Tombstone (1993)

Film: Tombstone (1993)

Stars: Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Jason Priestley, Dana Delany

Director: George P. Cosmatos

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Sam Elliott: click here to learn more about Mr. Elliott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Sam Elliott's career, honestly, could've just continued in the same mold it had throughout the 1980's for the rest of his time in Hollywood.  In the 1990's, he continued to take small (but steady) parts in more westerns & war pictures, including our film today, one of the more profitable traditional westerns of the 1990's.  But in 2015, Elliott started to have something of a resurgence.  He had a terrific supporting role in the film Grandma opposite Lily Tomlin (for my money, this was the role that should've won him an Oscar nomination), and got cast in The Ranch opposite Ashton Kutcher & Danny Masterson on Netflix (at the time this would've been a big deal given Kutcher's recent success on Two and a Half Men...now the call list feels like it should come with a subpoena).  He got a lead role in The Hero, playing a faded cowboy star, and then came the moment that it seemed like would never come: Elliott's part in A Star is Born.  In the film, he plays the much older brother of Bradley Cooper's lead, and Elliott informed not only his own performance, but that of Cooper (who was clearly imitating the actor's distinctive gravely voice).  The film, at the age of 74, won Elliott his first Academy Award nomination.  Asked for comment at the time, Elliott said "it's about fucking time."

(Spoilers Ahead) We've already reviewed and discussed at length A Star is Born, so we're going to go back to the 1990's when it wasn't clear this was something that was in Elliott's future, and review the film Tombstone.  In 1993-94, two films (this and Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp) were released basically with the same premise, focusing on the lives of Wyatt Earp (Russell) & his brothers Virgil (Elliott) and Morgan (Paxton).  The movie covers a lot of ground, including the Gunfight at the OK Corral, which would make the Earp Brothers true legends, and the ensuing revenge that took place after that would injure Virgil and result in Morgan's death.  Along the way, they are joined by Doc Holliday (Kilmer), and Josephine Marcus (Delany), the former their compatriot who is dying pretty much the entire film, and the latter the romantic partner of Wyatt Earp throughout most of his life.

If you're wondering why I'm writing that plot summary like a history lesson rather than our "deconstruct the plot" approach we usually do, it's because Tombstone is not a good movie, and has very little actual connection to these characters.  The film feels so formulaic as to be reading a history book (albeit one with a lot of fallacies about what actually happened, as forgotten brother Warren Earp is lifted entirely out of this narrative despite being there for key parts of this story in real life).  Russell, Elliott, & Paxton don't have much connection to one another as brothers-there's little camaraderie, with Elliott in particular badly miscast as a stoic figure (Elliott's at his best when he's playing something of a rascal, not a stern disciplinarian).  Even Golden Age western star Charlton Heston shows up for a "why's he here?" cameo with little fanfare.

The one saving grace of the movie is Val Kilmer, who is not as good of an actor as the other three men in most films, but here steals the entire movie wholesale.  His Doc Holliday, with an affected accent & covered in sweaty makeup, is delicious.  He flirts with everyone, he clearly is competent even while his body shuts down, and you spend the entire film rooting for him even though you he's not going to make it.  At the time, there was some Oscar buzz for Kilmer for this role, and while 1993 is hardly a year to complain about the Academy's lineup (one of the finest Supporting Actor sets that AMPAS ever assembled), watching this you definitely wish Kilmer had been able to get some accolades.  At least after this he got to be Batman.

And with that, we're going to end our month devoted to Sam Elliott, an actor who still works in film & television with such regularity there will hopefully be more shootouts & galloping in his future.  Next month, we're going to ride this season into the sunset, with our final Hollywood cowboy, a man who saw acting as a second career...a second career that brought about the final chapter of the Golden Age western.

The Thing (1982)

Film: The Thing (1982)

Stars: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, TK Carter, David Clennon, Keith David, Donald Moffat

Director: John Carradine

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

We do a film noir month every year for this blog in June, and I have a few things that I make sure to do every year, certain stars or directors that I basically require myself to go further into their filmographies as they are pioneers of the film noir genre (and have so many movies).  When you talk about horror films from the 1970's through the 1990's, few names command more respect and more intrigue than John Carpenter.  The horror master had already been part of the independent film scene for over a decade when he made Halloween on a shoestring budget in 1978, but it became a defining film in the genre (we watched it last year, link below for a review), and for the next several decades he would make unique, specific films, sometimes critically-lambasted (and then later rescued), one of which, The Thing, I watched for this blogathon for the first time this year.  I've already a made a note that if we continue this time frame for horror movies next season, we'll definitely have another Carpenter picture as there's a lot more to explore.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place entirely on the continent of Antarctica.  The film starts with a group of American scientists who see a sled dog headed toward their station, and get into a shooting match with a nearby group of Norwegian scientists, and only the dog survives.  They kennel the dog with their dogs, but it turns out the dog isn't a dog at all...but some sort of alien life form that has been frozen for centuries in the ice of Antarctica.  It kills all of the dogs, but there's a problem-we learn pretty quickly that it can assimilate into anything, including the other men on the compound.  This causes mass pandemonium.  Initially, the group are run by Garry (Moffat), but pretty quickly MacReady (Russell) takes over, and starts to quarantine different figures that are suspected of being infected like Blair (Brimley), the biologist in the compound.  This sets up a rivalry with Childs (David), the mechanic for the station.  One by one, the people start to die, their bodies taken over by the Thing, until it's just MacReady and Childs at the end, their station blown up and as a result, they will die in the cold...unless one of them is the Thing.

The ending of the Thing, I found out after the movie, has long been the subject of debate and scrutiny, and before we get into discussing it, I am decidedly on the team of people who think it totally makes the picture (which until then was a solid, if occasionally gross, claustrophobic horror movie...the end of the world happening at the end of the world is a solid idea for this genre).  The ending implies initially that Childs & MacReady are prepared to die in this cold, knowing that's the only way they can prove to the other one that they are not the Thing.  They save humanity through their own doom, because trust is no longer possible.  It's a bleak ending, but it's also compounded by the fact that it's not the only answer.  Either Childs or MacReady could be the Thing, no longer concerned by the figure in front of them, since they know they'll die, and once they die, they will go ahead and destroy the world.  The Thing is one of the few horror films, thanks to its middling box office, that never got a sequel, so the brilliance of this ending never gets confirmed, and Carpenter wisely has never revealed what he thinks happened in the end.

This all adds up to a movie that deserved a better audience, because despite tepid critics at the time, it's great.  Russell, David, & Brimley are all really terrific in their parts, leaning into the stereotypes of these characters with just a hint of malice that I found added layers to the tone of the picture.  Carpenter knows how to use the "you're all trapped" aspect of the film in a really smart way by shooting a number of scenes outdoors-we get to see characters attempting to go to cars or other buildings...but they know in the end there's no way to get away from the Thing.  And of course, the makeup & special effects for this film are on another level.  No, they aren't getting into the hyper-realism that the landmark Ridley Scott film Blade Runner was achieving that same year, but they didn't need to-you understand pretty quickly when a man is having his chest cavity ripped apart and is eating another man's arm with his split rib cage that this is terrifying even without it being anatomically perfect.  All-in-all, another great take from Carpenter coming off of Halloween.

Past Horror Month Reviews

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Child's Play, The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist

1990's-Present: The Blair Witch Project, Scream

OVP: Poseidon (2006)

Film: Poseidon (2006)
Stars: Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Emmy Rossum, Jacinda Barrett, Mike Vogel, Kevin Dillon, Stacy Ferguson, Andre Braugher
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I see a lot of movies, but I don't see a particularly large number of "bad" movies.  I'm not talking about a film like Vice or Bohemian Rhapsody where some people love it and I hated it, I'm talking about the sorts of movies that everyone generally agrees are truly awful, films like the ones that Nic Cage has made for the past twenty years.  Films, essentially, like Poseidon (a film that you could say stars Nic Cage and I don't think I would even bat an eye, even though I saw it yesterday).  The 2006 action film at seas is a truly terrible movie, but a movie so bad you almost could watch it ironically, appreciating the bizarre nature of such a massive film that features actors that were very much "of that year."

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a remake of the 1972 mammoth disaster flick The Poseidon Adventure (which you might remember I liked way back when we discussed it in 2012).  The film centers on a luxury liner, here already halfway out to sea (I'll give Petersen this-he doesn't skimp on the action with ancillary plot details that really detract from the whole reason you're seeing a film like Poseidon) and celebrating New Year's Eve with deadly consequences.  Among the passengers are former New York City mayor Robert Ramsey (Russell), his daughter Jennifer (Rossum), her boyfriend Christian (Vogel), a gay businessman Richard Nelson (Dreyfuss, and you know he's gay because he said "he" on the phone & wears an earring...because it's 2006 and that's all you needed then) and a professional gambler named Dylan (Lucas).  There are other characters, but they're mostly there to be corpses along the way, and so you don't really need their names.  In perhaps the best nod to the time period, Fergie (aka Stacy Ferguson) makes a brief appearance at the singer on the luxury lot, who is weirdly close to the ship's idiotic captain (Braugher) as for some reason they die in each other's arms.

The film's best, and only worthwhile, sequence is the gigantic crash.  If you hadn't already put it together, the reason I saw this movie in the first place was that it is part of the OVP, as it was nominated for Best Visual Effects in 2006.  The VFX are hard to gage, because it actually in some ways improves upon Titanic (the detail in some of the larger shots is incredible, considering the number of people and objects that are littered throughout the CGI), but it's also not differentiating itself enough in my opinion to be considered a landmark achievement like Titanic.  My brother noted that when you're grading Oscar's VFX choices in the new century, you're really just talking about a pre and post-Avatar world, and that's clear here-this movie wouldn't even get shortlisted today, but considering some of the contenders that year and the precision with which it used its VFX, it's a laudable nomination.

The film, though, is stupid.  The dialogue is painful, and frequently we see violent shifts in the personalities of the characters just to make it fit a specific scene; it's as if Ryan Murphy is the true captain of this boat.  All of the actors were very much "of the 00's" save for Russell & Dreyfuss, who are there to split the Shelley Winters role in half (heaven forbid we give that part to a woman in her 60's).  Rossum Vogel, Dillon, Lucas-they've all enjoyed some modicum of success since then but none ever took off as a film star, and it shows here when no one can rise through the mediocrity to become a standout.  The casting department didn't help Rossum in particular, as they literally cast two other women that look just like her in build and hair color to serve as token, damsels-in-distress (the women in this film are treated as nothing more than trophies or random people to be saved-literally none of them gets a moment of heroism-a twenty-year-old Rossum gets a piggyback ride from Russell at one point).  The film is terrible, but terrible in a way that's easy to mock.  I'm against hate viewing films (too many people put their heart-and-soul into a film to watch it ironically), but if that's your jam, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better movie to indulge your criticisms with.

OVP: Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)

Film: Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)
Stars: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Michael Rooker, Kurt Russell, Sylvester Stallone, Karen Gillan, Elizabeth Debicki
Director: James Gunn
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Few things have been as consistent (and as profitable) in the past few years as the Marvel Cinematic Universe coming out with 1-2 films a year, having people show up to the movies to catch the latest superhero installment (this also happens with the DC films, but no one seems to like them so it's kind of a bizarre conspiracy theory as to why they all seem to still be insanely profitable).  This May there was no exception, with the followup to one of my personal favorite films in the series, Guardians of the Galaxy (Winter Soldier is still the best movie by a wide margin the series has created, in my opinion) coming out.  Guardians set itself apart from Marvel and in particular the dour DC films by having a sense of humor about its crew, a motley group of space bandits led by a stuck-in-the-80's rebel named Peter Quill (Pratt).  Would the second film live up to the delight of the first?  Let's take a look...

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is centered around Quill, after a hilarious interaction with the Sovereign People (headed by the glorious and vastly-underused-in-every-film Elizabeth Debicki), finding his father Ego (Russell), who is essentially a god that has both created and exists concurrently as a man and as his own planet.  This leads to Quill realizing that he has some magical powers (Starlord, indeed), and bonding with the man whom he never knew growing up.  All-the-while, the Sovereign are intent on coming back and attack him for Rocket slighting them and stealing their batteries, while Yondu (Rooker), Quill's surrogate father, is also being chased toward the planet by his rebelling troupe, who are now under the leadership of Taserface (and yes, the name is properly mocked).

While the film has its fun moments, particularly anything involving Debicki as the Sovereign (easily my favorite storyline of the bunch), I will admit that this felt fun in the way that Pitch Perfect 2 felt fun.  It was great being in the saddle again with these characters, and in particular the chemistry between, say, Cooper's Rocket and Diesel's Groot, or Pratt with pretty much anyone but particularly Russell, is charming, but the wear is starting to show that wouldn't have in the entire series if there hadn't been a sequel.  This may be blasphemous, but the reality is that sequels aren't always a good thing, particularly when they point out ways the initial movie failed, and here it's that the characters are somewhat underwritten and occasionally one-note.  Dave Bautista's Drax, for example, becomes increasingly annoying as the film goes on, his unconventional reactions to social cues being relatively predictable and groan-worthy.  The film is more reliant upon you remembering the minutia of the first film than I was used to for a comic book film (I had to rely for parts of the picture more on my childhood knowledge of the Marvel Universe than I can remember having to do in any comic book picture since before the 2008 relaunch), and is too long.  The entire sequence with Taserface, for starters, is a bit of a drag, and while I enjoy Sly Stallone randomly showing up as much as the next person, between this and Andy Garcia in Passengers, is it in Chris Pratt's contract that an Oscar nominee has to show up and do almost nothing for a paycheck?  Seriously-unless Stallone is being positioned for a later movie or to be the Samuel L. Jackson of the Guardians pictures, I don't get what that was...was he James Gunn's matinee idol or something?  I generally like Stallone, but he had literally nothing to do here.

Still, it was not a film without charms.  Kurt Russell is such a joy to see onscreen always, and he relishes this moment in the spotlight.  In what has to be on either the Makeup or VFX clip reel for the Oscars later this year (from what I've read it was a combination of both), Russell's de-aging at the beginning of the film is the closest I've seen to actually avoiding the Uncanny Valley, perhaps because it's more makeup than CGI (it puts even Rogue One from last year to shame on that front).  In fact, the reliance on traditional makeup in the movie is intense-in a film that is a throwback to a different era (the 1980s continue their bizarre reverence in cinema), James Gunn wanted to celebrate such a time.

Additionally, the movie is funny at parts.  It's hard not to like this crew, even if I feel like the gimmick is being stretched now more than added to...no one wants to see Peter Quill become an Iron Man-level cascade of serious, but the world of Marvel's cinema has never been great about going deeper (the point of a sequel) without finding a solid balance between humor and drama.  This is all to say, I don't know where this goes in the third film, even if the post-credits sequence gives an obvious hint that Adam Warlock could soon be in-store for us.

Those are my thoughts-how about yours?  Are you leaving pleased, but not entirely as pleased as you were the first time?  Where do you think that the Guardians chapter of the Marvel universe should go next?  Are you feeling good about Adam Warlock as the next big challenge for the crew?  And who else is still in-awe of that Kurt Russell effect?  Share below!

OVP: Swing Shift (1984)

Film: Swing Shift (1984)
Stars: Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti, Ed Harris, Fred Ward, Holly Hunter
Director: Jonathan Demme
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Christine Lahti)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Watching older films always has a bit of a catch, especially in terms of where we're at with progressive politics.  I suspect twenty years from now, in fact, we'll watch films ranging from Legally Blonde to August Osage County (not sure why those were the first two that came to my mind-just go with it) and wonder about specific angles of the film and their portrayals of what is considered politically correct or important at the time.  Swing Shift presented this problem, but in a way I hadn't really anticipated.  As the cinema gets older, and in the 1980's it was pushing ninety in terms of age, it starts to revisit eras where the cinema was already an option.  Indeed, we frequently find allusions to that era in Swing Shift, mentally picturing actresses like Rosalind Russell or Susan Hayward taking on the roles that here are played by Goldie Hawn and Christine Lahti.  The chief problem with the film, which has a host of them, is that even in the 1980's the politics of the movie, and the way they present them, feel regressive.  The film has too many directions it gets pulled, and you can tell that there were troubles behind-the-scenes of the picture as the end product doesn't really know what it wants to be.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film famously hosted a major fight between director Jonathan Demme, then just starting out in his Hollywood career, and Goldie Hawn, who was one of the biggest stars on the planet when Swing Shift was hitting theaters.  The film tells the story of Kay (Hawn), a woman in a happy if a bit stifled marriage to Jack (Harris), who sits around waiting for her man to come home each day and occasionally passes judgment on her provocatively-dressed neighbor Hazel (Lahti) who moonlights as a nightclub singer.  The film takes a turn when World War II breaks out, and Jack is sent to the South Pacific, and much to his chagrin, Kay takes up as a factory worker to fill the gap left by the men going to war.  She slowly befriends Hazel and falls in love with a musician named Lucky whose heart condition keeps him from fighting in the war.  The film ends with Kay going back to Jack, Hazel ending up sleeping with Lucky and then randomly marrying the guy who first promoted her as a singer, and Lucky returning to the road, all the time watching all of the women lose their jobs so that the men coming home could have them back.

The film's tonal problems are what deserve its harshest retribution, in my opinion, as the politics of the 1980's are less familiar to me (though not so much that I don't have some comments on the way that women are portrayed here).  The film cannot decide for the life of itself whether or not it is a comedy or a drama, and that was a direct result of Hawn (who wanted it to be a comedy) fighting it out with Demme (who wanted a more dramatic picture).  The film, from scene-to-scene, underwrites certain elements of the film and you cannot tell whether or not the movie is going to be light-hearted or especially what drives the main character of Kay.  The film gets bonus points for being unpredictable, but that's more due to bad plotting than anything else.  We never really get any insight into Kay, whom Hawn plays entirely surface-level, and whether or not she's upset about losing her job or whether she really wanted Jack back or just settled with him because Lucky left and it was easier this way.  The ending, with Kay and Hazel making up also feels cloying and ridiculous, partially because we never understand why Kay and Lucky, who don't really care for each other, slept with each other in the first place. In the TCM introduction to this film (I want to be Ben Mankiewicz-how do I get that job?) he says that Hawn, after Demme got fired, had the film re-edited, and you wonder if part of Lahti's performance got cut in the dust-up which explains some of her character's more erratic decisions.

After all, it's Lahti who got the praise here.  Despite Hawn being the star, Lahti managed to turn this into a major career move, and in fact won the film's only Oscar nomination.  At first I didn't really get the nomination, as after all this was just Christine Lahti and she has always had incredible onscreen presence (part of me wonders if the nomination was simply a way to tell casting directors "hire her!"), but as the film goes on Lahti makes the most out of a thankless comic side role.  She finds depths in Hazel that no one else is really pining for (watch the way that she has to continually abandon her dreams, and the way she doesn't really know what happiness is-that's not really in the script, but Lahti makes sure you notice it), and she steals literally every scene she's in in the movie.  Lahti would have benefited from a better screenwriter (I wonder if she'd have won the Oscar if we'd received Demme's original vantage of the script), but she's way better than the movie and (in my opinion) one of those rare random Oscar nominations of the 1980's that actually deserved inclusion.

Before I go I would be remiss if I didn't come back to the feminist argument here, as it's interesting to watch this film or a movie like A League of Their Own and wonder how tragic it was that America decided it didn't have room for women in the workplace and the athletic field decades earlier than the Women's Liberation movement of the 1970's (think of what we might have accomplished!).  We get little sense from either Demme or Hawn over the unfairness of the women, who now have more experience in the factory, getting fired just so their husbands can go back to work, or the complicated political ramifications of such a decision (since their husbands were forced to go to war and give up their jobs due to a draft and national pressure).  That would have made an interesting picture, but Hawn and Lahti let on little other than the occasional complaint from a random coworker that they shouldn't have to be fired to give their job to a man.  As a result, the film feels decidedly anti-feminist which is the exact opposite of what it was going toward.

All-in-all, I left this film thoroughly disappointed, save for the excellent work being done by Christine Lahti, and also with a newfound (ahem) appreciation for Ed Harris in a naval uniform.  If you've seen the picture, what are your thoughts-do you agree the film feels disjointed and lacking a clear vision?  Are you also wondering why Lahti didn't become a bigger film star as a result of this movie?  And which of the 1984 Supporting Actresses gets your vote?  Share in the comments!

OVP: The Hateful Eight (2015)

Film: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Stars: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walter Goggins, Demian Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actress-Jennifer Jason Leigh, Cinematography, Score*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I don't really care that Quentin Tarantino is more-than-likely insane.  Honestly, I kind of love it.  Actors and entertainers are so hyper-sweet and polished these days that having an admittedly very talented individual like Tarantino out there in the world, completely rocking the internet with views that even I'm not always behind is exhilarating.  He sits there alongside the likes of Lars von Trier and Spike Lee as a provocateur whose filmography can back him up.  After all, this is a man who has made brilliant movies like Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Inglourious Basterds.  There is no question when you are sitting in a Quentin Tarantino film, and since I was old enough to see them, I've never missed a single one of his pictures.  That was true, of course, for The Hateful Eight, but about an hour into the film I began to regret my excellent track record, and wondered perhaps if Tarantino may need to start backing up his art more before he continues at riling up the collective Twittersphere.  The Hateful Eight is a long, pointless endeavor focused entirely on Tarantino's signature, violent motifs, but it is lacking his sharp wit and panting homage to the likes of Kurosawa and Leone.  Instead what we have is easily the worst film he's ever made, and considering his relatively infrequent pit stops at the movies, the year's biggest disappointment.

(Spoilers Ahead) Where to begin on a review I never thought I'd write (giving a Tarantino film 1-star is a stab in the heart)?  I think I will commence with the first two hours, which could be summed up in about five sentences, which is appalling in a time-wasting way.  We see Jennifer Jason Leigh violently beaten, casual epithets and a long and pointless story about rape played for shock value, and while none of this is particularly out-of-place in Tarantino's world, usually it's met with a sparkling amount of "what will happen next" and incredibly funny and odd dialogue.  That's all missing from this film, which frequently mines the same joke over-and-over again, such as a running bit where the door needs to be nailed shut to not let in the cold air, which could be funny in a Marx Brothers style, but it isn't (even the first time), and not once in the entire run of this gag did the packed audience in my theater laugh.  In fact, that was true for almost the entire movie-despite consistently having moments that are clearly meant for laughter, there were only a few sparing moments of humor that caught on with the audience (usually involving Daisy, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, getting a random aside in at the expense of her captor Kurt Russell) and not once did the entire audience laugh or even react together, unheard of for me in a theater that crammed.

The film doesn't really know anything about pace, and the first two hours move along with literally nothing happening except random characters getting introduced over and over to each other in random circles.  The names are purposefully ridiculous, but unlike other Tarantino films that doesn't really seem to matter-the names just sort of sit there, with the actors who play them not really matching up to the sharpness of the characters.  No one in this film is giving a strong performance, even though Samuel L. Jackson and Walter Goggins have been cited by other critics as good examples of strong Tarantino performances.  You compare this to Jules Winnfeld or Elle Driver or Mr. Pink and suddenly you're realizing how desperately we're relying on the memory of other great Tarantino films to try and justify sitting for yet another forty minutes as we watch a bloodbath endure in front of our eyes.  Quite frankly by the end of the film the main characters, played by Jackson and Goggins, have become such horrid human beings, frequently disparaging the only female character in a way we didn't see them do to any other male characters (sexism is alive and well here), that the fact that we have to watch them be celebrated in the "Lincoln Letter" finale makes me grimace with disgust.  About the only thing that recommends itself is Ennio Morricone's score, but Ennio Morricone could make your broken radiator sound good so that's pretty much the free space in bingo.

The violence itself seems repetitive and uninventive.  Tarantino once again watches a man be castrated onscreen, trying again to play it for comedic effect (but no one is laughing), and the explosive blood that made something like Kill Bill so staggering is now old-hat in his world.  I actually looked away when surprise guest star of sorts Channing Tatum has his movie star mug exploded before our eyes because what's the point of that image without some level of artistry to back it up?  The intensity of the scenes are lessened both because we have done this before, but also because the movie is insanely predictable.  For a director that could once surprise us intensely with his clever scripting (look at something like the "Kiddo" aspect of Kill Bill) there's no surprise you don't see coming.  The fact that Jackson and Goggins win after a pretty lame showdown with the rest of Daisy's gang or that Tatum, the movie star slumming in a supporting role, quickly watches his part disappear before we learn anything about him is something you see coming, and reeks of lazy writing.  Tarantino might have had Last Year at Marienbad or something in a long-and-languid inspiration during the early scenes, but The Hateful Eight is never that profound or captivating.  It's just a bloody, gory bore.

OVP: Silkwood (1983)

Film: Silkwood (1983)
Stars: Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, Cher, Craig T. Nelson
Director: Mike Nichols
Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Director, Actress-Meryl Streep, Supporting Actress-Cher, Original Screenplay, Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I do adore Meryl Streep, this is a true statement.  But on occasion I do miss her a little bit.  The reality is, for those who have grown up with a Devil Wears Prada-style Meryl that the Grand Lady of American Cinema wasn't always so stylized in her work on the screen.  Yes, there's little doubt that the past decade has been terrific for Streep, and that she's managed to parlay her work into being a movie star for a new generation, but it's worth remembering that she used to be a more naturalistic performer.  When Streep rose to prominence, there was such a sense of excitement around her, and the way that she could inhabit characters and create these deeply real, fleshed-out human beings.  She also, and this seems a bit harsh, used to be in better movies.  Perhaps few have been as good, though, as Silkwood, her 1983 drama about the life of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear whistleblower and labor activist from the 1970's.  The film, over thirty years old now, still feels fresh and relevant, a near-impossible coup for an issue film, but Mike Nichols and Streep herself aid this with bravura acting and a script that is more about human ignorance and bullying against a crusader than a specific issue.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Karen (Streep), in many ways in the same vein as Erin Brockovich who would succeed her.  She's not a great mother (her children don't even live with her, a less forgivable reality in 1983 than today, but the indictment still rings the same), she is sexually promiscuous at work (she flashes a coworker in a crowded room), and she seems to just sort of skate by with an okay performance while claiming she's doing a great job (we all know that person at work).  She works, however, at a nuclear plant, and is frequently dealing with issues of nuclear safety.  The film features the famed Silkwood shower scenes, where after nuclear exposure a person (in this case, frequently Streep) has to endure a harsh, rough shower and forced scrubbing from coworkers in order to "prevent" radiation from the plutonium.

The film is certainly at its best when it focuses on Streep and her role as an unlikely crusader.  One of the more interesting points of the film that separates it from other "unlikely crusader" style films is the way that they don't point out how odd it is that Karen, who hasn't seemed to care about anything but herself before this fight, is the one doing it.  Karen Silkwood doesn't have her "come to Jesus" moment, and in many ways is doing this to save herself and find purpose in her life rather than initially as a safety precaution for her fellow workers.  Still, the way the script unfolds around her becomes even more haunting as the film progresses, as thirty years later we have a sense of the lies that she was being told, and the ways that the the plant would eventually go belly-up in the wake of her death due to the misplaced plutonium.  Watching her coworkers use arguments like "I want to keep my job" and "it's fine the way it is" are scary not only because you know they're essentially in the building that is guaranteeing their death, but because you see that sort of ignorance still today, where people claim climate change can't be real not because of the science but more because "it would cost jobs" and "it's too expensive."  A lot of the film, quite frankly, resonated with me as a climate change crusader, and I felt that you could pretty easily bring the entire story to the present day without much issue in that regard, which is petrifying.

The film received five Academy Award nominations, with Streep positioned best-of-all in the bunch.  There's something so mesmerizing about Streep in the early-1980's, watching the way that she doesn't dumb down her performance, the way she's so on in every scene.  In many ways her work here recalls Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln and There Will Be Blood in the way that she abandons any sense of the movie star behind the work, instead just becoming an iconic character.  I feel like in some ways, despite some really amazing work since, she hasn't done that in modern memory in quite the same way since Miranda Priestly.  Cher, gaining her first experience of "serious" acting, is fine but not in the same league as Streep's lesbian best friend-she and Kurt Russell both have their moments (I love the question mark that Cher leaves on her character, whether or not she sold her out in order to keep her job), but really they just sort of our sidelined by Streep's outstanding work (Kurt Russell was definitely a dish in this movie, though, it's worth saying).  Mike Nichols' directing is taut and clear as always-he keeps slightly extended-shots when he needs it, and the ending is filmed with just enough malice to get across his opinion of what happened to Karen Silkwood without legal being involved.  Combined with Nora Ephron's succinct script, the film is certainly well-done.  The movie might have a tad bit of sprucing up of the supporting characters (I particularly never quite got what was going on with Craig T. Nelson), but that's a pretty quiet quibble for such a film.

Those are my thoughts on this movie-what about yours?  Are you with me that Silkwood still feels remarkably prescient today?  Do you occasionally miss the Meryl of yore?  And considering she had an amazing cast of Debra Winger, Julie Walters, Jane Alexander, and the victorious Shirley MacLaine competing against her in 1983, do you think she deserved that Oscar?