Archive for January 23rd, 2013

When seconds count…

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

,,,the police are 25 minutes away.

Even if you’re a police sergeant whose car has been egged.

(Previously.)

Cahiers du Cinéma: Django Unchained.

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

I want to throw Lawrence some linky-love for his review of Django Unchained. If I don’t, I’ll hear from him.

And, more to the point, he says a lot of what I wanted to say. My comments are more in the form of notes on his review than an actual review.

The script is clever and fairly taut for it’s 165 minute running time, and it doesn’t have the dead spots of (for example) Inglorious Basterds.

I disagree with Lawrence on this. Specifically, I found what I’ll refer to as “the third act” (people who have seen the movie should understand what I’m talking about) to be kind of draggy. I think that entire sequence could have been tightened up considerably; I was ready for the movie to be over long before it was over.

Dear Quentin Tarantino:
You’re a good director. Really. Please stop trying to act as well. Thank you.

I was glad to see Zoë Bell in the credits, though I honestly missed her in the movie itself. Maybe one of these days Tarantino will give her the role she deserves.

There is a scene where Django and Schultz have hunted down a wanted man; Django balks at shooting the man in front of his child until Schultz has him read the wanted poster. I thought this was a very clever scene, more clever than I actually expected from Tarantino, for two reasons:

  1. Django has trouble reading the wanted poster. Of course he does; he’s a slave, he probably wasn’t taught to read very well to begin with. There are a lot of hack directors who wouldn’t have thought of developing Django’s character in that way.
  2. That scene also sets up a key plot point much later in the movie, which I won’t spoil here.

Generally: yeah, I liked it, but I would have liked it a little more at 2:15 or possibly 2:30, not 2:45.

Edited to add: For some reason, Lawrence’s comments about this film self-selecting its audience, and comments I expect to get from certain other people, remind me of ham. Don’t know why.

Final judgement.

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

Both Lawrence and I have written about Amado Pardo, restaurateur, Democratic activist, convicted murderer, and alleged heroin dealer. As Lawrence noted in his last update, Mr. Pardo was in declining health and had been released to hospice care.

According to the Statesman and his attorney, Mr. Pardo passed away yesterday. His trial on the drug charges was scheduled for February 11th. I’m not clear how Mr. Pardo’s death is going to affect the charges against the other people who were indicted with him.

Obit watch: January 23, 2013.

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

Taiho.

Who?

Taiho, “widely considered the greatest sumo wrestler of postwar Japan despite the fact that he weighed scarcely more than 300 pounds”.

Taiho, who made his debut in the mid-1950s, dominated his sport until the early ’70s. Standing about 6 feet 1 and weighing about 220 pounds at the start of his career, he was a sylph of sumo, relying on skill more than heft to win matches.

His career record was 746-144-136, and he won the Emperor’s Cup (“an immense silver trophy awarded to the champion of sumo’s top division”) 32 times.

And one more gratuitous note: Taiho was born on Sakhalin Island during World War II. After the war ended and the Soviet Union took control of Sakhalin, Taiho and his mother were sent to Hokkaido.

His father, an anti-Communist who had fled his homeland for Sakhalin after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was apparently arrested. The family never learned his fate; years later, touring the Soviet Union as a sumo star, Taiho reportedly sought his father’s whereabouts to no avail.

Remember, folks: Commies aren’t cool.