3 Short (Or Not) Paragraphs: The Hunt

2020, Craig Zobel (Z for Zachariah) -- download

Decided to watch this one, even if its been four years since Kent piqued my interest. Trump's first term ended just a week after Kent posted it. Trump's second term started about six months ago. In a current world where he (Trump, not Kent) constantly spawns conspiracies to fit the world into his desired view point, I was curious as to movie that pissed him (Trump, not Kent) off so much.

OK, there have been plenty of "human beings are the prey" movies, so the premise is not shocking. Its a Blumhouse production, which generally means its coming with at least a little bit of side-eye and not taking itself too seriously (except when they do, and want you to Be Afraid) but this spin on the premise is worthy a little chuckle, no matter which end of the North American political spectrum you are. Essentially, the movie begins with a bunch of hillbillies waking up in a field, after a brief intro where a bunch of very rich assholes have to deal with one of said hillbillies waking up early on their plane.

OK, not all hillbillies, but quickly it becomes apparent they are of the Right Wing American persuasion (it's a lifestyle choice, they are not born that way) especially after they knock off a few of the recognizable faces with long distance gun shots or a minefield. But calm, collected Crystal survives and walks off on her own. 

A few others escape and end up at a roadside gas bar, the kind the kids usually stop at on the way to a sex fueled weekend by the lake. One eats a donut and dies, another is shot by the owners, the last is gassed. Then Crystal (Betty Gilpin, Mrs. Davis) shows up and discerns pretty quickly, the whole thing is a ruse, a deadly trap. She also has figured out she is nowhere near Arkansas, which is where the gas bar was pretending to be, but somewhere in Eastern Europe. 

That was an odd turn for the movie, and I was hoping it would get odder from there. But, also like most Blumhouse, they stretch a bit out of the average thriller-horror comfort zones but not too far. Still, its an enjoyable romp. The "reveal" is that the rich assholes are Extreme Left who were cancelled because they joked about doing a redneck hunt, each of them removed as heads of their respective corporations. So, they decided they might as well do a redneck hunt, but specified against each of the conspiracy minded, yell about it on the Internet types that accused them all of the hunt. This is a spin on PizzaGate idea of the Democrats running a pedophilia ring, and the QAnon nuts running wild with it. 

The fun thing is that they got the wrong Crystal. Sure, she's from Mississippi and sounds the part, but this Crystal is a well-educated, well (militarily) trained woman down on her luck, and maybe a wee bit unhinged in her own right. It is kind of funny that the exact reason Trump went bonkers on the movie kind of matches up on how the Right misconstrued what these Rich Assholes were doing in the first place. I think that was intentional, as all press is good press? Alas, it didn't work out and this movie kind of disappeared into the ether.

Even so, we get such a wonderful performance from Betty Gilpin. Sometimes the smallest of characterizations can just add so much to a role. Crystal knows she's a bit off, and is not at all bothered by the idea of killing whichever Rich Asshole stands up in front of her. She's got some rage in her, which she acknowledges with head nods and whistles, and they just gave her a reason to give into it, much to our delight.

KWIF: Coens crazy

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Spent much of the week with my feet shuffling along the cement floors of Toronto Fan Expo and the asphalt road of the Canadian National Exhibition. My feet hurt. But you don't need feet to watch movies.

This Week:
Honey Don't (2025, d. Ethan Coen - in theatre)
The Big Lebowski (1998, d. Joel [and Ethan] Coen - DVD)

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Ethan Coen's two films sans his brother Joel have instead found him partnered with his editor/wife, Tricia Cooke, and the resulting Honey Don't  and Drive-Away Dolls before it are very much the result of that distinctive pairing. They are the first two entries of what they have informally described as "lesbian b-movie trilogy" (the film they co-directed prior to Drive-Away Dolls, the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind is not part of said trilogy). Cooke is queer and there is definitely both a queer and feminist agenda (in a good way, not in the toxic manosphere way) with the first two entries in the trilogy. 

They are crime films on the surface - Drive-Away Dolls is much more a wild road trip sex comedy, whereas Honey Don't is much more firmly dime-novel pulp and grindhouse with all the accoutrements that come with it (sex, nudity and brutal, thrilling, squick-inducing violence). But at their core, they are taking genres, subgenres and sub-sub-genres that have normally been manufactured by men, for men and making them very, very gay.

Honey Don't opens beautifully, with a mysterious French woman on a scooter coming across an overturned car in the remote Bakersfield dusty terrain. The woman double checks that the car's driver is dead then pilfers a ring. She then goes and takes a refreshing dip in a nearby stream before venturing back on her way in her leopard-print outfit. She looks remarkably like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, and is styled like her too, hair and wardrobe. That should have itself been the tip-off to me of what this was going to be...a pastiche of a pastiche while forging its own paths off the trail.

The opening credits are fantastic... grainy footage of Bakersfield shot out the side of a moving car, with digitally enhanced moments where the footage pauses to reveal credits on billboards, signs, graphitti and other such locales. Underneath the images, dripping full 70's with a killer bass hook, and in full-blown rasp power vocals is Brittany Howard's "We Gotta Get Out of This Place"... it's an absolute killer.

The film introduces us to hardboiled P.I. Honey O'Donahue getting out of bed after a one-night stand that you know isn't going anywhere. She's brought onto the aforementioned crash site by Detective Marty Mekatawich (Charlie Day) who makes constant advances at Honey non-stop and is relentless in spite of her quite blunt and decisive rebuking. It's passed off as "good natured", and the sheer fact that it's Charlie Day means there's definitely a comedic (and non-threatening) edge to the delivery of his ineffective come-ons, but it's only funny if you don't realize how exhausting it obviously is for Honey to have to deal with. In spite of it, she kind of likes the guy... from a distance.

The person in the car is a client of Honey's, with connections to a local church, led by Chris Evans' egomaniacal cult leader Reverend Drew Devlin. He's in deep with some French investors, and the woman from the beginning, Chere (Lera Abova), is kind of the cleaner. Seems Devlin has found himself in a bit of a mess. Dealin is a guy who knows how pretty and charming he can be and he uses it to his every advantage at all times. Undernea big bright smile and beautiful physique is a vainglorious sociopath whose whole congregation is a front for drug running, and a vehicle to manipulate the women of his congregation into having kinky sex...err...congress with him.

We meet Honey's pregnant sister (Kristen Connelly) and her sprawling brood (she keeps admonishing Honey about judging her as a mother, and it's kind of clear she's got her own issues around it), including her niece Corrinne (Talia Ryder) who is seeing a dirtbag who turns out to be an abusive MAGA douche.

Lady Kent pointed out that the film is a "shaggy dog" story, the kind that is twisting and convoluted only to ultimately have a conclusion that negates or makes the story somewhat futile or irrelevant. The Big Lebowski is a shaggy dog story, and, having re-watched Lebowski days earlier, it's hard not to compare. But the tones are completely different.

With Honey Don't we're expecting a sort of detective noir caper, but it's not that. Honey investigates her client's death but only lightly. She has a client (Billy Eichner) who wants dirt on his boyfriend's infidelity, and she doesn't even manage to start that job before her Neice disappears, which then becomes her primary focus...outside of having frantic hook-upd with MG (Aubrey Plaza) from the police station.

Shaggy dog stories come together in ultimately unsatisfying ways, because they sort of mislead you into thinking everything you see matters, everything you see is connected. Well, it is...and it isn't. I am reminded, thought, that many a Coens film has taken multiple viewings before they click, and I can see that definitely happening with Honey Don't...it just might take a few more viewings then others.  There are definitely standout parts to the production, it's just hard to get a grasp on the tone its going for. I think the "lesbian b-movie trilogy" classification actually helps put it much more into perspective.

Much like in the first half of the Coens career where Joel was getting the director's credit and Ethan was listed as producer (due to Director's Guild b.s.) even though they were co-directing, I have to wonder if these films are co-directed by Ethan and Tricia Cooke. As much as there's a Coen-y vibe, there's also an un-Coen-y vibe that challenges what little expectations I have when approaching a Coen production. Cooke definitely has her hand in the editing, and there's a lot of choices made in the edits, some which are phenomenal and others which prove a little perplexing (at least upon first watch).

I'm keen to give this another watch with a little time a perspective. Right now it's pretty low on the overall Coen's ranking, but I do like it better than Drive-Away Dolls, which I still have yet to give a second viewing.

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What still needs to be said about The Big Lebowski that hasn't already been said? Not much I reckon, but here we go anyway. Sometimes you just gotta put one letter in front of the other and see what happens.

After Fargo became and immediate and beloved cinema classic and masterpiece, eyes were hotly attuned to the Coens' follow-up. I remember seeing The Big Lebowski in theatre and just. not. getting it. I don't exactly remember if I tried again later on DVD or just wrote it off as "not for me". It wasn't until meeting Lady Kent that I was encouraged to try it again. She was a big fan of the film, see, and, as she likes to remind me, got it all from the first viewing. 

By the time I rewatched Lebowski it was in its pop-culture ascendancy, it was only just starting to become part of early internet memes, and you would see Lebowski cosplay out in public on Halloween. Something about all that meme-ification did make it snap it place. It provides an incredible frame for which to display a lively painting of pure irreverence.

Fargo is a perfect movie, and Lebowski perhaps even more so. The intent put into every line, every beautifully constructed Roger Deakins frame, every accentuating needledrop, it's all so very, very precise. It is truly a comedy goldmine, each watch unveils new performance flourishes, or new intentions in dialogue, or new realizations...it's a movie that, in its byzantine shaggy dog construct, keeps giving back to its audience the more familiar they become with it.

This go around, it became so amusingly apparent that Walter (John Goodman), despite being a hair's breadth away from full-fledged lunatic conspiracy nut, is actually right about everything that's happening in the whole scenario the Dude has gotten involved in. Even though Walter can't help but mess everything up, he's got his eyes open, he just can't see past his own issues to bring any situation to resolution. It's like he's looking for conflict.

Jeff Bridges as The Dude is by no means an aspirational figure. He lives a slovenly simple life. He needs his pot, his drinks, his bowling and his car. Anything else, like friendship, or sex, or making money, is equal parts bonus and hassle. 

The concussion/roofie-induced acid trip flashbacks by way of musical montages are magnificent gateways into the way the Dude's mind works, and it's truly as uncomplicated on the inside as it appears on the outside.

Also on this rewatch it stood out to me seeing Carter Burwell's name on the title credits as composer (with T Bone Burnett listed as "musical archivist") since the soundtrack to The Big Lebowski is the first of its kind for the Coens, where it marries so much of its scenes to a song, much in the way Quentin Tarantino or Danny Boyle were doing at the time, and later Edgar Wright and James Gunn (and many other modern auters) would.  We don't see a lot of "various artists" soundtracks from Coens productions (it's something that again jumped out at me about Honey Don't, which along with the shaggy dog storytelling kind of marries the two films, if only a little bit). It's a remarkably successful attempt at the song-story coherence, it's truly a wonder why they really never did it more.

The Coens use, manipulate and subvert the conventions of Raymond Chandler, or so I'm told...I'm not well versed. The Coens love the classic detective noir writers and those seeds form the foundation of so much of their work. But they're still film guys, who have a ridiculously extensive knowledge of cinema, its tropes, and its uniqueness, and they will abuse those classic genre conventions like a chef making ramen noodles, twisting and slamming and dusting and manipulating until something ready for the pot results, and then it just becomes the centerpiece of the Coens' soup. Delicious delicious soup. I think it may be dinner time.

The Hunt

 2020, d. Craig Zobel - Crave

The Hunt was originally intended as a fall 2019 release, but right wing media got news of the basic premise - elitist lefties hunt right wing deplorables for sport - and had a goddamn conniption fit to the point that the president* of the United* States publicly condemned the film...as if he had nothing better to do.  "The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos," he said, with the irony of that statement to be applied 16 months later.

Of course all the butthurt "feelings" that right wing blowhards put on this film was all just more grist for the mill of political divisiveness.  None of them calling for its ban had seen the film at that point.  Those right wingers were projecting and stoking their own fears (which are copious) that lefties would take it as inspiration and legitimately start following suit in hunting your basic salt-of-the-earth, gun-loving, beer drinkin', rah-rah-'Merica 'Mericans.  The reality is that if anyone was going to hunt anyone else for sport, we know what kind of people those would be (and a history of lynchings and mob violence and attempted government kidnappings and coups tells us so).  

So The Hunt was delayed.  Distributor Universal delayed the film's release, they said not as a reaction to Trump's unfounded paranoia, but rather due to multiple mass shootings happening near the release date.  But when it did come out, it was right at the precipice of COVID lockdowns and it barely made a blip in the news cycles.  Suddenly something was more important than left-right political divides... until it wasn't.

If 2020, and 2021 so far, have shown anything it's that these divides are becoming unbridgeable gulfs.  Social media, alternative "news", and even much of the mainstream is pushing people to choose sides.  Hell, the American political system stupidly only accommodates two sides, as if there's no shades of gray, which is part of the problem.  But what isn't being conveyed is that the extreme reaches of both sides are much smaller (although growing) then the flapping gums would have you believe. 

And so we have The Hunt, a film that threatens to stay relevant for far too long, even once we're past the Trump presidency*.  The Hunt, as a story, is not a suggestion on how people should behave, but a broad, grindhousey satire, is fed up with both sides.  On the left you have overly sensitive "well actually" (mostly white) individuals who feel the need to make every cause their own and try to bully anyone and everyone into submitting to it.  On the right, the overly sensitive, the ignorant, the fearful, (definitely white) who want everything they want, their way, and if it doesn't go that way there's got to be someone to blame (other than themselves).

We open with a group chat, where individuals are texting about the "idiot-in-chief" and how, thankfully, they have their deplorable-hunting retreat coming up.  Smash cut to a luxury jet, where a very confused, drugged up, redneck stammers into scene, looking very out of place among the elitists talking caviar and champagne.  The elitists murder him with glee with an unseen woman, their host, dealing the finishing blow with a designer stiletto.  That's what kind of film this is going to be.

Hunger Games style, a group of right wingers emerge in the woods, finding a crate in the middle of an open field.  It's loaded to bear with weapons but just as quick as these people arm themselves, feeling a very false sense of security, they start taking fire.  There's a good couple fake-outs here with some recognizable faces who are taken off the board immediately.

We zero in on Betty Gilpin (GLOW), who seems hypercompetent, and isn't prone to all the wild speculation that the others indulge in.  There's repeated talk of "Manorgate", which I think is an "in story" conspiracy theory, but it sounds just like any of the far-fetched QAnon bullshit that people have taken to in recent years.  This conspiracy theory is just what you think, that elitist left wingers are kidnapping and hunting right wingers for sport.  It's amusing that it becomes hard to actually dispute this as conspiracy given what we're witnessing.

There's a few elaborate set-ups here the lefties have in store for the deplorables, but the film isn't content to just play out their version of The Most Dangerous Game.  We spend time with both sides, and they're kind of annoying or despicable both, but played for laughs, so long as you get that the joke is how ridiculous they both sound.  Gilpin's whole thing is that she doesn't care who's hunting her, or why, only that they are.  She's also a little (*whistles*) so this is helping her burn off some pent up whatever.  She's also got a "tortoise and the hare" analogy she's lived her life by, that has some dark edges to it, where the hare goes and murders the tortoise and his family after beating him in the race.  Yeah.

[SPOILERS]

The movie leads us to the final confrontation between Gilpin and Athena (Hilary Swank), the main orchestrator of this whole endeavor.  But the third act starts with a flashback to a year before, when Athena is removed from her own company after the opening text chain about hunting deplorables -- just a joke to begin with -- goes public and spreads like wildfire.   Everyone on the thread was impacted.  So they get together and start to pick out who the instrumental players were in spreading the "Manorgate" story, and decide to make Manorgate real, since so many of them think it's real anyway.  These rumor mongers are the people they round up, except Gilpin's character was a case of mistaken identity.  Athena doesn't believe it and they have a knock-down, drag-out fight anyway.  Athena seems obsessed with Orwell's Animal Farm but it's Gilpin who sets her straight on its message (highlighting that elites think themselves morally and intellectually superior than they actually are).

[END SPOILERS]

The end result is a story that reflects (and lampoons) how divided present day America is in the wake of the Trump years.  There's rampant distrust of one's neighbour, fuelled by capitalists who want to profit or otherwise benefit from such discord.  And if you think the story paints Gilpin as the accidental hero of the story, she's just another piece of the problem puzzle... the cynical centrist who is only in it for themself. 

It should be made clear that the script from Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers, Watchmen) and Nick Cuse is intentionally a very, very broad swipe at both sides.  The humour is very easy, because both sides have made it very easy to make fun of them by merely repeating their own absurdity back at them.  It's not a film that's moralizing, or making any grand statements except to say that, maybe, the extreme dialogue from any source leads to  dehumanizing people, turning them instead into a vilified idea.  There's no room for empathy or understanding once you've given over to extreme ideology.

This is not a serious movie, nor is it subtle.  It tackles its subject matter with all the delicacy of using a sledgehammer to crack an egg, yet everything is intentional.  It is smart enough to know how to play with these two extremes to entertaining ends, like how Mythbusters play with some very dangerous toys, smartly.  Like a proper grindhouse movie, it tackles its topic-of-the-day with a plethora of silly, gross gags and deaths.   It revels in each kill as a sort of punchline, and as an equal opportunity offender.  It's a film that's had enough and just wants both sides to shut up for a while, but instead of being angry it's just kind of numb to the chatter.  It wants you to know that it thinks you're stupid for believing in conspiracy theories and that your aggressive political correctness is pretty off-putting (and probably counter-productive to your intentions).

I liked this movie, quite a bit. It's like drinking a Slurpee, pretty enjoyable except for the occasional brain freeze.

10 for 10: Rewatching Tarantino [and then a ranking]

[10 for 10... that's 10 movies which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie --or TV show-- we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable?   ]

In This Edition:

Reservoir Dogs (1992) - d. Quentin Tarantino
True Romance  (1993) - d. Tony Scott
Pulp Fiction (1994) - d. Quentin Tarantino
From Dusk 'til Dawn (1996) - d. Robert Rodriguez
Jackie Brown (1997) - d. Quentin Tarantino
Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003) & 2 (2004) - d. Quentin Tarantino
Death Proof (2007) - d. Quentin Tarantino
Inglorious Basterds (2009) - d. Quentin Tarantino
Django Unchained (2012) - d. Quentin Tarantino
The Hateful Eight (2015) - d. Quentin Tarantino

Aaaaand go-go (twist contest!)
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Reservoir Dogs features many of the Tarantino hallmarks, but not all of them (no fetishistic foot shots).  You've the climactic shootout, tension-raising extended dialogue sequences, killer soundtrack, prolific use of ethnic and racial slurs, pop-culture references, dark comedy, non-linear timelines and so much more of what we've come to expect from the writer/director/actor*   27 years later, Reservoir Dogs is the minimum viable product for a QT picture, the template for everything that would come later.  It's a heist picture that pretty much ignores the heist.  It's about sitting around the fringes of the heist, the downtime and the aftereffects.  It's exploring how terrible people deal with things gone wrong, and how there's something still relateable even in those terrible people.  The gut punch of violence - the infamous ear cutting sequence - was notorious back in the early 1990s, and kept a lot of people away from the film, but that kind of grimness is commonplace on television these days.  You see worse on the average episode of CSI or NCIS or whatever acronymed procedural is popular these days.  I don't love this movie, but I like it a lot.  It's got a brisk pace (one of few QT movies to clock in under 2 hours) and a captivating framework.  The budgetary limitations show in the design aesthetic, the movie looks a lot different than every other QT production since, but the dialogue and performance is the show here, and it's pretty good in that regard.

[10:29]

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True Romance is the least memorable of all the Tarantino-scripted movies (though one wishes they could forget Natural Born Killers), because it's not a Tarantino movie, it's a Tony Scott movie with Scott trying to cram a Tarantino movie into a conventional Hollywood narrative.


 Christian Slater is miscast (there's no belief or conviction in what he's saying - a Sonny Chiba fan, works at a comics shop, Elvis obsessed - I don't buy it, bub) and you don't get any sense of where this character has obtained such brazenness and confidence. This guy is a geek, but Slater doesn't do geek.
The rest of the cast is on point for a Tarantino joint, though: Patricia Arquette is great as Alabama, (even if she is a manic pixie dream girl prototype), Val Kilmer as Elvis (err..."the Mentor"), Gary Oldman as the lead singer of Korn, Christopher Walken and Dennis hopper being racist.  Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini sharing a scene years before The Mexican, Sam Jackson, Bronson Pinchot, Tom Seizmore, Chris Penn.

The direction is all wrong, the edits are all wrong, the musical queues are all wrong... even the usual orgy of violence in the end of nearly every Tarantino movie is sensationalist cheekiness, here Scott tries to play it straight and doesn't understand the absurdity of it all.

This movie has a terribly juvenile sense of love and romance, and it doesn't care to explore the greater emotional depths of the characters or their relationship. The second half of the film gets so sidetracked with its drug deal it forgets about the relationship.  But listening to Tarantino's commentary, and hearing about the original structure for the film (which was his usual non-linear construction), it IS more about the drugs and how these lovers got embroiled in with these mobsters and their cocaine.  QT says that he loves this film as is and by the time he had name enough to get it made he was beyond it. But I can't help but want his full vision for this. To see Slater pick up Big Kahuna Burgers and for Hopper to ask for a Red Apple instead of a Chesterfield.

There's definitely a theme of rebel lovers in QT's early work...here, the duo in Natural Born Killers and Pumpkin and Honey Bunny in Pulp Fiction.

[written while watching the film, so not timed]
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Ahhh, Pulp Fiction.  This was my awakening as a wanna be cinephile (it turns out I'm too interested in things like comics, music, comedy, games, and such to really commit to the cinephilic lifestyle) when I was 18 years old.  This was a slap in the face, a sudden shock that there's more to the world of film then just what Hollywood dishes out.  QT's approach to Pulp Fiction seemed to be assembling a collage of cinematic homages and putting those on top of a twisty, non-linear, multi-story framework.  Taking inspiration also from 30's and 40's pulp magazines, where there are multiple tales of gangland crime, detective noir, and all sorts of debauchery, the film doles out a half dozen stories, all interconnected but placed out of order.  It's a dense layer cake, but utterly delicious every bite.  I watched this thing 6 times in the theatre when it came out and multiple times since.  I haven't watched it in a while  but most of the script is still committed to memory, as is most of the soundtrack.  The entire package remains thrilling to me 25 years later.  I'm never bored watching it and when it ends I just kind of want to watch it straight away again.  It's kind of a feel-good movie for me.  For all its dark themes, and heavyweight aspects (violence, drugs, gangs, rape, racism) it's a hilarious movie, and it's shot so brightly, it's almost like it's without shadows.  I love it tremendously.  It's a masterpiece.

[20:14]

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From Dusk 'til Dawn was a favourite of mine 20-ish years ago.  I was into both QT and Robert Rodriguez quite heavily at the time so seeing the two of them married together like this was a big thrill.  It also exposed ER's Dr. Hunky George Clooney as a capable action star and badass.  The thing is, if I'm being perfectly honest, is I liked the criminals on the run aspect of the film's first half a lot more than the second half of vampire monster killing at the titty bar.  The first half has an internal logic at least, one which pokes a little fun at the media's obsession with real-world violence with a news clip of the crime the Gecko brothers commited and a reporter way too enthusiastic about covering the story. 

Of course, this is a very, absurdly violent movie, and I have no problem with that, but the inner consistency of the second half, of how the vampires turn their victims, or how they die, or what can kill them, it all falls apart very quickly.  Nothing is consistent in the second half and it's just balls to the wall ridiculousness.  There's no hint of scares here, it's meant as pure Grindhouse goofiness.  I wish it had stuck with the more grounded tone of the first half. 

QT gives his best (and perhaps only good) performance here as Richie Gecko, a demented sex offender with violent intentions, barely kept in line by Clooney's Seth Gecko, definitely dangerous, but certainly more level-headed.  Richie's interactions with the Fuller family, particularly Juliette Lewis' Katherine is full on ick-inducing, particularly when the film goes into Richie's demented POV that most certainly isn't reality. 

There are aspects I like about the second half, Fred Williamson primarily.  He's hilarious in the role, particularly when he's telling his absurd 'Nam story.  Rodriguez's fast-and-loose doesn't clash with Tarantino's meticulousness all that much, but he certainly seems more at home in the realm of exploding vampires and bloody neck bites than he does with long conversations.  Oh and the foot fetishiness is at its apex here. Bleh.

[1:29:10]


(written after Django)

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I didn't like Jackie Brown when it came out.  I was extremely excited for it, hotly anticipating it.  In the few years since Pulp Fiction I had become a Tarantino devotee (I even watched Destiny Turns On The Radio because he was acting in it).  I was reading his screenplays, listening to soundtracks over and over, attempted to following his recommendations via Blockbuster and other video stores in a vain attempt at catching onto his cinematic influences (it's pretty much everything, it's futile), and of course, watching Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction over and over.  I thought I knew what I was going to get with Jackie Brown.  I was wrong.  And I was so disappointed.  I didn't think it was a bad movie, but I didn't get it.  It didn't have so many of Tarantino's usual flairs that I didn't know how to feel about it. I always meant to get back to it, to try it again, but I never did, so great was my disappointment.  I didn't even buy it on DVD when it came out.  Me, this Tarantino devotee.  That was my first experience with understandings that our idols aren't flawless and that at some point they'll let you down (so many more of these lessons were still to be learned).

Two decades later though, and Jackie Brown makes sense to me now.  It's a surprisingly adept portrayal of the disappointments of middle-age.  Sure much of that comes from Elmore Leonard's book, Rum Punch, which Tarantino adapted, but QT sure seems to get it.  And he holds himself back.  I think this is a love letter to his mom and her friends, these strong middle aged women he knew who are constantly pushed down by the world but they won't be beaten and they know how to shrewdly navigate it without letting on that they're in control.  Or maybe it's just a fantasy, but it's really, really damn great.

At the time of its release, I was expecting more of a Blacksploitation vibe because of Pam Grier's presence, (probably thinking it would be more like Black Dynamite, something really tongue-in-cheek) but the earnestness is what makes it so great.  It really is a fantastic movie, and Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Carlyle, Bridgette Fonda all hit it out of the park.  Hell, you've got both Michael Keaton and Robert DeNiro in relatively small support roles (DeNiro barely speaks at all until the third act).  It's brilliant casting.  There's no big eruption of violence, and QT tempers his grindhouse instincts almost completely, finding a completely different gear that we never see this exact way again, but it certainly influences how he approaches dramatic moments in the future.  It's his most mature movie, in more ways than one.

[33:32]

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QT has always said Kill Bill was intended to be one movie, and it was a greedy Weinstein decision to split them up into two pictures.  I've been waiting a decade and a half for a complete Kill Bill, to see it the way its creator intended, and though it keeps getting teased, it never gets released.  So, for the purpose of this recap, I just watched them back to back, literally skipping the credits on volume 1 and jumping direct into Volume 2.  The only thing that seems out of place in doing so is the brief recap at the start of Volume 2 that seems out of sync with the rest of the film.  Otherwise, I don't know that there's much else missing or added to the proceedings.

The wife (that would be my wife, not The Bride) had said that she didn't think the films held up, but I was rapt watching these two again.  More than any other film that QT had done before, or has done since, Kill Bill smashes together so many of his cinematic loves.  There should be tonal whiplash, but the chaptering of the film helps contain each segment to its own genre.  There's obviously different inferences of kung-fu and martial arts films.  There's an anime sequence.  There's so many hard boiled asian action tropes.  Hell, it opens with a Shaw Brothers title card.  The first half really steeps itself in Chinese cinema of the 70's and 80's, while thoroughly digging its heels (so many feet shots) in its 70's exploitation revenge drama. The second half toys around with noir and western revenge cinema (it really is laced with all different genres of revenge), while still keeping its toes (so many feet shots) in Chinese cinema.

The action in the film is ridiculous.  Master fight choreographer Yeun Woo-Ping outdoes himself with so much of what QT asks for here.  What we see in the big Crazy 88s fight is often relegated to animated form because it'd be so difficult to pull off in reality, but here it is.  It's visceral and scintillating.  The climax of Vol. 1, the showdown with O-Ren Ishii is stunning, a majestic and magical sequence that comes more from Samurai cinema than Chinese wuxia.  The opening kitchen fight combines John Woo with wuxia, while the later fight in the trailer is incredible for acknowledging the obstacles and challenge of fighting in close quarters.

What I disliked originally in the theatre was the slow burn of the finale, but watch as a whole, there's total resonance, with The Bride finding out her daughter lives, and is beautiful.  How she handles Bill in this sequence comes back to the maturity QT found in Jackie Brown, and it's beautiful, well-acted, and heartfelt.

As a whole, Kill Bill is a lot, but it shouldn't really be anything less than what it is.  Not totally perfect, not without its flaws (or controvercies) but thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless.

[51:34]

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I saw Death Proof originally as part of the Grindhouse presentation, a lenghty double-feature viewing experience that kicked off with Robert Rodgriguez's Planet Terror.  A gross, yet giddy dive off the deep end of exploitation tropes.  Where a true grindhouse movie has to pace out its shocks and gags, with his budget Rodriguez could dole out multiples per minute.  In comparison, QT's Death Proof was meandering and leisurely, with a very extensive amount of time given to following a quartet of liberated women as they have an evening out at a dive bar.  The promised murder machine driven by Kurt Russell's Stuntman Mike only appears for a few minutes in the entire film, and the menace of Stuntman Mike's presence in the bar actually waffles between creepy and charming.  When the kill(s) actually happen, well, it's almost over before it began, but really you didn't want it to overstay its welcome to begin with.  And then there's a whole other half, where the tone shifts from ominous, slasher film to stunt spectacular.  It's almost two different projects altogether. So tonally it's a bit all over the place, and yet, QT seems to have everything right where he wants it.  If he's going to do straight up grindhouse, he's going to do it true to straight up grindhouse...complete with the meandering dialogue, the titillation, the drinking and drugs, the menace, the kills, the janky editing and extreme camera angles.  And he's not going to do just one straight up grindhouse, but two.  So you get in a 2 hour span both a relatively uninspired horror with a big spectacular kill, and then a stunt show with a dash of revenge thrown in.

Back in the day, watching all of Grindhouse, I wasn't in the mood for QT's slow amble after Rodriguez's amped-up visceral experience (not to mention those hilarious, gross and densely packed mock grindhouse trailers from the likes of Eli Roth and Edgar Wright).  But as its own production, as an experiment to make authentically styled grindhouse, but on a bigger budget, I think QT nailed it.  He has such an appreciation for the style of low budget exploitation cinema that it influences all his work, but in replicating it he know exactly what's going on.  At the same time, he makes it his own, as one would expect, and the dialogue and soundtrack are on point for QT.  The first half is good, the second half is delightful (Rosario Dawson, Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms and Mary Elizabeth Winstead make a wonderful quartet).  QT giving Bell a real spotlight to show off her formidable stunt skills is pretty much the entire point of Death Proof in my mind.  But then there's also the great turnaround where Stuntman Mike becomes a wimpering, simpering fool as he's not used to women fighting back.

This is not a great movie, and there's not much here to think about past what it is, but it is pretty fun.

[1:08:25]
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Whoops, I forgot to write about Inglorious Basterds.  There are some flat out incredible scenes in this film.  The opening sequence is breathtaking in both its beautiful cinematography and its intensity.  QT has always liked tension building but this is almost exclusively built around tension building.  People trying to hide who they are from other people, the stakes always so high, yeah, it's best avoided by anyone with anxiety issues.

The titular Basterds of the film are kind of the least appealing aspect of it, however.  Their ruthless, revenge-tinged scalphunting is uneasy and speaks too much to "rah-rah 'merica" in its revisionist retelling of how World War II went down.  I can't tell whether it's QT playing to his grindhouse fanaticism or if it's satire of "We're No. 1, U.S.A! U.S.A!" WWII movies that make it seem like there was no war without America's involvement.  There's just uncomfortable problems here.

That said, it's a pretty exciting feature overall, with an absolutely epic, now infamous climax which was a very bold choice on QTs part.  In any other director's hands it would feel like an unearned twist, in QT's hands, it feels like logical extension of the storytelling, and the director.  I like this one...just a little less than I did before.

[1:45:49]

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With Django Unchained we enter the realm of QT films I've already written about on this site.  But the purpose here isn't to reiterate what I've said before, but to measure my impressions now, in a quick 10 minute writing session.  And so, to be perfectly honest, I was a bit disappointed with this rewatch.  Django as a character has an almost legendary status now... the film ends with him triumphant in killing all the southern degens and rescuing his true love, and he feels epic at the end, but the rest of the film is only marginally about him.  It's three acts of exploits, first with Christoph Waltz's King rescuing Django and taking him under his tutelage in the craft of bounty hunting, then venturing out to mess with Don Johnson's southern fried estate, and finally winding up at Candy Land where Django and King square off against Leonardo DiCaprio's vile Candy.  In these exploits you can see the legend of Django building, but it's still not his show.  It's not until the fourth act where Django frees himself and gets his revenge that the real legend of a true badass mofo is born.  It's an origin story.   QT has said he will never do a superhero movie but here, he's basically done it already.  I mean, QT has already plotted a Django/Zorro team-up comic which may come to fruition as a film soon enough, but we really need a Django movie that immortalizes the character into grand status.  This underbakes the legend, leaving it a little soft in the middle.  It's also really self-indulgent, as I think we've gathered QT's movies all are.

[1:17:26]

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And back to The Hateful Eight.  Honestly, I didn't particularly like this movie the first time around, and of all of QT's movies this is the one I had the least desire to revisit.  Upon revisiting most of my initial apprehentions about the film still hold -- it's too long, it squanders its panavision, it's use of narrator is annoyingly inconsistent -- but at the same time, watching it at home made it a more inviting experience.  It may not be the way QT originally intended but I liked it more.

Cutting out the overture and the intermission trims the experience down quite a bit, which makes it feel less padded.  In fact, taking out those elements (as great as Ennio Morricone is) leads the film back to being more character focused.  The first time we hear the narrator (QT himself) is after the intermission, an intermission which the narrator references, so on home release, if you weren't familiar with the theatrical experience, would seem a bit odd.

I was actually hoping to watch this as part of the multi-part "Extended Edition" that QT recut for Netflix.  I was curious to see how the experience of the film worked broken down into episodes (the film is already carved out into chapters) with material added in.  There are parts within the current cut which seem like they were abruptly edited, so I could see at least some of the points where more would go.  It's not that the film needs more, but operating as a TV series, I could see this working even better.  There's a mystery at play and the way it executes and unfurls that mystery is quite well done, but I think would be even better in episodic form.  Alas, with the release of Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood I think the extended edition got pulled from netflix, at least for now.  That said, I'm in for another rewatch of that version, or even just the film again at some point in the future.  It's kind of fun. Also, no gratuitous fee shots.

[1:38:14]
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And that's the QT recap.  Nope, no Natural Born Killers and no Four Rooms (neither are available on streaming at the moment) but let's be fair, both of those are bottom-of-the-list dwelling features anyway.

As for ranking...I had done one before it turns out, after viewing The Hateful Eight  but at that time I hadn't seen most of QT's films for years.  So this one is more true, since everything is fresh (to be fair I should probably see Once Upon A Time... again before ranking it but fuck it...)

So here it is, hot, fresh, and rank...er, rankings (with movement from my last rankings in brackets):

1. Pulp Fiction - of course [-]
2. Kill Bill - I think I liked both "volumes" even more on rewatch [-]
3. Jackie Brown - what a difference two decades make. A new favourite [+3]
4. Inglorious Basterds - holding strong [-]
5. The Hateful Eight - something works better watching it at home [+2]
6. Death Proof -  in some ways, it's the most fun QT [+2]
7. Reservoir Dogs - still a pretty taut movie, but feels prototypical [-2]
8. Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood - I'm not sure about this one yet [new]
9. Django Unchained - I also can't believe it's fallen all the way down here, but there you go.  It misses the mark in some ways. [-6]
10. True Romance - bleh [-2.5]
11. From Dusk 'Til Dawn - I've moved past it [-4.5]
12. Four Rooms - why? [n/a]

 

Deadpool

2016, d. Tim Miller

I was there when Deadpool was born.  That's an awkward way to phrase that.  What I mean is I had joined in on the big X-Men comic book bandwagon of 1990/91 that sold a bajillion copies and created a trend that virtually broke the entire industry.  Deadpool was introduced right at the precipice of that time in New Mutants #98.  To say he was unremarkable would be putting it lightly.  He certainly didn't strike me as anything noteworthy or special.  But all it takes is the right writer, or the right artist, or the right creative team to break a character out.  That would have happened in the late-'90's, long after I had jumped off that bandwagon.

I missed the Deadpool boat.  I couldn't get past the Liefeld tiny feet and thigh pouches to give him a shot.  Plus, anti-heroes aren't typically my thing.  My take was that homicidal mercenaries aren't heroes and really shouldn't really be celebrated.  I can be kind of square sometimes. 

I watched from the outside as Deadpool inexplicably grew in popularity more and more, from team member to guest star, from mini-series to ongoing, from one book to multiple books a month.  These days Deadpool comics and guest appearances are rivaling that of Wolverine back in the aforementioned 90's X-Men heyday.  Point being, I've read all of at most a half dozen comics starring Deadpool since the early 1990's and they've done absolutely nothing for me.  I don't care about the character, and, by and large, I didn't care about the movie.

I agree that Ryan Reynolds was always a better candidate for a wise-cracking, foul-mouthed mercenary than he was for Green Lantern, but that's about as many shits as I was willing to give the project.   In the wake of a botched Deadpool (also played by Ryan Reynolds) in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (as the whole movie was a botched effort) I cared even less to see a Deadpool movie.  Even after that lively proof-of-concept video was released, the ones that had fans salivating and ultimately led to the studio greenlighting a modestly budgeted picture, I still didn't care.  At all. 

Look, I just wasn't that into Deadpool.

And then, in the monor-ist of minor miracles, the movie got made. With an R rating. And the adverts for it were...promising.  And the posters and billboards and Ryan Reynold's twitter feed were all perfectly done bits of meta marketing.  Altogether, it was still not enough for me to really care all that much.  I genuinely appreciated how this underdog story actually came to fruition, even if it didn't have my excitement or overall interest.

And then it made some bank.  Some major, major bank.  And both fan and audience reactions (beyond those whose thing it just wasn't) was unbelievably positive.  At that point it went from outside appreciation to casual interest.  He still wasn't a character I was interested in spending time with, but on the word of so many friends and critics (nerds and non alike) I suspected an eventual watching when it got to the home market would be in the offing. 

But one day, I found myself rather taken aback when my wife, who gave even less shits about Deadpool than my two shits, suggested we go see the movie on one of our rare child-free evenings.  And for some reason we did.  And, beyond all expectations, we had a damn good time.

Deadpool is a damn fun movie.  It's not going to be everyone's cuppa, as it is excessively violent and excessively vulgar, but it's so extreme it's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon gone wrong... which may be the perfect analogy for Wade Wilson.  He's very much of the Bugs Bunny sort.  He's a wily trickster who makes punchlines out of creating wildly elaborate scenarios that get people killed in very dramatic/comedic extremes.  Also like Bugs, he's fourth wall breaking.  He addresses the audience directly throughout the movie, and more than a few times makes clear allusions to the fact that he's in a film, or that he exists in a cinematic franchise universe where "it's like they couldn't afford any other X-Men".

The first half of the film is one large set set piece taking place on a bridge in Vancouver (well, actually some unnamed city, but it's Vancouver) intercut with Wade Wilson's backstory about how he came to be.  The bridge fight is very clever and enjoyable in both its extreme violence and Wade's incessant dialoguing (which alternates between intentionally goofy and rather witty).  Then Colossus and his young protege, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, join the frey and things get even livelier as it loosely ties itself into the X-Men franchise while still keeping its distance. 

The flashback scenes find Wade Wilson as a mercenary for hire who finds a shared sense of humour and ultimately love with Vanessa (and utterly game Morena Baccarin, making for a winning, if twisted, romantic comedy), right up until he discovers he has five types of aggressive cancers and a short lifespan.  This puts Wade in the sights of an agency who is promising a cure if he takes part in their experiment, their experiment being extreme torture to force people to manifest any latent mutant powers they may have.  After the torture threatens even Wades seemingly limitless endurance, his power of rapid cellular regeneration (meaning he can heal any wound) appears, but it leaves him looking horrifically scarred, like a burn victim).

He can't go back to Vanessa so disfigured, so all he has is his revenge on the men who made him that way.  The second half of the film is Wade seeking his revenge (or a cure), while the men whom he's seeking revenge on are trying to proactively stop him, which brings Vanessa back into the picture, as well as Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead.

The plot is a little pedestrian, but it's its simplicity that works so well, especially told how it is.  Breaking the story into two halves and intercutting the flashbacks with the action allows everything to live and feel vital without slowing anything down.  It seems to always be propelling itself forward.  Not to mention Wade is always running at the mouth, and most of it is quite entertaining.  There's a spirit to the overall picture that just works and everyone involved seems to be up for.  It's light, but not without its tension or moments of weight.  Miller and company do an excellent job at making Wade Wilson a likeable (though hardly respectable) character, and even at times you have to admire his commitment even when he's outmatched.  He's not very bright, but he is kind of valiant, in his own way.

The film looks pretty great for its budget.  It negotiates its few fight sequences incredibly well, and it's through limited budget that they seemed to have innovated, making it all feel like fresh action.  It's also pretty refreshing for a film like this to have a climax that is, in most regards, small potatoes.  It's a 1980's action movie style ending, where it's the good guy vs the bad guy with some destruction around them.  It's not a save the world scenario, it's just kill or be killed.  There's no other stakes beyond that.

I was pleasantly surprised, and, what's better, highly entertained.  This is a product of dedicated vision and limited (perhaps non-existent) studio interference.  If works so well because the filmmakers and performers got to make the film they wanted to.   I'm not a converted fan of the character, but I would go as far as to say I'm now a fan of Deadpool the movie.  I look forward to a sequel.  Even though it made so much money, I hope they keep the budget tight so if forces Miller and company to stay inventive. 

Congratulations Ryan Reynolds...after four failed comic book properties, you've finally made one you can be proud of (though maybe don't show your grandma).

Django Unchained

2012, Quentin Tarantino -- in theatre

I don't know where to start talking about Django Unchained.  With the voluminous discussion surrounding it, it's evident Tarantino has created yet another intensely provocative and divisive piece of art/trash.  It is a complex film that challenges and entertains continually and consistently.  It's not a perfect movie, and it's not the best movie ever made, or of the year, or even of Tarantino's oeuvre, but it's very likely the most interesting film of 2012 and of Tarantino's career, and as such will no doubt have a longevity (both in watchability and in spawning conversation/debate) that will surpass all but one percent of one percent of films made.

The subject of slavery is a largely avoided one in cinema.  It's a shameful and horrifying aspect of America's past, and the resonance of its ill effects still permeates Western culture to this day.  It's a part of the conversation on the systemic racism that America (but not America alone) was built upon and in many regards still carries with it.  It's not deemed a marketable or bankable subject, so it gets tiptoed around or sidestepped entirely, particularly in Western entertainment.  I can think of only a few pieces of modern cinema or television that deal with it in any regard (Color Purple, Amistad, Roots, Mandingo, Lincoln I guess).  Quentin Tarantino isn't out to make a commentary piece, he's out to make entertainment.  At the same time, he's going to confront you with the evils of oppression and people trafficking and racism, flat out.  It's the backdrop of the film.  Django Unchained couldn't exist without a whole lot of racists getting all worked up about a black man on a horse.

I don't know that the audience is ever supposed to feel comfortable with the word "nigger" bandied about so prolifically, but Tarantino is well aware the power of the word, and as it's bandied about around a thousand times in the film's near 3-hour run-time I'm wondering if it's more charged or diffused.  Either way, it's just another uncomfortable and necessary part of the portrait of the racist old South that Django resides in.  Tarantino uses that racism is used in a variety of ways.  It's used for comedic effect as often as it's used for dramatic effect. It's used for suspense and body horror, it's used to provoke the audience, to offend, anger and entertain.  Tarantino flexes racism around every genre convention in such a way as to dilute or amplify its potency depending on the needs of the script.

As typical for a Tarantino film, the script is fresh in its outlook, marrying the conventions of spaghetti westerns, exploitation, and revenge drama with his gifted flair for dialogue, taking what's old and making it vital again.  The visual queues are a collage of other cinematic moments and homages, but largely left to those die-hard cinephiles to point out.  Regardless, it's a great looking film.  The structure of the script plays out in four acts, though from what I've heard, it's even been edited down despite it's current lengthy status.  The first act is the liberation of Django by Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter.  The second is the education and emancipation of Django, as Dr. Schultz teaches him his trade, and plays semantics with Big Daddy Bennett at his plantation.  The third act is Django's empowerment, as he takes control of the grift he and Dr. Schultz set to play on Calvin Candie.  The fourth act is straight up Django unleashing his fury, straight up revenge fulfillment.

Each act allows for a key scene for an actor to take over.  Christoph Waltz is brilliant, and Tarantino's dialogue dances off his tongue, he controls every scene in the first act effortlessly, with a refined charm and such absence of menace that his violent actions always come as a surprise.  The second act gives, oddly, Don Johnson the spotlight as the cartoonish Colonel Sanders-like Big Daddy.  The act culminates in a halting, yet uproariously (and still uncomfortably) entertaining sequence about hoods and eye holes.  Big Daddy is the cartoonish opposite to whom we meet in the third act.  It's owned by Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor whom I have little reverence for.  It's a testament to Tarantino's script writing as well as directing that he finally provided a DiCaprio performance I didn't just tolerate, but actively admired.  DiCaprio is filled with menace masked by a congeniality that makes him all the more evil.  The final act gives over completely to Jamie Foxx who takes Django on his arduous journey.  He largely services the actors and the sequences throughout much of the first three acts.  He provides a presence for them to discuss, to act around, but the third act it's all Foxx, as he is gifted one BAMF (think Jules' wallet from Pulp Fiction for that acronym) moment after another.  Special recognition naturally goes to Sam Jackson for his comical but viciously evil performance as Candie's longest serving slave, the reprehensible "house nigger", as Django details, who subjugates his own people for the betterment of himself and his masters.  Somewhere within Jackson's performance are other, earnest emotions that defy explanation (Stockholm syndrome seems to underplay it) yet are deeply rooted in his brilliantly complex character work.

The film is as raw and violent as any of Tarantino's pictures.  That should come to no surprise to anyone who's followed the director's career.  He has a thing for Grindhouse sensationalism, and he employs it as deftly here as he does in every other film he's done.  The mandingo fighting sequence is particularly the most shocking (out of a bevvy of shocking sequences), the casualness of the observers giving it more potency in the same vein as the ear cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs or the Gimp sequence of Pulp Fiction.  Horrible people doing horrible things with little reverence for how horrible they are.

After a few weeks of reflection, I have to say that I loved Django Unchained.  There's a raw nerve exposed all throughout the lengthy run-time of the film, one that's tweaked equally with sugar and with a bracing blast of cold water.  It's an experience that left me remarkably uncomfortable in how entertained I was.  Others will fall further down the uncomfortable side, while others still will just be outright offended.  What I was left wondering was how many were going to be entertained but for the wrong reason.  How many would identify not with the protagonist, but with his oppressors.  It's the most unsettling part to me, knowing that they're out there.  But I like a film tremendously that can challenge and spark up a lot of intelligent discussion and debate, whether about serious stuff like violence, or racism, or less immediate topics like art and cinema.  If a film can truly inspire this much smart discussion, there must be something smart about it, n'est pas?

3 Short Paragraphs: Drive Angry

2011, Patrick Lussier (actually the guy who did Dracula 2000) -- download

This movie, another in the long line of B- movies being made to pay off Nic's tax debt, was just made to have pithy quips made about it. It has the plot of a bad rip-off of Ghost Rider, Nic's usual over the top acting and the feel of a grindhouse flick. But by the gawds, I loved it.

No, it's not good good. It's schlocky B good, in the way that it was made with a love for the grindhouse genre without going the way of the tongue in cheek homage. It has violence and fan-service and gore and wild stunts that would have 17 year old boys yelling out loud in the theatre. But it had some stylish aspects that made me smile with glee.

William Fichtner as The Accountant, no not The Devil but big D's accountant, is played perfectly. The character is not done with campy evil but with an amoral (as in morality is not part of his makeup) sense of responsibility. Cage's Milton (really, will any B movie fans catch the reference?) escaped from Hell and while it may have been for admirable reasons, he still did what he should not have been able to do. And surprisingly, Billy Burke's evil devil worshiping Jonah King is just a bystander in the connection between The Accountant and Milton when he probably feels he is the true focus. The idea that Big D would actually not care much for baby murderers, considering he was setup to punish them, is another thoughtful aspect that made me smile.