STRICTLY BALLROOM (Three Stars)

Australia-U.S.: Baz Luhrmann, 1992 (Miramax Lionsgate)

Before the razzle-dazzle of Romeo and Juliet, or the spectacular virtuosity of Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann sparkled on a smaller stage in his Australian sleeper hit Strictly Ballroom, a nifty, lower-budgeted, but still flashy and imaginative little gem of a musical movie.

It’s Lurhmann’s romantic look at a small time Australian dance contest and at the gorgeous couple (Paul Mercurio and Tara Morice) who break the rules, fashion some fancy new steps and set the show on its ear. (The movie’s signature tune is Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”) The whole show is pretty, exhilarating and fun to watch — and so is the wannabe star couple. Of course, they’re no Fred and Ginger. But then, nobody is.

Extras: Commentary; Documentary with Luhrmann; Featurette; Deleted scene; Design Gallery.

CLOAK AND DAGGER (Three Stars)

U.S.: Fritz Lang, 1946 (Olive).

Fritz Lang was at his Hollywood studio best in the 40s, especially in the middle of the decade, when he made Ministry of Fear and The Woman in the Window (both 1944) and Scarlet Street (1945) — all films with good scripts or strong literary sources that Lang made even more special. On the other hand, Cloak and Dagger, the glossy World War II spy drama that Lang directed a year later (1946), is well-directed and supremely well-shot (by Sol Polito), but not that well-written. It’s an unimaginative intrigue-as-usual film noir that, while not bad, isn’t too high in the Lang canon.

It’s an unabashed formula picture, with a professional but hackneyed boy-meets-girl plot. American Spy Gary Cooper (a.k.a. Professor Alvah Jesper) and resistance fighter Lilli Palmer flirt and run in the waning days of World War II, in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, where Coop has been parachuted to prevent wizened little professor Vladimir Sokoloff (Polda) from inventing the atom bomb for Hitler before the Manhattan project back home. Coop’s mission: snatch the scientist and fly him out — while doing his best to score points with Palmer, an Austrian-German actress playing an Italian partisan named Gina. Helping out is another dashing partisan, Pinkie, played by Robert Alda, who had just starred as George Gershwin in the 1945 bio-musical Rhapsody in Blue and might have better employed as Coop’s romantic rival.

Cloak and Dagger is hamstrung by a second-rate script, as clichéd as its title, even though it was written by two celebrated Hollywood lefties (and later members of the Hollywood Ten) Ring Lardner, Jr. and Albert Maltz, and is based on a story by Boris Ingster, the director of the 1940 film noir classic Stranger on the Third Floor. With all that talent, there’s nothing particularly wrong with Cloak and Dagger, but nothing particularly right with it either: little that’s very memorable or exciting, even while Coop is racing though Europe, one step ahead of the Gestapo. (One exception: the nerve-rnding, near-silent fight-to-the-death between Coop and a suspicious Nazi, with a bustling street outside.)

The picture’s major flaw is that it doesn’t have a continuous, effective villain, like Dan Duryea in Lang’s three previous pictures. One good, suave heavy (maybe like Palmer’s husband Rex Harrison) could have given Coop something stronger to play against, and juiced up the show. But perhaps we expect too much here of the auteur of Metropolis and M, and maybe too much of Gary Cooper, who despite his problems impersonating a nuclear professor and German-speaking spy, does still manage to look super-duper. By the way, if you can spot any Communist propaganda in this movie, you may have a future on Fox News.

THE GUILT TRIP (Two and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Anne Fletcher, 2012 (Paramount)

The Guilt Trip they call it? Well, in this movie, Barbra Streisand, bless her, plays a nice Jewish mother named Joyce Brewster and Seth Rogen plays her not-so-nice Jewish, or at least half-Jewish, son Andy — and for this movie I have just one word: Meshuggener! No, that’s not nice. The movie tried. Its heart was in the right place. It’s about a mother and son — a nice picture for this holiday season, when a mother is lucky if she hears from her son, once — and the two of them are driving cross-country together while he peddles his invention, this super-duper cleaning product that he invented, called Sci-o-clean or Schmatzo-Clean or something. I’m not kidding. It sounds like Hollywood mishigoss, I know. But Andy is taking his cleaner to these big corporations all over the country, a cleaner they make out of coconuts and soy sauce, and Joyce, the mother is there for, you now, moral support. Moral support! We should all have such moral support when we drive cross-country to peddle our coconuts.

Would you like a little chicken soup? It’s no trouble; it’s just in the rerigerator. No, it’s no trouble; don‘t worry about it. Such a worrier, like my cousin Si….So, anyway the two of them, Joyce the mother and Andy the son, they drive from Virginia to Texas to Santa Fe to San Francisco (so economically too, in a compact car and with what do you call them, process shots out the window). And, on the way they quibble and they kvetch. He quibbles and she kvetches. And he screams. Oy! A little too much, maybe.

One thing I have to ask. Barbra Streisand, she‘s a lovely lady still, still– with a lovely voice. (She’s 70, really? My God, she looks 50.) So why didn’t they give her a song to sing? They’re embarrassed maybe that she once played Fanny Brice in that movie Funny Girl and she sang “People who need people?” They’re embarrassed that she could make people cry with her singing? This movie should have a song and a scene half as good as “People, people who need people, are the luckiest people…”. I’m serious. Or half as good as “Second Hand Rose.” “Even Jake the plumbuh, he’s the man I adoah. He had the noive ta tell me…“

Okay, okay, I’ll stop singing, Mr, Caruso. Mr. Pavarotti, Mr. Golden Throat Cantor Sirota Placido Domingo, whom nobody can sing to when he’s around. But this Guilty Trip or whatever, it should even have a song as good as, you should pardon the expression, “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog” by Mr. Elvis the Pelvis Presley. And you know, I bet Miss Streisand could probably make us cry with that one too. “Hound dogs, hound dogs who need hound dogs…” Okay, okay. Such a sense of humor you don’t have.

The movie, too. I mean it. Miss Barbra, she‘s a funny lady, too, still, so why didn’t they give her a joke to tell? Ot a joke that was, God forgive me, funny, at least. I’m serious. Or rather The Guilty Trip is serious, too serious. The jokes in this movie, they give you the idea the writer and the director think it would be disrespectful to laugh too hard. Can you imagine? They have a perfectly good funny actress playing the mother, Miss Barbra Streisand, and a perfectly good funny actor playing the son, Mr, Seth Rogen, and still the best joke they can come up with is Mrs. Brewster trying to win a contest and she should, forgive me, make a pig out of herself eating a four-and-a-half pound steak at some fancy Texas steakhouse called Cattleman’s Ranch or The Cattle Kettle or something, full of, what do you call them, cowpokes. Cowpokers. Cowboys. Like Mr. Ben Graw, this cowpuncher played by Mr. Brett Cullen, who likes Joyce and who reminded me a little of Cousin Randy the laminectomy specialist. A little. Whatever. Eat your soup; it’s getting cold.

Anyway, Miss Barbra. She eats. She’s almost done. She stops. No explanation, except maybe you know, she feels queasy. This is as good as they’ve got? This is a big fancy-schmancy expensive Hollywood joke? A joke about almost vomiting? And as for that contest, that mishigoss, that so-called prize: that’s all she gets for eating, God help us, a four-, five-pound steak with a salad and potatoes and biscuits and some kind of dessert? That’s all those cheapskate cowpokers give her as a prize, is that when she eats it all, she gets one, you should excuse the expression, lousy free dinner? And maybe some Pepto? They should give her free steaks till the cows come home, and they should give it to everybody in their so-called phony contests, except of course your cousin Diana, the Greenwich Village Vegan, God bless her. (Eat your soup; it looks lonely sitting there. Be polite.) Chiselers, that’s what they are. In the script I mean. I know none of it really happened, thank you very much.

Then, Mr. Seth Rogen. About him, I was completely bewildered, I must tell you. Rogen: The actor who plays Joyce’s son Andy, who looks like my cousin Si’s nebbish son Ricky. Andy, the so-called son! You should excuse that expression too: Mr. Rogen, the star of that distinguished world-renowned moving picture, Knocked Up. What does he do now that he’s not running around, you should excuse the expression, knocking people up? Knocking ladies up?

He yells at his mother. He insults his mother. He’s embarrassed by his mother. His mother who gave him life and cooked his meals and cleaned up his messy room and made sure he didn’t walk to school with his pants on backwards and his hat upside down. For this– Mr, Fancy Schmancy Seth Rogen — you scream and carry on like your mother committed some kind of crime? Such a son as that, he should be ashamed. He should be eating her steak for her. For shame, Mr. Fancy Schmancy Seth Rogen. I hope some day when you knock some more people up, you should have such a son as that.

You know what would have saved this Guilty Trip for me? If at the end, when they have those credits that go on forever — like Cousin Si’s second wife Mabel or Uncle Bert talking about his gout — they’d had Miss Streisand sing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.“ Wouldn’t that have been nice? They could have brought in Mr. Tony Bennett, I’m sure they’re friends, to sing it with her. Such a song: perfect for her. It would have given people a nice feeling when they left the theater.

What? You think it’s corny? Corny, he says? Thank you Mr. New York sophisticate Top Ten David Letterman. Like nobody wants to hear Barbra Streisand and Tony Bennett sing a wonderful song about the city San Francisco where the mother Joyce and son Andy end up? Well, maybe. The world has changed is all I can say. Wait a minute. You say I’m all confused? This movie isn‘t The Guilty Trip; It‘s The Guilt Trip? Like that‘s some big difference? Oh, I see.

You say The Guilt Trip is actually a tribute to the screenwriter’s mother — written, by the cartoon writer, Mr. Dan Fogleberg, excuse me, Dan Fogleman — who wrote those nice cartoons, Cars and Bolt and Tangled. And he wrote this movie about his own mother, Joyce, and named Miss Streisand‘s character Joyce after her. You’re sure? Andy the character is actually taking his mother across country while he peddles his coconuts, because he wants to have a reunion between Joyce and her old boyfriend, the man she gave up for Andy’s father, also named Andy? And there’s a surprise ending? Oh sure there is, like these people in Hollywood can keep a secret.

Well, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. If Mr. Fogle-Schmogel writes about what he did to help his mother, he must be a nice boy. At heart. These movies today are so confusing, I think maybe they even confuse the people who make them. So I‘m sorry, sorry. Sorry to you, Miss Streisand, Sorry to you Mr. Fancy Schmancy Seth Rogen. (Yes, I won’t call him fancy-schmancy any more. ) Sorry to you, Mr Unfancy Rogen. Sorry to Miss Director Anne Fletcher. (Did she really make a movie about 27 Dresses? How industrious!)

As for Mr, Dan Fogleman. Well, God bless him, I say. There’s a son. Not like some sons I could name who can never pick up the phone and dial a number or answer a phone call when somebody makes it across country, at all that expense? No, he wouldn’t treat his mother like that. Instead, he makes a movie about her, even if it’s sometimes hard to understand. Or sometimes even corny. What can I say? Nothing. No, one thing I do say. Meshuggener!

Not the movie. Somebody fancy-schmancy right here in this room, right here within my earshot. I say no more. My lips are sealed. Eat your soup. By now, Mr. I Know What’s Corny, it’s so cold you could make chicken-flavored ice cubes out of it.

Extras: None.

MAMA (Three Stars)

U.S.:Andy Muschietti, 2013 (Universal)

Remember the good old, bad old days of movie horror, when screen frightmeisters didn’t always seem to try to turn our stomachs to make our hair stand on end? Remember when blood and gore and paranormal high jinks and lousy, deliberately amatuerish-looking camerawork and weren‘t the names of the game, when audiences could get scared at a moviewithout also getting revolted? Some pretty good movies helped make that grisly transition — shows like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Night of the Living Dead and Nightmare on Elm Street, and even not so good but interesting pictures like The Blair Witch project– but that doesn’t mean those same movies weren’t also resposnible for an awful lot of crap.

Mama is something of a throwback, and at times a stunning one.. At times, it’s not stunning at all. But at its best, this state-of-the-art modern ghost story — another scare saga from the Guillermo Del Toro factory — recalls those earlier, less bloody days of fear and (not necessarily) loathing, when horror films were made for adults, and when they could even strive to be a little subtle, and literate. Filled with elegant, spooky images of otherworldly phantasms plaguing fairly real-seeming people, Mama spins a yarn about two little feral girls, Victoria and Lilly, left in the forest in a shabby cabin after their distraught father (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) freaks out, following a financial wipe-out, and hustles the girls out to the forest. His goal: trying to kill them both, followed by his own suicide.

The girls, however are rescued by a sinister-looking wraith-thing that is (or was) apparently their mother (played by Javier Botet, with lots of CGI). And five years later — after somehow surviving in the woods by themselves for all that time — the girls are discovered and brought back to civilization. (Unfortunately, there are still financial woes, thanks to the U. S. Congress at its most monstrous.)

So the lassies are set up in a fairly posh home by an inquisitive doctor interested in their psychology (Daniel Kasha as Dr. Dreyfuss). They are cared for by their late father’s brother, a Bohemian-style artist named Lucas (Coster-Waldau in the second stanza of a double part) and his punky-pretty girl band girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain). Needless to say, the two little girls – the tamer and more civilized Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and younger, wilder Lilly (Isabelle Nelisse) — prove quite a handful. Not as much of s handful, though, as the flying, swooping, totally spooky creature who is apparently their very protective mom. Or what she’s become.

I’m not partial to a lot of modern horror movies, especially the ones with a big Ick-factor. But I like most of Del Toro’s work, and I enjoyed this one. Del Toro was the executive producer here, and the director-cowriter, making his feature debut, is Andy Muschietti. He’s no Del Toro, but he’s an imaginative chap with a very spiffy visual sense, Besides, starting Mama off with a big financial crisis demonstrates that the movie has a good sense of what’s genuinely scary about contemporary society — and who the real monsters are. Also, having a heroine who’s a punk rocker of sorts shows both that the movie is somewhat hip and that Jessica Chastain — an Oscar favorite this year for her work as the CIA Bin Laden hunter in “Zero Dark Thirty“ — can be an amazingly versatile actress.

Playing Annabel, she attracts and repels (a little) and stirs things up. She also gives us a sense of reality, and her believable reactions to all the spooky things swirling around her pull us right into the action. So do the wild responses of Charpentier and Lelisse as Victoria and Lilly, two of the scariest little girls on screen since the blank-faced little ghosts in Stanley Kubrick’s and Stephen King’s chilling classic The Shining.

Watching Mama, I was occasionally reminded of another classic movie horror tale about a little girl and her mother, producer Val Lewton’s and co-director Robert Wise’s 1944 low-budget Curse of the Cat People. Mama isn’t low-budget, and it doen’t have any cat people, cursed or not, but, at times, it scares you without creeping you out. So does Jessica Chastain.

DVD PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (Three and a Half Stars)

U.S.: David O. Russell, 2012 (Starz/Anchor Bay)

Silver Linings Playbook is a semi-Capraesque, semi-Paddy Chayefskyesque drama/comedy for the new millennium: a smart and amusing movie felicitously co-starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jackie Weaver, Julia Stiles, and Chris Tucker in roles meatier than we usually expect and played with great big dollops of joyous spontaneity, live-wire energy, bristling wit and just a touch of psychological darkness.  A multiple Oscar nominee, it was definitely one of 2012′s best romantic comedies and Cooper and Lawrence one of the year’s shining couples. It was a little overrated. But movie romantic comedies have been so bad recently, that it’s gratifying ing to find one worth overrating.

The movie was adapted by writer-director David O. Russell from a novel Matthew Quick, and it’s about Russell’s favorite subject: a dysfunctional family. Here the family, the Solitanos, live boisterously together with their dysfunctional friends and neighbors, in a sort of semi-functional Philadelphia suburb — a likable but nutty community whose ailments and oddments include bipolar disorder (Cooper), severe depression and seemingly  loose morals (both Lawrence), gambling addiction (De Niro), adultery (Brea Bee), a penchant for jogging while wearing a trash bag (Cooper), and — the most inexplicable and frightening of these various disorders — an obsession with the Philadelphia Eagles getting into the Super Bowl.

At the core of the comedy is the emotional condition of Cooper as Pat Solitano, Jr. — a performance that vaults him into a some kind of new serio-comedy stratosphere. Pat Jr. is an ex-teacher suffering from that bipolar issue, who has undergone months of mental institutionalization after beating the bejeezus out of a colleague who was sleeping (and showering) with Pat’s wife Nikki (Bee). Sprung from the hospital, along with his gabby pal Danny (Chris Tucker), Pat goes back to the house of his parents: his salty Eagle-loving bookie dad Pat, Sr. (De Niro) and his tolerant mom Dolores (Weaver, who was the terrifying mother of the Australian crime drama The Animal Kingdom). Also around: Pat Jr.s bro-pal Ronnie (John Ortiz), who has a bossy wife, Veronica (Julia Stiles), who in turn has a seemingly very available cop’s-widow-friend, Tiffany (Lawrence). A nice therapeutic romance is on everyone’s mind here, though Pat, Jr., unfortunately, is obsessed with engineering a marital reunion with Nikki.

With Cooper, who zoomed to stardom in the epic buddy-buddy comedy The Hangover, and Lawrence, who conquered the critics in Winter’s Bone and then zoomed herself in The Hunger Games, chemistry isn’t lacking here. Cooper plays Pat Jr. with a mix of obstinacy and nervous intensity, plus a phony bravado, and a disguised vulnerability that make a sharp contrast with the unshakably self-confident stud he played in The Hangover. As for Jennifer Lawrence, she adds naturalistic comedy to her resume to go along with the mastery of naturalistic drama she showed in Winter‘s Bone and the heroic young womanhood of The Hunger Game.

Then there’s the acting titan turned post-Focker sitcom papa Robert De Niro, playing the meatiest and juiciest of all his recent papa roles. De Niro‘s Pat Sr., like his son, is a hothead, and he’s been banned from the Philadelphia Eagles stadium for fighting. But he still makes his living off pro sports betting, and as the plot thickens,  Pat Sr. enginers a complex betting parley that involves the Eagles winning and Pat. Jr. and Tiffany placing high as a couple in a dance contest — something she’s asked him to do as payment for her help in getting an illegal letter to Nikki.

This is all corny as hell of course — Strictly Ballroom crossed with Big Fan — but corny is okay sometimes as long as it keeps us laughing. De Niro, a master of dramatic improvisation, here shows (again) he’s also a master of comedy disguised as dramatic improvisation. He knows how to make us laugh (and to get us scared and make us cry as well). And so do do Cooper and  Lawrence.

David O. Russell doesn’t work often enough, maybe because he makes the kind of hybrid offbeat movies — these mostly dysfunctional family rom-coms, with hooks ranging from incest (Spanking the Monkey) to adoption problems (Flirting with Disaster) — that are harder  to get financed. But Russell can do something that often seems a nearly lost art in movies these days. He writes smart, snappy, funny comic dialogue that we can buy psychologically, and that the actors usually do with infectious verve and spontaneity. Russell also assembles fine casts — probably because they want to say his lines. In general he can (and does here), turn out the kind of adult, unsentimentally appealing and sharply funny entertainment that weneed more of in the movies. That’s what makes him a critics’ pet. He deserves it.

As for DeNiro, I’d like to see him in a few less sitcom papa roles, and a few more Scorsese-style parts. Then again, making people laugh — even at dysfunctional families — isn’t an unworthy occupation, as we learned in Sullivan‘s Travels. Neither is running book on the Philadelphia Eagles, though it might seem like grounds for institutionalization.

Extras: Deleted Scenes; Featurettes; Dance Rehearsal; Q & A Highlights.

The Red Menace (One Star)
U.S.: R. G. Springsteen, 1949 (Olive)

Is The Red Menace really “The Reefer Madness of anti-Communist movies? Or is that flattering it? Too earnest to be funny, too serious to be camp, too boring to be effective propaganda, this Herbert Yates-produced doozy from Republic (for which it stands) is probably one of the worst of the post-war anti-Commie thrillers, entertainment-wise. It isn’t even dumb enough be dumb fun — since writers Albert Demond and Gerald Geraghty know something about their subject. They have dialogue about Hegel, and a Red temptress has a bookcase full of tomes by Marx and Engels.

But The Red Menace has its moments. The movie’s “hero” is vet Bill Jones. played by Robert Rockwell, who vecame a TV immortal as Eve Arden’s shy teacher beau Mr. Boynton on “Our Miss Brooks.” Here, Rockwell’s Bill is a hot-tempered ladies’ man, boiling mad at the Government’s mistreatment of Veterans. He‘s right. He‘s also ripe pickings for the local Communist recruiting center at the local bar — which has radical talent scouts and a cadre of Commie femme fatales (Betty Lou Gerson and Barbra Fuller as Yvonne Kraus and Mollie OFlaherty), with whom Bill dallies before settling down with the belle of the cell, Russian émigré Nina Petrovka (Hanne Axman). But never trust a Commie. Soon comrades ar dying like flies and Bill and Nina are on the run, in a faked highway scene that almost makes Detour look like Grand Prix.

The director, R.G. Springsteen, was a Republic regular, who mostly made westerns, but has one gem to his credit, the 1956 rural drama Come Next Spring, with Steve Cochran, Ann Sheridan. and Walter Brennan. He can’t do much for The Red Menace, noirish hokum that also boasts a duped African-American (Lester Luther), a fiery Italian-American who isn’t buying any dialectical materialism (Norman Budd), a persecuted, poliically incorrect Jewish poet (Shepard Menken) and a benevolent priest, Father O’Leary (Leo Cleary) who’s ready to forgive Mollie O’Flaherty and everybody else, including Demond and Geraghty. The solemn just-the-facts narration is by “Los Angeles City Council member” Lloyd G. Davies, who also doubles as the movie’s Immigration Chief.

If this show had a little more humor — in fact, if it had any humor at all — it might have won a place in film history as the first, or most typical, or most inane, of the Rom-Commie-Coms. But not even Eve Arden, Gale Gordon, Richard Crenna, and the whole “Our Miss Brooks” gang could pull a laugh out of this script — though at least, in The Red Menace, you get to see shy Mr. Boynton coming on strong. Marx should be such a ladykiller.

JACK REACHER (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.: Christopher McQuarrie, 2012 (Paramount)

Jack Reacher, the new guns-blazing crime movie thriller, starring Tom Cruise as the seemingly invincible title hero, comes out at the worst possible time for a movie with a lot of firearms: in the aftermath of the Newtown gun massacre. But it would be an obnoxious and often unlikable show in any case, in any time — just not such an obvious one.

In any case, violence begets box-office, or so Hollywood often seems to believe—and Jack Reacher is an almost ridiculously violent movie, so ridiculous that if writer-director Christopher McQuarrie had dreamed up better jokes, and more of them, he might have had one hell of a comedy. Based on “One Shot,“ one of a series of crime novels by Lee Child about Reacher, a 6’5’’ behemoth of an ex-military dude who lives under the radar, and emerges to solve crimes maybe just for the hell of it (or, in this case, to prove he was right in a previous case), the movie stars Tom in a role more appropriate for Liam Neeson or Dwayne Johnson, The Artist Previously Known as The Rock. except why should Neeson have to play every 6’5” behemoth kicking the ass off dozens of bad guys and tearing apart another city? (Pittsburgh in this case.)

The movie starts with a bang — five or six bangs actually, as a sniper blasts five strangers from a parking lot across from Pittsburgh‘s baseball stadium. When the wrong sniper (Joseph Sikora as Bart) is arrested for this crime, he calls out for Reacher (who arrested him for another shooting during the Iraq War), and goes into a coma, Reacher shows up anyway, convinced that Bart is guilty, and offers his investigative services to Bart’s attractive lawyer Helen Rodin, great great grand-daughter of the famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin. (The talented Helen put herself through Stanford law school by sculpting and mass-marketing statues of Arnold Schwarzenegger, thinking.)

No, sorry. I meant to say that Helen is the daughter of the famous Pittsburgh D.A. “Rody” Rodin (Richard Jenkins). Rodin is prosecuting Bart, and other mysterious characters are involved in some kind of conspiracy which will be revealed later. At that time, we will meet, to our astonishment, a cold, glassy-eyed maniac of a crime and business czar called The Zec, played by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog—director, in better times, of Even Dwarfs Started Small, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, or Every Man for Himself and God Against All. In this movie, the Zec earned his rep by chewing off the tops of his fingers to prevent death by frostbite and gangrene in Siberia (or somewhere like it)—which sounds like a scene in a Herzog movie, and probably tasted worse than the shoe Herzog had to eat after losing a bet to Errol Morris about Errol making his first movie. (Is that any less preposterous than the Rodin story?)

There’s also a car chase—the old-fashioned, non-digital kind—and several fights, one in a parking lot, often with guns. And, at the end, Robert Duvall shows up as Cash, a salty old Marine and jocular gun salesman, who gets in on the fight just for the hell of it—or so it appeared.

I didn’t like the movie very much, and not necessarily because of the heinous massacre in Newtown that preceded it. It’s just not a very good movie, even though, to their credit, the filmmakers try almost everything. Cruise takes his shirt off (and Pike complains). McQuarrie, who wrote very good, sharp, stylized dialogue for The Usual Suspects, seems to have decided to crank out stylized mediocre dialogue for a while, and who can blame him? Cruise plays Jack with a lot of charisma but no patented Cruise smiles — and who can blame him? He also tries hard to play six-five, but only manages five-ten, perhaps because Herzog forgot to bring along his dwarfs.

GANGSTER SQUAD (Two and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Ruben Fleischer, 2013 (Warner Bros.)

Gangster Squad is a well-produced but badly written crime movie depicting a 1949 war between gangster Mickey Cohen and a vigilante squad of undercover LAPD cops. Watching it brought back memories of the real Mickey Cohen, as I saw him on TV decades ago. He was a scary guy, but not in the psychopathic monster style with which Sean Penn sometimes amusingly plays him here. The real Mickey Cohen was scary because he seemed, in a funny way, so ordinary, so likable, like a tough uncle with lots of bloody but colorful war stories.

When I saw him, Cohen was on the Mike Douglas show, which had an afternoon slot, and he was talking about his meeting with Harry Cohn, the long-time head of Columbia Pictures, and reputedly one of the meanest among all Golden Age Hollywood execs (which is saying something). Cohn had called him into his office, according to Mickey, to ask him for an expensive favor. He wanted Mickey to murder Sammy Davis, Jr., who had incurred Cohn’s displeasure by having a (very secret) affair with Cohen’s top Columbia blonde bombshell Kim Novak. As Mickey told it, he listened patiently, then informed Columbia’s boss that he knew Sammy Davis, Jr., he knew Sammy’s father and family, and if anything at all injurious ever happened to Sammy or any other Davis, he, Mickey Cohen would find Harry Cohn, and blow his head off.

Did that story really happen? Mickey told it very convincingly, without any seeming pathological kinks or boastfulness. He obviously expected the audience to regard him well for presumably saving Davis’s life, and they probably, mostly, did. Somehow, by his air of seeming candor and his casual toughness, he had succeeded in pulling us into his dark world, and its deadly codes As for the fact that he had confessed to physically threatening a powerful movie mogul with a horrible death, well, Mickey Cohen was a gangster. That’s what gangsters do. That’s one of the reasons we keep watching gangster movies.

That Mickey Cohen story is more interesting, and scarier, than anything that happens in Gangster Squad, a movie so bloody and violent (superficially so) that it was pulled from its original release date after the Dark Knight massacre in the Aurora, Colorado multiplex, and partly reshot. (The studio cut a Gangster Squad massacre scene set in Grauman‘s Chinese Theatre and reset it in Chinatown.)

But bloodiness and violence don’t really sting unless the people are real, and nobody is real in Gangster Squad: Not the movie’s Mickey Cohen, whom Penn plays as a kind of cross between Gary Oldman’s Dracula, the Frankenstein monster and Robert De Niro as Al Capone in The Untouchables. Not the vigilantes — played as six clichés in search of an author by Josh Brolin as Sgt. John O‘Mara, the tough returned WW2 vet, Ryan Gosling as Jerry Wooters, the tough lady-killer, Anthony Mackie as Coleman Harris. the tough black cop, Michael Pena the tough Mexican cop Navidad Ramirez, Robert Patrick as the tough old western coot Max Kennard, and Giovanni Ribisi as the not-so-tough techno-geek Conway Keeler (a cliché about three decades early). And not Police Chief William Parker, the LAPD’s controversial head cop, whom Nick Nolte turns into a growly old patriarch. Nor Emma Stone as femme fatale Grace Faraday (Cohen’s girl, who’s also sneaking out with Jerry Wooters). Wathcing all this top-flight talent stuffinf themselves into these roles is kind of like watching a seven-layer wedding cake being stuffed into a Twinkies package — but that’s probably an insult to the memory of Twinkies.

The story is simple — which is probably exactly what the police-vs.-Mickey Cohen wars were not. But even though everything in the movie is painfully predictable, everything is also painfully unmemorable. It tends to dribble out of your head as soon as you’ve seen it. O’Mara does something violently heroic, which draws the attention of Parker, who proposes the undercover gig. O’Mara recruits the other five. His wife (Mireille Enos) is worried. Meanwhile, the film’s Mickey Cohen behaves maniacally; in his first big scene, he has a failed minion pulled apart by two cars near the old Hollywoodland sign. (Even that scene is forgettable.) The gangster squad attacks Cohen. He fights back. Bang. Bang. Jerry and Grace sneak off for hanky-panky. Everything keeps building toward the last big showdown. It isn’t worth the effort.

Ruben Fleischer, who directed Gangster Squad, has been mostly a hard-edged comedy director (Zombieland, 30 Minutes or Less). But one of the problems with Gangster Squad is that, though it’s frequntly ridiculous, it isn’t very funny, which was this script’s only real chance. One could watch Gangster Squad and come away with the impression that Cohen was Dracula, and that Parker was John Wayne, and that the gangster squad were the Magnificent Almost Seven. But the movie, even though it’s clearly a crock of crap, still doesn’t entertain you. Which is the biggest crime of all.

MY SON JOHN (Three Stars)

U.S.: Leo McCarey, 1952 (Olive)

Robert Walker swears to his mother (Helen Hayes) that he is not now and never has been a Commie (and he‘s lying), in the most interesting and memorable of all the post-war Anti-Communist melodramas: Leo McCarey‘s  fascinating  My Son John.  Walker, who had just finished making Strangers on a Train for Hitchcock,  has another plum sociopath movie role here: he’s John Jefferson, a seemingly brilliant young fellow-traveling academic and important Washington D. C. employee, who’s fallen in with Reds and become a spy.

Just like the irrepressible Bruno, John talks too much: unwisely spouting the Party line while on a visit home with mother Lucille (Hayes), who becomes increasingly distraught, and father Dan (Dean Jagger), who becomes increasingly enraged. (Dan the dad seems ready to kill somebody, maybe son John, if he hears any more about social justice and class warfare.) On John’s trail, and intensely sympathetic to John’s troubled parents, is Van Heflin as the smart and sympathetic FBI agent Spelman. — the kind of G-Man J. Edgar Hoover would have given extra duty.

Robert Walker came to My Son John  after he had just finished playing the greatest role of his career, as psychopathic rich boy killer Bruno Anthony, in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train — and there’s some small pieces of Walker-as-Bruno in My Son John. Walker died (at 32) before finishing McCarey’s film, and McCarey (with Hitchcock’s assent) had to use part of Bruno’s last  scene in Strangers for his climactic moments in My Son John. (The actor dubbing Walker at the end is McCarey himself.)_

In fact, good as Walker is in My Son John, if he had played John more like Bruno, more madly and comically, and with more crazy zest, it would probably have been a better movie.  Ironically, McCarey was one of the greatest of the Hollywood Golden Age comedy directors (Duck Soup, Ruggles of Red Gap, The Awful Truth) — and he was also wonderful at poignant family drama (the devastating Make Way for Tomorrow). But he seems to have lost his sense of humor almost entirely in My Son John.

It‘s probably the soberest movie this brilliant Hollywood laugh-getter and big-drinking piano-player ever made. McCarey took his subject very seriously — to him, this is obviously a family tragedy — and Hayes is sometimes quite moving as the fear-stricken mama. But Jagger, as John’s wild-eyed dad, who can’t stand Commies and would truly rather be Dead than Red (or wish that very fate on his Commie-loving son),  is too often corny and even maniacal. Jagger is playing a true-blue American, but he portrays Dan Jefferson as such a potentially murderous fellow, I almost wouldn’t have been surprised if Dan had turned out to be the real Communist spy.

McCarey was a genius at on-set improvising, and since he’s the only credited screenwriter on My Son John, it’s reasonable to suspect that the actors are improvising at least some of their lines. But they’re not trying to make us laugh (though Walker certainly seems capable of it again), and My Son John‘s very seriousness, tends to undermine its effectiveness as either drama or as propaganda. It’s an oddball mixed-dish  of a movie by a great moviemaker out of his métier,  a guy who was better off making us guffaw in Fredonia than trying to make us weep in Washington, D. C.

Extras: None.

THE WOMAN ON PIER 13 (I MARRIED A COMMUNIST) (One and a Half Stars)

U. S.: Robert Stevenson, 1949 (Warner Bros. Archive Collection)

This is probably the most famous of all the post-war anti-Communist melodramas — not for its quality or popularity (minuscule, on both counts), but because of its bizarre Offscreen history. (See below.) As for the plot: Robert Ryan is a business guy, labor liaison and blackmailable ex-Commie, married to a good woman (Laraine Day), but pulled back into the Party and its schemes by an old flame/femme fatale (Janis Carter) and the poker-faced deadly head Red (Thomas Gomez, in a rare piece of overplayed underplaying). The Commies act like white-collar mobsters; Ryan — a staunch liberal off-screen — plays his part like a good man succumbing to drugs or lycanthropy.

This notorious bomb is based on a very bad McCarthy-era anti-Commie script, full of clichés and propaganda, that Howard Hughes used to hand around at RKO, to try to roust out politically radical directors. If they turned it down (as Joseph Losey and Nicholas Ray both did), he usually fired them. Ray got away with rejecting it, Losey didn’t — and the director who accepted the project, and who helms it with a straight-faced lack of involvement that makes the whole movie seem even more ludicrous, is Robert Stevenson. In later, happier times, Stevenson went on to make the Disney movie classics Old Yeller and  Mary Poppins.

Extras: None.

 PROMISED LAND (Two Disc Combo: Blu-ray/DVD/Digital/UV) (Two and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Gus Van Sant, 2012 (Universal)

Matt Damon, who’s become a kind of classic American leftist movie star– a Hank Fonda of the new millennium — has gotten trashed  by some right-wingers (and some moderates and left-wingers as well) for his new film Promised Land. But I think it’s pretty good — a Capraesque tale about a big natural gas corporation trying to get drilling rights to the gas deposits in a Pennsylvania farming town that’s fallen on hard times. Damon, who’s one of our best actors and doesn’t always get the credit he deserves (because, these days, he gets slammed for his politics), plays Steve Bennett, a small town Iowa guy who thinks he understands and relates to these small town Heartland people, and has  a Messianic sense about his job.

Steve, a genuinely nice guy, believes he’s saving the populace from the current economic downturn, rescuing them from the shocks and disappointments  he endured himself.  And, like most small town guys who made it big and later go back to the heartland, he’s just a little full of himself. When he arrives in (the fictitious) McKinley, with his more cynical working partner Sue Thomson (Frances McDormand), he’s not quite prepared for what he meets (though we are): a general store manager who sees right through him; an active, vocal populace; a retired teacher named Frank Yates (Hal Holbrook) who knows all the facts and figures and the bad side of gas drilling or “fracking“; a wised-up sexy schoolmarm, Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt);  and a slick, one-step-ahead environmentalist named Dustin Noble, who beats his time everywhere, including with Alice. Dustin, who may have been named after Dustin Hoffman, is played by John Krasinski, who also co-wrote the script with Damon, from a story by novelist Dave Eggers (the author of the ironically, nudgingly titled “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius“).

In other words, Promised Land is a realistic left-wing social drama about something that might actually happen in the real, everyday world –  instead of, say, about a maniac running from house to house, slashing people to bits, or monsters from hell rising up from the ground and chasing everybody to city hall, or an invasion of extraterrestrials or gangsters on the run staging sensational orgies and bloodbaths. Not that I have anything against movies like that, if they’re done well (and they occasionally are), but I don’t think Damon (or Krasinski) should get points off (or on) simply because they try to make movies that send us messages about issues they care about, or try to create real people, or face real problems, or real horrors. There are things that don’t work in Promised Land, but we’d be better off if there were more movies like it. And I wish there were.

The director Damon chose after deciding not to do it himself, was Gus Van Sant, and that was a wise choice. Van Sant has directed Damon twice before in Damon scripted movis — in Good Will Hunting, the  Oscar-winning realist message drama about social class and intelligence, with Ben Affleck,  and in the wild, weird, arty, long-take  lost-in-the-desert fable Gerry, with Ben’s brother Casey. It’s obvious that Van Sant and Damon click artistically (just as Damon and the Afflecks do).

Visually, Van Sant gets the small town atmosphere, the look and feel and the rhythms of these people, with both naturalism and poetry — and I say that as someone who hails from the Heartland myself, a small town Wisconsin guy. Van Sant, from that hip city Portland, Oregon, gives Promised Land a humanistic style and feel, and though the characters are in some sense, obviously and even preachily conceived, the story works right up to the end, which unfortunately depends on a surprise twist that isn’t adequately set up and, in some ways, doesn‘t make sense.

Damon’s acting though, and his sheer personality, carries a lot of the movie. Like the left-wing Fonda, and like Fonda’s life-long right-wing friend Jimmy Stewart, Damon is an all-American guy with personality and a brain, and a kind of unspoiled boyish quality that beguiles many audiences. That quality shines through Promised Land, a pop-political ballad of a movie about what’s best (and sometimes worst) is us. Enjoy the movie, and Damon, for their best. It may not be a heart-breaking work of staggering genius, but it’s good, solid, admirable. It’s heartland stuff.

CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW.

THE KID WITH A BIKE (Also Blu-ray) (Four Stars)

Belgium/France: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2011 (Criterion Collection)

The Kid with a Bike is another first-class film by those fabulous film realists Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne from Belgium. And it‘s a beauty — a quietly naturalistc and tremendously moving fiction feature done in the Dardenne Brothers’ trademark quasi-documentary style, telling a story that seems as real as the street outside your window and the people walking or riding by on it — especially the kids with bikes. It’s also another of  the Dardennes’  stories about fathers and sons (like 2002’s The Son or 1996’s La Promesse), and about the dividing line between generations and also between ordinary people and lawbreakers.

The setting is, once again the industrial, largely working class city of Seraing in Belgium: the Dardenne Brothers’ home city and the location for most of their films since La Promesse. The central character is an 11-year-old boy named Cyril (played by the remarkable child actor Thomas Doret),  a child who has lost his father and had his bike stolen — and can’t adjust to either loss.

When Cyril gets the bicycle back, thanks to the kindness of a stranger (Cecile de France as Samantha, a social worker at the place where the boy lives), he both attaches himself to his benefactress Samantha and sets off on a quest to  reunite with his dad Guy (Jeremie Renier), who has moved to another city without telling him. But, just as Cecile is the unexpected angel who brings him familial love, there are two antagonists who frustrate his search: the local young criminal kingpin Wes (Egon Di Mateo), a young dealer who tries to recruit Cyril as a gang member, and Guy himself, who has intentionally abandoned his son (after the loss of his wife), and  clearly doesn’t want to see him again.

The Kid with a Bike consists mostly of short, swift scenes with Cyril racing though mini-dramas of social and familial conflict. The dominating image is the boy with this bike, caught in fast-moving tracking shots following him as he runs down the sidewalks or rides on the streets. These are very kinetic sequences — they will probably remind many of you of the special childhood sense of freedom and speed kids get in driving a bicycle. And Thomas Doret is a very kinetic actor. His energy seems boundless, his will indomitable. When Cecile is asked, by her irritated boyfriend, to choose between helping Cyril  and being with him, she actually chooses the boy, and we’re not surprised. It’s not a semi-romantic attraction, at least not overtly so. But Cyril is a human comet, and that unshakable will of his keeps asserting itself and speeding past the rest of the slower, more pedestrian world, What happens to them all finally is both shocking and, in a way, inevitable.

I think The Kid with a Bike is a great film. But it’s so cheaply made and so simple — in execution and seemingly in themes — that it’s been pretty much neglected in the U.S., despite good reviews and despite winning the Cannes Film Festival jury prize (which it shared with Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s crime story Once Upon a Time in Anatolia). It’s the sort of movie that an average American audience, even an average American art film audience, might think was nice, but small or inconsequential.

Not so. Actually, the Dardenne Brothers’ film does deal with complex themes and deep emotions, and it’s profound in its grasp and portrayal of everyday humanity. Only if you ignore that humanity and those depths does it seem unimportant or minor. A good deal of this movie’s  powerful effect comes from its ability to make us see through the eyes of a child, and feel with the heart of a child — or, more accurately, think and feel in sympathy with a child who, because of his abandonment, is increasingly being thrust into premature maturity — in contrast to his irresponsible father.

The resolution of all these problems,  which I won’t described, conveys a very mixed strange feeling — and that’s when we may realize how much the Dardennes have come to  identify with — and have made us identify with — this kid on his bike and what he‘s gone through.

Doret is, in fact, an astonishing actor. Tirelessly energetic, thoroughly unself-conscious, yet chillingly aware of everything around him, he dominates every scene he‘s in — which is almost every scene in the movie. The cinema has been graced recently with a number of excellent child actors, from the younger Dakota and Elle Fanning to  Saoirse Ronan, and Doret is one of the best of them, a child  actor with an incredible sense of natural behavior and unforced realism — with the presence of  a little Depardieu or Brando or Steve McQueen. Doret, without a false note, portrays a boy  hungry for experience, not yet spoiled by the world and its hypocrisies, someone who believes in people as they seem, and is surprised when they betray him — and themselves.

The Dardennes tend to work with the same actors over and over again, and I imagine we’ll eventually see Doret again too. Jeremie Renier, who plays the despicable Guy  – and who shouldn’t be confused with the American actor Jeremy Renner – has been working with the Dardennes since he was a boy actor himself, in La Promesse, and he has by now an extraordinary simpatico with everything they do. The brothers’ other main player. in most of their films, is back again too: the chunky, bespectacled Olivier Gourmet, who has a style reminiscent of John Goodman‘s, shows up here in a small but memorable role as a phlegmatic bar owner.

The radiant blonde Cecile De France, of course, is  not only new to the Dardennes’ unofficial stock company, but a  major French and international star as well. (She co-starred in Clint Eastwood’s  Hereafter.) Yet, in a way De France’s film stardom and beauty, fit the movie as well as the old Dardenne hands do. As Samantha commits herself more and more to caring for and protecting Cyril, she begins to seem a kind of beautiful fairy godmother,  a surrogate mother out of a dream.

The Dardennes also rarely use music, but here they play on the soundtrack, several times, a heart-breaking passage from the slow movement of Beethoven’s’ “Emperor” Piano Concerto No. 5 –  my favorite classical piece in all the world. It got me here again, too, though the fast first movement (Allegro) of  the “Emperor” is the one I really love best.

The Dardennes, who began as documentary filmmakers, are among the preeminent dramatic movie realists in the international cinema today. I wouldn’t call their fellow multiple Cannes prize-winner Michael Haneke a realist, though he’s often a great filmmaker, and many of the current French-speaking cineastes tend to be either genre specialists or political (or sexual) naturalists.

The Dardennes, by contrast, always seem to be conveying life as it is, without any filters of subjectivity. We follow Cyril‘s journey but we’re not trapped in his point of view — or, seemingly, in anyone else’s. At the end, we’ve lived a piece of his life with him, a very important piece.  And we wonder and care about what will happen to him and to Samantha — or at least, I did. And I could never ride a bike.

Extras: Conversation between Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Kent Jones; Interviews with Cecile De France and Thomas Doret; Documentary Return to Seraing (2011), in which the Dardennes revisit locations from the film; Trailer; Booklet with essay by Geoff Andrew.

PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW
DJANGO UNCHAINED (Also Combo pack Blu-ray/DVD/Digital) (Three and a Half Stars)
U.S.: Quentin Tarantino, 2012 (Weinstein Company/Anchor Bay)

Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained was a surprise multiple winner at the last Oscars. but only because some of us may have overestimated its outrage quotient, and underestimated how damned entertaining it is. After Dirty-Dozening it up in his last picture, Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino pullls us here into a magical movie land that buff Tarantino knows well: the  wide-open, ironic, gun crazy realm of mid-to-late ’60s-early ’70s Italian spaghetti Westerns—a roost ruled by director Sergio Leone and star Clint Eastwood  and their “Man With No Name” Trilogy, but also home to a wild bunch of trashily enjoyable offshoots by moviemakers with lesser names and smaller guns. Like Sergio Corbucci, who made the original Django in 1966.

An audaciously enjoyable and horrifically exciting melodrama set in the Old West and the Old South of the nineteenth century, Django Unchained  churns out not so much the history of our dreams, or the dreams of our history (what John Ford and D. W. Griffith gave us), but the nightmare alternative Western history of Leone and his colleagues and imitators, from the revisionist ‘60s and ‘70s, when there were movies with titles like A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die. Since Tarantino has called Leone’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly his favorite movie, it’s not surprising that he gives his new show something like the  grandly operatic super-style that was Leone’s hallmark: an eye-popping  cross-cultural technique full of simmering machismo and tolling bells and epic showdowns and Mexican standoffs  and explosive violence, with characterizations so lurid and unrestrained and colorful (in many different ways) that the movie often seems to be poking fun at itself. And us.

Tarantino’s latest  is a jocular, bloody madhouse of a movie that stomps on notions of political correctness as if they were bugs.  The  title comes from a sleazily baroque oater directed by Corbucci – an Italian Leone knockoff that starred, as coffin-toting bounty hunter Django, the 1967 Camelot’s Lancelot, Franco Nero. (Nero  does a self-kidding cameo here in a bar scene, but Vanessa Redgrave, Camelot’s Guinevere, is nowhere to be seen. And the real-life Django—the great French Gypsy jazz guitarist surnamed Reinhardt—is unfortunately nowhere to be heard.)

Instead we get charismatic African-American gunman-bounty hunter  Django (played with stoic hip and smolder by Jamie Foxx)—an embittered ex-slave saved from outlaws and schooled in slaughter by Dr. King Schultz (played, with another Oscar to show for it, by Christoph Waltz, the wordy Nazi villain of Inglorious Basterds). Waltz is a good guy this time, Django’s mentor, but there’s some high-grade screen villainy by Leonardo Di Caprio and Samuel L. Jackson, both of whom would have stolen the movie if Waltz didn’t already have it stuffed in his back pocket.

It’s a typical Quentin Tarantino mix: a grand expansion of the kind of movie that used to be slapped together by producers, Italian and otherwise, whose motives were mostly purely mercenary, and writers and directors of  sometimes high but batty-looking style who would do practically anything to keep the audience awake. We’re in the West and the South, circa sometime around 1858, and we see Waltz as the  dazzlingly eloquent German traveling dentist and bounty hunter Schultz save and free the quietly deadly slave Django (Jamie Foxx). Schultz wants Django to help him track down some elusive bounty prey, Django‘s old acquaintances the Brittle brothers, murderous scum for whose heads fortunes are offered. Django, hellbent on revenge, wants to find his still enslaved wife, the German-speaking Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).

In the course of their search, interrupted by numerous cameos by erstwhile stars and mainstays of that great cinematic era, the late ‘60s and ‘70s,  Schultz and Django wind up in the elegant but barren-looking estate Candyland, insane domicile of  the sadistic  Southern Gentleman Calvin Candie (Di Caprio), whose affairs are actually run by Stephen, a devilish  consigliere disguised as an Uncle Tom. There, surrounded by affable bigots, Southern aristocrats, milk-faced semi-belles and persecuted African-American  gladiators, King and Django infiltrate the beast’s lair and whet Candie‘s depraved racist appetites, by  pretending to be part of the local Mandingo slave-fighter trade. They also find Broomhilda. (A reference to Wagnerian opera or the ’70s comic strip?)

The movie is appropriately scored to great jangly torrents of old Ennio Morricone  music (and one new Morricone theme), and those of  his colleague Luis Bacalov—along with Richie Havens (“Oh Freedom“) and Jim Croce (“I Got a Name“). I also found it amusing to savor the small but pungent roles played by Don Johnson (as Big Daddy), and everybody from Bruce Dern to Russ & Amber Tamblyn to Michael Parks to James Remar to Tom Wopat to Tarantino himself. Amusing too is the movie’s cheerfully sarcastic version of the Ku Klux Klan, shown as Klan-robed dimwits who repeatedly ride into each other (especially Jonah Hill), because the Klan-seamstress misplaced the eyeholes in their masks.

You can say what you will about Django Unchained, but you can’t say it’s not both entertaining and some kind of  deeply personal project, or that it doesn’t have something to say (often stingingly) about American racism and violence. Tarantino takes a story and script that might have been written by Elmore Leonard or David Mamet after a few shots,  and directed by a Sergio Corbucci, a Fernando Di Leo or a Lucio Fulci, and gives it the kind of finicky attention to high style you might expect from a David Lean or a Federico Fellini.

One of the likable things about some trashy, unrestrained, magnificently awful  movies—trash done with genius and shamelessness — is that this kind of show lets you indulge some sleazy impulses, without suffering the usual consequences. That’s part of Tarantino‘s appeal. He opens up great golden veins of amusing garbage, enlivens his stories with his genius for dialogue and the fruits of his hip encyclopedic take on movies, and then just doesn‘t censor himself. Much. He makes us laugh, so we have a tendency we let him get away with murder.  I‘m not complaining about this.  Django Unchained is probably his best overall picture since Jackie Brown—partly because it has his best overall dialogue since Jackie Brown (which was based on Elmore Leonard), and dialogue is one of his strongest, sharpest points.

Is Django enjoyable? Indubitably, as King Schultz might say. Is Django offensive? Probably. Should we take it seriously? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Or, to be less wishy-washy, we should take the soul of this movie seriously, but not necessarily the body. We’ll leave that to the flesh-peddlers and violence hucksters and racists, who, in this movie at least, get their just desserts.

Extras: Featurettes, Sound Track Spot; Twenty Years in the Making: Tarantino’s XX Blu-ray Collection.