Sorry. I'll fix it tomorrow when A) I'm sane again; B) I got this awful letter paper monkey off my shoulders; C) I return dead broke from Atlantic City. I'll make up for it, I swears. Beside, the 50th Post Spectacular! is my birthday, so you know I'm going to bust out all the tricks. Or spiral into a dizzying depression about how old I am (which is ridiculous, since I'm only turning 23, but that's past halfway to 25, which is a slippery slope to 30...). Either way, expect fireworks Saturday. Film Rec: Jackie Brown OK, I get it. Plenty of people just don't like this film. They think it's too slow. They think nothing of interest happens. They think it's just Quentin Tarantino masturbating behind the camera for two and a half hours. I get it. It's not for everyone. To me? It's the closest QT has ever come to producing a perfect film. The intersecting character dramas seem organic rather than forced, a huge pitfall of the common person embroiled in criminal/police procedure film. The dialogue is clever, but not so clever you're focusing on what was written rather than which character was saying it and why. Is it because the film's adapted from a novel? Perhaps. I can't speak for certain because I haven't read the book yet. What I do know is that a solid story is told on screen with a lot of style that had to be defined in the writing stage. It's so strange that of all the Tarantino films, this is the one I choose as my favorite. It doesn't have over the top camp (Pulp Fiction - look me in the eyes and tell me that dance sequence, or the burger sequence, or even Kathy Griffin doing her best Charlie Chaplin comedy walk isn't campy), or disturbing violence (Reservoir Dogs), or buckets of blood (Kill Bill Vol. 1), or sweeping multi-dimensional character arcs and non-traditional storytelling (Kill Bill Vol. 2), or even throwback exploit tactics and dialogue so dense you need a chainsaw to hack through it (Death Proof). No. It's a well told heist film. It's an interesting drama of total strangers working together to achieve a set goal while other try the same thing. It's entertaining and engaging without indulging in any gratuitous excess. Watch it if you haven't. It's a good story with interesting characters that still reads as fresh and different over ten years later.

Labels: film rec