One’s a shattering comedy-drama, the other is the darkest comedy imaginable – guess which is which
A lot of our friends liked The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (for the Elderly & Beautiful) when it ran for about six months at the Mariemont Theatre. We didn’t go because I said I didn’t want to see a movie about euthanasia. Yes, I know it was supposedly a gentle, civilized British comedy about a group of literate, elderly retirees moving to India, but they were going there to die (eventually). Plus, I thought it would be an example of hyperlink cinema that wouldn’t
work like Love, Actually where there were nine stories and I could have cut two or three of them easily. My sister sent Marigold Hotel as a Christmas gift so we watched it and I liked it much more than I thought I would.
work like Love, Actually where there were nine stories and I could have cut two or three of them easily. My sister sent Marigold Hotel as a Christmas gift so we watched it and I liked it much more than I thought I would.
The Seven Retirees Meet |
Judi Dench Adapts To Her New Home |
Dev Patel and Tena Desae |
The underlying messages from the movie are that we may not be able to afford retirement in our own first world countries so we’d better hope that the rising Asian nations would have a place for us and that pragmatic common sense and math are the way to sustaining vitality. Don’t discount those that may initially appear unattractive because their gifts may be the most useful. As Europe totters financially and the U.S. faces a fiscal cliff, this movie’s implications are timely and frightening.
Django Unchained is Quentin Tarantino’s latest and it’s a shocking, unbelievably bloody variation on the spaghetti westerns of the ‘60s and a great screwball comedy. Actually, all of his movies have been screwball comedies, but instead of the stakes being about romance, they’re about desperate survival. It’s already been controversial because of its questionable language, but this may result in bigger box office. Specifically, the N word is used over one hundred times, though the two mature black women in front of me did not react as if they were offended. It was the continual F word repetition that I found objectionable because it didn’t seem of the period, whereas the N word usage, while chafing, is consistent with the historical cultural context. There have been other objections by Spike Lee and Tavis Smiley, among others. While I respect their opinions, Tarantino never makes light of slavery and its warping affects upon anyone who came in contact with it.
Jamie Foxx as Django |
Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx |
Leonardo DiCaprio |
Samuel L. Jackson as the Head House Slave |
Yes, the violence is shocking and perverse and funny just like it was in Inglourious Basterds, but that dealt with American Jewish heroes battling Nazis far away in Europe; this is about Americans (and one German) battling one another and it’s far more dangerous politically. Django comments significantly (and this is a paraphrase) that he knows how America is with violence because he’s been raised with it and implies that the dentist is naïve in comparison. Tarantino knows how Americans are thrilled and repelled by violence and he shows the terrible price that must be paid for both retribution (Basterds) and freedom (Django). However, a recurring motif in his work is that people that cannot communicate with those from another group, either through language or cultural respect and understanding, will eventually lose to those that can.
While the pundits wring their hands and rebuke, we must remember that Tarantino is the only major American white director to consistently utilize ethnically diverse casts. He refuses to portray blacks in this or Jews in Inglourious Basterds as victims; they stand up, fight, and suffer the triumphs and tragedies. Unfortunately, there aren’t any great parts for women in Django; this is a shame since Uma Thurman, Pam Grier, Rose MacGowan, Rosario Dawson, Mélanie Laurent, and Diane Kruger have shone in his earlier movies. With this mature, commercial entertainment, Tarantino simultaneously confronts the Left that doesn’t want anything portraying disenfranchised group without compassion and sensitivity and the Right that doesn’t want anything that details the racial anguish inherent in American history and culture.
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