Jan. 2

Well, we're two days into the new year and already Gabriel and I are already confronted with our first (long) weekend alone.  Julia leaves early tomorrow morning for the AIA conference in Seattle and will be gone through most of Monday.  She'll have a good time there - she'll see the Space Needle, Pikes Place, the Fremont Troll, the art museums.

Gabriel and I?  Well, we'll pass the time, I'm sure.

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Over the Christmas break, David and I went to the movies twice.  For me, it was the first time I had been to the theater in a year - since David's last visit.

 
The first movie we saw was a film that had been in the theater a while, Robert Zemeckis' Flight.  Denzel Washington (in a superbly watchable, charismatic performance)  plays terrific air pilot Whip Whitaker, who nevertheless finds himself under fire when the plane he is piloting from Orlando to Atlanta crashes, killing six people.  Whip, an alcoholic, is found to have had cocaine and alcohol in his system, which puts his life and career and freedom in jeopardy.  Because Zemeckis is always at the forefront of cinematic possibility, you know that the plane crash is going to be a marvelously realistic, queasy sequence.  But the film was different than I expected - it plays out as an elongated warning against the dangers of alcoholism.  Not that I had a problem with this.  John Gatins' screenplay is detail-oriented and layered, and the supporting cast is very good: John Goodman (comic support) as Whip's dealer; Don Cheadle as the airline's lawyer; Bruce Greenwood as Whip's union rep; and, especially, English actress Kelly Reilly as the junkie who befriends Whip.

 
Django Unchained is a Quentin Tarantino film, so you know it's out to arouse and enrage and provoke.  Much has been said about the film's excessive use of the n-word; for me, it was just Tarantino's way of smearing history's ugliness in our faces.  It's also, of course, a lot of posturing.  There are no profound statements made about racism here; this is a film that knows it's a film.  We get oodles of great music, endless cinematic references and homages, clever framing, spot-the-cult-actor appearances... and, well, Christoph Waltz.  Waltz, who plays a bounty hunter who accompanies the titular freed slave (Jamie Foxx) to the Louisiana plantation to reunite with Django's wife (Kerry Washington, underutilized), just might turn out to be Tarantino's greatest discovery.  Once again, he's witty and off-balance, cheerfully, puckishly intelligent and ruthlessly swerving around amorality.  We have been hearing all year that this was the part that would win Leonardo DiCaprio his first Oscar; as the dandified plantation owner who likes to watch slaves beat each other to death, he's terrific.  When he disappears from the picture, the film turns into an overblown bloodbath.  Samuel L.Jackson does excellent work too as the true heart of evil, the 76-year old slave who for all intents and purposes is the power behind DiCaprio's throne - a malevolent, envious man who doesn't like to see other black people with higher social positions than him.  A highly, highly entertaining, if overlong, film, with great use of Jim Croce's 70's soft-rock classic "I Got a Name."              



Images courtesy of: 

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