In The Old Light

Conditions: Yeah, they'll do.

The No Sense Standoff

In a way the current standoff in Alabama is worse than normal standoffs, in that the hostage taker doesn’t seem to have any motive.

So the current crisis — a little boy kidnapped and held prisoner underground for days — has left people here struggling to find a purpose behind it. They have found none on their televisions or in local newspapers, because authorities have released little information.

On Tuesday, a gunman believed to be 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes stormed a school bus, shot and killed driver Charles Poland, and dragged a 5-year-old named Ethan from the bus and into a subterranean bunker on his property. But Dykes has not, in any public way, aired a grievance. So for almost a week Midland City's 2,300 citizens have remained suspended in horrified puzzlement.

- latimes.com/news

How do you reason with a madman who has no specific goal? So how is this latest gun tragedy going to work out?



Film Review: Django Unchained

Well I think we know now why Quentin Tarantino was so unhappy about the questions people were asking regarding the violence in his latest movie in the light of recent gun masacres. It’s nothing to do with any kind of causal relationship between fantasy violence and real life violence. It’s simply because that that’s all his latest film has in it. For years Tarantino has been held as some kind of classic auteur director, a man who constructed such brilliant films. But while he certainly knows how to attract good talent, and was always able to construct a good dialogue scene, the problem I think has always been about content.

Content. The point of the movie. The heart of the tale being told. Tarantino, I think, has no feel for the actual point of movies. It’s not about constructing a sequence of events. That’s what a movie has, not what it is. The point is the journey the audience makes, on the arc the characters make. And Django Unchained, despite the march of landscape across the screen, doesn’t go any damn where. Jamie Fox plays Django, a slave freed by Dr Shultz (Christopher Walz) in order to help and then partner Shultz as a professional bounty hunter. Shultz is a modern man, unhappy with slavery. Django has a wife somewhere he wants to reunite with. They decide on an elaborate plan designed to find and then purchase her from her owner (Leonardo Dicaprio, hamming it up for all he’s worth). And at the end of the rambling tale, just as it’s all about to work, a massive violent bloodbath breaks out. Why, you may ask? There is no answer. Shultz throws away both his plan and his life in sight of the finish line, just for the hell of it, forcing Django to have to revert to plan b: kill everybody. This is a violent and harsh movie, saturated in the simple inhumanity of the time. It doesn’t have anything to say, no new ideas to play with, it delivers us right into to the parlour of the ultimate slave owner, and then serves its empty meal of violence up on a platter.

It is particulalry odd given how careful the film was earlier to depict the difference between bounty hunters - who can kill bad guys, and bad guys - who can kill anyone and end up getting killed by bounty hunters. This, I felt, was a key point the movie was making. But in the end it doesn’t matter. Schultz makes a sacrifice play and it’s up to Django to to simply kill everyone – and hence I suspect becoming a future target of a bounty hunter. Now since at no point has Tarantino tried to develop the character of Django (a man who is an expert shot, has oodles of confidence, and knows exactly what he wants – all from the get go) then there is nothing in the end to watch except the violence. Who gives a shit about coming out to the cinema to watch violence? If I wanted simple violence I would have stayed at home and played some video games. Be a damn sight more comfortable. Damn sight more logical as well, considering how stupidly this film falls apart at the end. Two hats out of five.



- Peace out