drug deal.

Roy speaks of "The Tibetan Book Of The Dead", a book he lent to Brown, explaining how one's spirit sticks around for a while after death before it is re-incarnated.

When the drug deal at the club goes horribly wrong, Brown is shot by police in the restroom and his spirit does just that - it hovers above watching the people he knew and flashes back to the major events of his life.

He watches his erotic dancer sister (Paz de la Huerta) as she reacts to news of her brother, and we learn of their shared childhood past - most traumatically the violent automobile death of their parents they witnessed from the back seat of the car.

We follow Brown, point of view-wise, through these tangents over and over and it's an engrossing yet at times highly disturbing experience.

It can be frustrating too - I loved it at first, feeling like I was inside something instead of just the normal sensation of watching a movie, then I hated it for a bit wishing Brown's spirit didn't linger so long when watching his sister have sex with her seedy nightclub owner boss (Masato Tanno).

But, hey, in the afterlife what else are you going to do?

I ended up loving it again as it wound its strands into a jarring conclusion.

There's a WAKING LIFE-like philosophical nature to its flow of imagery, and a raw energy to the aftermath our decased protagonist watches that took me in and, well, kind of freaked me out.

With it's 2 hour and 23 minute running time, ENTER THE VOID is too long (there's an extended "Director's Cut" on Blu ray and DVD if one doesn't agree with that), but it's a vivid, overwhelming, and incredibly crafted work.

Director Noé, whose stunning yet also disturbing IRREVERSIBLE blindsided critics back in 2002, is developing a visionary style that can take film goers on an unforgettable ride - though one that may test their patience.

Curious movie lovers looking to venture away from the mainstream into uncertain waters should take him up on this particular challenge.

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Blu Ray Review: MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)

MYSTERY TRAIN (Dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1989)

There are several notable elements that Quentin Tarantino took to the bank a few years later heavily on display in Jim Jarmusch’s 3rd feature film MYSTERY TRAIN, now out on a special edition DVD / Blu ray courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

First off, there’s the non linear story-line that gives us three different scenarios that happen at the same time from different perspectives.

Second, there’s the hipster soundtrack that posits Elvis Presley (of course, it being a Memphis movie), Otis Redding, and the Bar-Kays to decorate the film’s scrappy edges. Third, there’s an ultra hip disc jockey who is heard throughout the movie (think: Steven Wright in RESERVOIR DOGS) spinning that cool soundtrack - Jarmusch regular Tom Waits does the duty here. Fourth, there’s Steve Buscemi.

MYSTERY TRAIN is an independent gem that was for a long time endangered to be a forgotten film. This spiffy new Criterion Collection edition not only saves it from that fate; it presents it as the classic that anybody who saw it in the last 20 years knew it was all along.

It’s a movie in which the locale is as much a character as any of its cast. Memphis comes off as a ghost town with dilapidated buildings, dive bars, and a very decrepit hotel – the Arcade Hotel which was raized the year after the film finished shooting. All 3 separate storylines, the names of which are “Far From Yokohama”, “A Ghost”, and “Lost In Space”, take place on the same hot night in Memphis, Tennessee.

In the first story, Youki Kudoh and Masatoshi Nagase play a young couple on somewhat of a religious pilgrimage – they want to visit the old stomping grounds of the King of Rock and Roll and his minions. Their tour of Sun studios tasks them and they constantly bicker about who’s better: Carl Perkins or Elvis Presley.

The next narrative involves Nicoletta Brasch as a recent widow stranded in Memphis while escorting her husband's coffin back to Italy. At a diner she listens to a creepy Tom Noonan telling a story about the ghost of Elvis and later with Elizabeth Bracco as a woman fleeing an abusive ex she re-tells the story. Bracco reacts harshly: “Is this the one where the guy has to go to Graceland and it turns out to be Elvis? I think I’ve heard this a hundred times. I think almost everybody in Memphis has picked up Elvis’s ghost hitchhiking.”

In the third storyline, Steve Buscemi, Joe Strummer (of the Clash), and Rick Aviles navigate through a drunken criminal night ending up at the same hotel as the previous protagonists. The ghost of Elvis lingers as Strummer is referred to as “Elvis” much to his chagrin: “Don't call me Elvis! If you can't use my proper name, why don't you try 'Carl Perkins, Jr.' or something?”


 

The details concerning a gunshot that is heard in the preceding stories are made clear in the final story and with it the arc is complete. As the night clerk and bellboy of the Arcade Hotel, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinqué Lee are the most consistent characters in the movie – they encounter all the movie’s players in all 3 scenarios and handle them with memorable flair. “Mystery Train” concerns the intertwining stories of foreigners in a quintessential American city.

Like in many of his other films Jarmusch comes off like an American film maker who makes foreign films about America. In my humble opinion this is his best.

Bonus features or as Criterion calls them – Supplements: A rambling but highly amusing Q & A with Jarmusch in lieu of a commentary (his words there not mine) and a couple of cool featurettes including a documentary on the film’s locations and Memphis's musical history and on-set photos by Masayoshi Sukita. 

There’s also an excerpt (19 min.) of a 2001 documentary on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins entitled “I Put a Spell on Me”. All excellent extras on an essential indie classic.

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