The Mule You Know

Some Thoughts on The Mule (2018)

Art is a funny thing. I've seen a lot of good movies this past year-- both new and old. I've also seen some real clunkers. Some real shitty movies that just got my goat and really made me angry. The Mule, the latest film by famed film-maker and shitty boyfriend, Clint Eastwood, is neither of these things.

And yet, I can't stop thinking about it.

It's not good. It's not bad*. It's just inherently strange and that it isn't one thing or another is what is so exceptionally strange about it. That a man who felt so strongly about Barack Obama that he rambled at a chair in front of a live studio audience, at a time where the nation is run by a mentally-deficient sex-offending, con artist-- where the panic against Latinx people and refugees requires a big dumb wall and where children are being put in concentration camps and are dying-- you'd think that some sort of passion would be present. That there was something about this story that had to be told. That something, even something truly ugly, would slip out.

And it doesn't.

It goes on for two hours and then it just sort of ends.

It's a truly baffling picture, because at least I understand the impetus of Sully or American Sniper or, especially, Gran Torino. One would almost have to go out of their way not to cast their lots one way or the other when it comes to something as sensitive and as fraught with controversy as the border and the War on Drugs. And yet, no decision seems to be made at any point for any reason other than to make a picture.

And yes, what I'm saying is that I kind of wish that Eastwood had been a little more racist. That baring his blackened heart would have at least been art of some kind.

At 200 years old, you'd think that the only thing that could tempt Eastwood out of his crypt would be a story that he really needs to tell. One that really speaks to him. Presumably a story where he gets to say racial slurs for millions and millions of dollars. The Mule doesn't seem to be it. That the one bicentennarian on earth who doesn't have an opinion about Those People directs movies is actually more fascinating than the movie itself.

I was talking to Cruz, a friend of mine with whom I co-host A Quality Interruption, and I was explaining this movie to him, trying to make sense of it and how I felt about it and, really, I was just dropping the ball on it (as if you couldn't tell). I

He described to me a character from One-Hundred Years of Solitude**. The character is an old man who lived this full, long life-- adventure, war, romance, all that-- and now he was at the end of his life and all he did to fill his time was making aluminum fish. Once he's done making his little fish, he then melts it down and starts all over again. That seems to be what Clint Eastwood is doing. He's tinkering. He's making movies to stay busy. In its own way that's admirable. The hitch I'm having is why make this movie just to stay busy?

What is more than that-- how in all of the time of staying busy do you make a movie so listless and basic after nearly fifty years of directing your own movie?

Here are some highlights that before I go:

• This movie has Michael Pena in it. That's always a good sign. 
• Diane Wiest is in this? That's great!
• In this film, the titular mule (as played by Clint Eastwood) has not one, but two threesomes. People give Tom Cruise shit for always making sure that his romantic interest is hotter and younger that he can actually pull (lest we start wondering about things), but Eastwood is the master of this. He did the same shit twenty years ago with Blood Simple and here it's even stranger and sadder. Now, while, we all love a dirty old man, I have to wonder about the motives of Eastwood making sure that people know that grandpa can still fuck.
• In this movie Eastwood's character is a florist. I swear to god. It's literally the first scene.
• You would only have to change, like, three things, and this would just be an episode of The Simpsons where grandpa accidentally gets recruited by Los Zetas. And, actually, I'd kind of like to see that.
• Most of the movie is just an old man driving through the mid-west listening to Oldies. Honestly, if there was one actual reason a pre-Boomer lith made this movie, that might be it.

FOOTNOTE:
* We all thought abut completing that joke, but not all of us did it. Sometimes the best writing happens because of what you decide not to do.
** A book that I'm not even going to pretend that I've read.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and bakery clerk. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

Back to the Outback

A Review of SWEET COUNTRY (2018)

Sweet Country is a long ride of a film and it feels like it. On the surface it appears to be a simple, by the number western, but as it creeps along, it slowly reveals a film about the pain and price of Australia's bloody past-- and indeed the bloody past of most all of western history. It’s not a film that you walk out of the theater feeling unsatisfied by. It’s a full, rich film that is also pointedly merciless and exhausting. It is a film that asks for as much as it gives.

Sweet Country tells a seemingly simple story that would fit perfectly between Shane and High Noon (or Unforgiven and The Proposition) about an Aboriginal farmer (Sam Kelly played by newcomer Hamilton Morris) wrongly accused of murder. A posse is formed and a manhunt ensues. And throughout all of this are the complicated domestic lives of people living at the edge of the dying British Empire.

It’s also a film that rides a line between traditional Westerns, revisionist Westerns, and Australian westerns (of which there are a surprising amount). As well trod as that genre (and sub-genres) is, Sweet Country stands out because it’s a film about the conflict between natives and settlers that is from the perspective of the natives (both in front of the camera and behind the camera). Not only is the story more interested about the Aboriginal people (and those that are stuck between two worlds as “half-castes”), but the camera itself seems to give them all of the best shots. And why wouldn't it be? In this world (ie: history), the best white people on offer are either abject racists, madmen, or well-meaning but complicit in the despoiling of Australia. While I can’t say that Sweet Country has a rich and bold Aboriginal voice, what I can say for certain is that it’s a movie that has a unique voice and that alone makes it worth seeing.

The stand-out among these is Warlpiri actor Hamilton Morris, who plays the runaway that the entire film centers around. Who has a face that belongs to another era—namely the golden age of Westerns. That man has a face and a carriage about him that just belongs on the big screen. And, like some of the greats of the American Western, he isn’t much for speaking. He lets everyone do the acting around him. Morris is an interesting choice to center the film around him as he very clearly isn’t a seasoned actor, he brings a verisimilitude to the picture that you don't often see in movies about native people. Hamilton Morris (what a name!) feels like a fulfillment of promise of "sensitivity" regarding native people that so many other films promise and then completely fuck up.

Sam Neill is also present doing his Sam Neill thing. I’d say more, but it’d be simpler and better for everyone if I just reminded you that Sam Neill is the best. He's great.

One of the bolder choices that Warwick Thornton makes is that Sweet Country is completely without non-diegetic music. From beginning to end, the only music you hear comes from a character. It’s

It’s funny because when I think of Australian and Westerns, I think of one of the best scored films of all time, The Proposition. 

Sweet Country is a film without distractions. Instead of making the film feel empty or lifeless, the lack of a score preserves the film’s tone. It’s a joyless world and it’s a joyless film. To add music would be to garnish it in some way that wouldn’t be true to the film.

It also leads to the only legitimate laugh in the entire picture. Again: Thank you, Sam Neill.

Another stand out feature of the film is the landscape (which is maybe the only unqualified strength of Hostiles). As full of bugs and snakes and god knows what else, Warwick Thornton (doubling as cinematographer) makes the Australian back country look like a place that you would want to visit-- or at least a place where you could stare longingly at the Abyss in peace.

It makes you pine for a world that somehow entirely gone and yet somehow still here. In that way, Sweet Country stacks up to the best films the genre has to offer. Sweet Country is a nearly joyless, nearly heartless film that fills its almost two-hour running time with a weight that matches the subject matter. It shows the Australian past as the heartless, soulless thing that it is and because of that, it isn’t something that anybody is going to be storming the gates to go and see. That only seems to make it even more vital as a work of art. Thinking on it, that’s probably the point.

James Kislingbury is a writer, a podcaster, and has never been south of the equator. You can donate to his Patreon . You can buy the book he edited here (and on eBay). You can also follow him on Twitter. Also, if you well and truly give a shit hmu on my Paypal. Want to buy me a coffee? Get at my Ko-Fi.

Alright Ramblers, Let's Get Rambling

THE HATEFUL EIGHT REVIEW

By James Kislingbury

I've put a lot of calories into telling people why most of Tarantino's movies are garbage. Kill Bill 1 is fun, but too long and too closely resembles a feature length music video. Kill Bill 2 is too long and no fun. Death Proof watches like a practical joke. And Inglorious Misspellings* watches like the deleted scenes of a film that never got made. While his first three films are classics for varying reasons, after ten years of watching an artist wander in the wilderness, I realized that I couldn't follow him any more. I was going to go watch movies that had stories.

Then Django Unchained came out. It felt like a maturing of Tarantino's fixations. While all of the quirks that he usually overindulged were still there, he managed to wrap them all up in a film that was full of characters and had a compelling story. It had a drive and a direction that, after the box office failure of Jackie Brown, he seemed to resent. Yet, as much as I loved that movie, I also realized that this was something he could easily backslide from. He followed up Jackie Brown with Kill Bill. The same might be true of moving from Django Unchained to The Hateful Eight.

It is with no little energy (and no little relief) that enjoyed The Hateful Eight quite a bit.

Well, maybe “enjoyed” is the wrong word. I enjoyed Mistress America. The Hateful Eight, I endured. It's a movie that almost demands that you loath it. It indulges in all of QT's worst fixation (short of women's feet), yet, in the end, it's a film that comes together as a satisfactory whole. It is not a movie without faults and it is certainly one that I wouldn't begrudge anybody for loathing, but, damnit, I liked it. I really, really liked it.

That makes me a bad person, doesn't it?

First and foremost, as with all of Tarantino's post-Jackie Brown movies, it is too damn long**. Like Bruce Dern's old timer, it's even satisfied to go nowhere. The first 90 minutes of the film are jam packed with long stretches of nothing. Here's a scene of expostion. Here's a long take of people hammering spikes into the ice that will not come back at all. Here's another scene of folks jawing on about a whole lot of nothing (that will also not come back in any way, shape, or form). Beneath the grizzled visage of The Hateful Eight, is the sharp face of a Agatha Christie chamber piece, yet it insists on indulging in its

The worst example of this is how we have to watch a board get nailed into a door frame at least five different times. We watch it. Every. Single. Time. We get it, QT, it's kind of funny. The first time. Now you're just fucking with us. Go back to filming women's feet if this is how you're going to be. This movies doesn't so much need an editor as it needs a pathfinder. A large, ugly man with a machete. Possibly Machete. QT can probably get him for a song.

The other problem with the structure of the film is that its story is bound together with the same gossamer threads as a good Three's Company episode. It's premise makes little sense and as the film carries on, its plot thickens, and its stakes get raised, it make less and less sense. The story requires that Daisy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the bounty which the entire film revolves around stay alive, but. . . Why? The Hangman (Kurt Russell) isn't a particularly upright man. So why is she still alive? This is stretched even thinner when we realized that almost everyone has a vested interest in her dropping dead. Yet, she doesn't.

Why? Because the sitcom requires it. This conceit is a cause for monologues and ultraviolence. The worst of the film seems to act upon this urge. Don't think about the logic, don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain, look over here. We've got the guy from Justified doing a caricature of Barney Fife and that's pretty cool, right? RIGHT?

Unlike his worst films, though, it never tips over. It knows where it's going, even if it takes the long way around. Through some switchbacks. And then backtracks. Then takes a nap. Then decides it would just be easier to go the easy way after all. No, not that easy way. Come here, I'll show you. It's not like you didn't clear your schedule for the next three hours.

I mean, how many goddamn times do I have to see somebody put a hammer to a nail? They don't even hit their thumb! Not once!

The Hateful Eight is also loathsome in that it makes me find common cause with Spike Lee. I don't feel like that's ever a good sign. This time, though, I get it, Spike. You were right. Tarantino loves using the word “nigger***” too goddamn much. Motherfucker is in love with it. Straight up. The dude gets off on it. Dude wants to fill a hot tub full of it and lather himself up good with it. He loves making other people say it, too. He loves making other people say it to his friends. He has to. Otherwise, he's an idiot and he isn't that. Of all of the things our dear director might be, he's not dumb. That might make it work.

Me twenty minutes into the film.

Which makes me wonder: Does he actually know what this word means? Not that I get it. I'm a dumb white dude. But, man, I feel like Spike Lee has got to have a handle on this, right? Spoil sport, though he may be? Does Tarantino think he's making a point? Or does he want to shock us with it? You know, prove a point, man. Frankly, I could give a fuck. It's exhausting. What is more is that it is boring. It's your dumb punk rock friend in high school pushing another safety pin into his ear. Except that he's a grown man. And the safety pin is a racial slur. Real cool, Darryl. Now shut the fuck up and see if your brother can buy us beer.

The first n-bomb drops about ten minutes into the film and never lets up. Ultraviolence, “bitch,” and some really good sexual assault occurs between the opening and closing credits, yet the n-word is there. Always. Ever present. Every scene. Oh, and the next one? It's got even more of them. And it's needless. It's there to prove a point that we already understand. It's there as a replacement for actual dialogue about America or about the cultural landscape in the post-Civil War climate. It's just the n-word. Again and again and again. It's not clever or cute or funny. It's a racial slur. It should mean something. Otherwise, it's an aesthetic adornment that comes at the cost of actual meaning. That's probably not something an artist should aim for. I don't know that being the Goodfellas of the n-word is a goal an artist should aspire to, either.

A friend of mine went to the reading of The Hateful Eight and when the first use of nigger occurred, Tarantino interrupted and pointed out that this was the first time it would occur in the story and that there would be 200-something more. The audience laughed at this. My friend looked around at this parliament of honkeys, their mouths agape in laughter, and had visions of the climax of Inglorious Bastards. At that exact moment, they'd be right to blow us up, he said.

It never lands on the ear the way it's supposed to and my annoyance of it only abated because, I think, I was numb to hearing it after the first two hours. Then again, maybe that's the point. Actually, like the drawn out nothingness that makes up the first half of the film, I'm fairly certain it's supposed to be alienating. Then again, maybe like a lot of QT's more clever points, maybe I don't give a fuck.

Flaws aside, The Hateful Eight's strengths do more than outweigh or outshine its manifold problems. The films problems are things the rest of the film treads upon and moves past. It says something about the quality of the rest of the film that I can ignore something as distastful as the needless use of racial epithets. Then again, maybe the joke is on me.

Somebody give this motherfucker a sequel.
No, not you, Eli. Never you.

I guess this is also helped along by the fact that Samuel L. Jackson is in prime form in this movie. His role as the bounty hunting Major Marquis Warren almost feels like an apology for making him the villain in Django Unchained. Warren is, to borrow a phrase, a bad motherfucker. He's cool. He's collected. He's got the best outfit. And, unlike everyone else in the movie, he actually seems interested in doing his job (which, when another character remembers that they also have a job to perform marks the point where I became fully invested in the film).

The best monologue in the film also belongs to Jackson. I won't spoilt the surprise, yet, as horrific as the story is, I can't help but laugh at it. I'm still laughing. I'm laughing because Samuel L. Jackson is laughing and who am I to disagree with him? He's a really good actor, as it turns out.

As it is with the best of Tarantino's movies, The Hateful Eight is a film about characters. It is about people in a premise, not a premise that requires people. The conceit of the film, thin though it may be, never overcomes the basic human drama that exists between these characters that Tarantino and his actors have crafted. As the film goes on, the story becomes less about being a mystery or a western or an exploitation movie and more about the dynamics of these characters. Their loyalties shift. Their needs shift. Their desires conflict. And then a lot of people die poorly. It's a hell of a lot of fun. Or, well, you know, "fun."

Tarantino's best movies, Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, aren't about showing off (necessarily), but about people, characters, and place. His worst films and his most absurd overreaches have always been about being as loud and flamboyant as the Weinstein brothers will allow him to be. Some artists need a tether. I don't know that Tarantino has ever had one. Maybe that's the appeal. Who else is going to make a movie like this? Who else can piss off this many people and make this much money with a movie? That's fun. That's exciting. I just kind of wish I didn't have to imagine QT writing his screenplays with one hand because he was jerking off with the other.

Oh, also, Ennio Morricone does the score for this film. ENNIO FUCKING MORRICONE! He finally got him! Tarantino finally completed the loop!

There's a better, leaner, less needlessly dispicable film beneath the surface of The Hateful Eight. That movie would not be a Tarantino movie, though. For better or for worse, this is what we have. As obnoxious as the man may be either on screen or off (or in this case, in a voice over), he's making the films that he wants to make. Like George Lucas, plenty have tried making movies like him, but none have succeeded. It's nice for me to be on the side of the argument that actually had fun with the damn thing.

The Hateful Eight is a better movie than it has any right to be. It's a better movie than most movies have a right to be.

It's a fine movie to round out 2015's Oscar season-- That is if you really want to spend nine hours watching cowboys be the absolute worst to each other. If that sounds like your kind of thing, then The Hateful Eight is the movie for you.

James Kislingbury is a writer. Ostensibly. He also podcasts about movies. You can support his podcast here. But you won't. Also, buy his dad's book about old time saloons from here. Writing on his own blog means he can have whatever byline he wants. 

*There is no way I am looking up how to spell that film's title “correctly.”

**Yes, Death Proof included. Also, did you know that he went back and added scenes to the movie? If I recall correctly it was so it could be a contender at Canne. Ugh. As if QT couldn't be any more pretentious, the additional scenes were also black and white. Looking back on it, I think this was the exact moment that I realized that this director was just a man and, also, fuck this man.

***Sorry, but we're all adults and I'm not going to talk about it without saying it. I don't have a problem with hearing it and I don't have a problem with it in movies. Again, I'm a big boy. I take issue with how this film handles it. Me. The middle-class white dude in his 20's. You know. The arbiter of what is offensive or not. I mean, I did go to college. . .

Zero Narc Thirty

A Review of Sicario (2015)

by James Kislingbury

I've been burnt by films like this before.

The Counselor leaps most readily to mind. It had a perfect cast, a great director, a screenplay from the English language's greatest living writer, and it was a disaster. Top to bottom blegh. A front to back conveyor belt of vomit and fish heads that is was so perfectly constructed, you almost have to wonder if Ridley Scott was entering into some kind of a Fat Tuesday-like purge of his baser artistic instincts. More recently True Detective Season 2 pops to mind, but the less energy spent on that thing the better.

I say this because expectations can be a terrible thing, especially when your expectations are not only not met, but pulled forcibly from your arms and thrown into a well. Even when a film is good, your expectations can often sabotage your appreciation of that film. "Well, it could have been better," you say, walking through the parking lot, glumly talking to no one.

Sicario defies this tradition. It's a fantastic film, one of the best I've seen this year. It is a film that not only meets my impossible to define, solipsistic expectations, but it, more importantly, it is a film that is as good, if not better, than the collection of talent behind it. The end result is a film that is as horrifying and compelling as anything you will see in 2015.

A shorthand description of Sicario would pit it as Zero Dark Thirty* meets The Counselor (but if The Counselor was good). It's a nihilistic procedural that collides with reality. In this case we follow FBI door kicker Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) as she is recruited into the War on Drugs. The film also stars Josh Brolin as a suspiciously laconic OGA spook and Benicio del Toro, who seems to have channeled all of his typical scenery chewing into being as imposing as possible. Along with Macer's partner played by Daniel Kaluuya**, the team charges headlong into the underworld of Mexican (and American) crime.

As you can imagine, things go poorly for everyone.

This is a movie that begins with the discovery of over forty bodies packed into the drywall of a cartel-owned house. It doesn't let up from there on out. Sicario is a film that manages to use this setting without exploiting it for shock value. The desecrated bodies that hang from Ciudad Juarez's freeways are not titillation, they're facts of life.

Few movies embraces Werner Herzog's concept that "The poet must not avert his eyes" as well as this one does. To show what the current war on drugs looks like is sure to turn off many and hopefully piss off a lot of other people, but it's a vision that works. The story requires its characters to walk through this underworld and, like us, they walk out changed. And maybe not for the better.

One of the reasons Sicario stands out as a film about drugs is that unlike Savages or Scarface, it's a movie that nails the double-think of the War on Drugs. In order to beat brutes, we must become brutes. In order to stop crime, we have to let it carry on. In order to bring things to light we have to hide them. It's a film with all of the glamor and sheen of a head on collision. And each collision is couched inside of a thrilling, perfectly put together action sequence. You can have your nihilism and eat it too.

It reminds me of Zero Dark Thirty, not because of the driven female lead or the deadly bearded men running around in military kit. Both are films that steadfastly refuse to give you an answer. It simply shows you. These are the facts. Here is what a human being suffocated and stuffed into a wall looks like. This is what your government is willing to do for the sake of. . . justice? This is what happens to a man who has lost everything. No judgment, no music cues, no twists just the facts. It isn't a film that is looking to meet you half-way, which is why I like it so much.

Another bit of grounding in the film is Emily Blunt's performance. I would say she was a revelation if it wasn't already clear that she's one of the coolest actors in the business. She's the female Tom Hardy, which is to say that Tom Hardy is the male Emily Blunt and that I would watch them both in any movie that they appear in. Also they should both be James Bond***.

If you haven't seen her in Live. Die. Repeat, All You Need is Kill, The Edge of Tomorrow, you should. It's the best video game movie ever made and she's the best thing about it. Sicario is a very different kind of a film, but she carries it in the same way that Tom Cruise carries The Edge of Tomorrow. She has charisma. As bad as things get in this movie, as abused as she may be, you want to hang out with her while she is going through this. As much as she carries you through this film, she also carries the burden of the story in a way that is somehow mundane to the core, yet heroic in a way that all lost causes are.

Drugs are all around us and as a culture, as a species, we still don't seem any closer with grappling it today than when we did, well, ever. Beyond being entertaining, Sicario is a way to digest this complex subject in some way. That's what great art does. It leaves us with something more interesting than answers.

Twenty minutes into Sicario, we see Blunt's Kate Macer washing the results of a particularly brutal SWAT raid on a house. That is a thesis statement of the entire film. It's what you'll want walking out of the film or maybe you'll agree with Kate later in the film “I need a drink.”

Amen to that.

Sicario isn't exactly a fun movie. It's packed with tension, it's thrilling in places, and even manages a few laughs, but it isn't fun. It doesn't provide answers or edification. It points its lens at the Abyss for two hours and let's the camera roll. Sicario deserves to be seen, not because it's an uncompromising look into the War on Drugs, but because it manages to be, on the one hand, suffocating and heartless, and on the other, completely and utterly gripping. It's a film that needs to be seen. No, it's more than that. Sicario a film that needs to be witnessed.

FOOTNOTES

* Coincidentally, Kathryn Bigelow produced a documentary about the border and vigilantism called Carteland this year. Obviously something is in the air and it's not just Don Winslow, who I imagine burns his typewriters after every novel to "free the demon.

** Oh, he's British? Of course he's fucking British.

***And also Idris Elba. Rotating Bonds. Can you dig it?

James Kislingbury is a writer, a podcaster, and DAREs to be drug free. You can check out his podcast A Quality Interruption here. You can support his creative endeavors on Pateron here. You can follow him on Twitter here. There are no wrong answers here.