Reviews
An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)
Loner rebel Richard Gere joins the navy to become a pilot and find himself with the help of his friends, lover, and generic tough drill sergeant in this romantic drama
Let me preface this with a statement about myself, for me, it's really difficult to like a romantic movie because I cant enjoy it unless it feels real to me, and making fake love seem real isn't easy. However the reason the love in this movie doesn't feel real to me isn't because the acting is bad or because there's just no chemistry between the two main lovers, Richard Gere and Debra Winger, the issue is that this entire movie is just a gigantic pizza which is 80% cheesiness and 20% movie.
The movie only ever manages to have one genuinely good part, the climax, when David Keith offs himself in a motel room with a belt in the shower, something truly sad and something that made me feel a connection to his character and disdain for his ex-lover who had pushed him off the edge. Shortly after however it seems like the movie just forgets this whole entire incident with little collateral damage beyond Gere mouthing off to the gunnery sergeant and having a grudge match that leads to (not even joking) Gere getting kicked in the balls and lying down in the fetal position after him and Gossett exchange a few pseudo karate kicks.
Its a shame too, mostly because Gere's character could have been much more interesting, what with his background being raised by his alcoholic father in the Philippines and ports around the world, but the movie seems all to eager to move past that and just get to the part where he's a nice guy and marries the girl. Really he's only ever a jerk in the beginning and his jerkiness is only ever mildly apparent. yet they still try to make him seem like some disturbed rebel when the only edgy stuff he does is karate, riding motorcycles, not talking about feelings, and having a stash of boots and belt buckles he fenced off to his bunk mates, a kind of ridiculous plot point which leads to him and the sergeant having beef, but what was his purpose in doing it anyways? did he need money? did he just want to be edgy? did the screenwriter just want him to be edgy?
The worst part is the end, if this were a cheese pizza the last slice would literally just be a melted piece of a cheese wheel, of course he commits to Winger and goes to her upon his graduation and lifts her up in the air joyously in love a mere 20 or so minutes after his closest friends suicide, and the credits roll leaving me, the audience, wondering where the last two hours of my life went with nothing to show for it but the memory of a crappy cheese pizza of a movie without a single pepperoni or topping in sight.
smh 4/10
Django Unchained (2012)
Django is an ex slave bounty hunter with his partner who freed him, Dr. King Schultz, on a quest to save his wife who is still a slave.
Django Unchained has all the quirkiness you'd expect from a Tarantino movie, seemingly in a constant contrast between ultra violent action and a strange breed of southern civility, with a good bit of humor and cheesiness spread throughout. Django is by no means a sophisticated movie, nor does it try to be, but it certainly has fun. The movie turns a lynch mob into comic relief with perhaps one of the funniest scenes in a Tarantino film, and the way blood gushes out of bullet holes like a geyser is strangely fun to watch ( as morbid as that sounds ) sort of reminiscent of that same giggly feeling I felt watching Uma Thurman Katana break dancing in a mob of tuxedo clad ninja gangsters in Kill Bill Vol. 1, or watching Monkeys wielding LMGs in the Planet of the Apes reboot. That's not to say there isn't some stuff in this movie that is quite cringe worthy, namely a slave who is eaten by dogs and watching two "Mandingo" fighters battle to the death with a sadistic Leonardo DiCaprio watching.
As far as acting goes, Leonardo DiCaprio nailed his role as slave master, his character, Calvin Candie, was both unsettling and charismatic at the same time sort of emphasizing that weird southern civility built on a foundation of brutality.
Christoph Waltz also does a great job as the German bounty hunter Dr. Schultz, and I really enjoyed his relationship with Django, played by Jamie Foxx (another notable performance).
I didn't really have too many gripes with this movie, but they're still there. Broomhilda, played by Kerry Washington, is Django's main motive in this movie, but she literally says maybe a paragraph's worth of dialogue at best. Also the transition between Django being an ex- slave and becoming a bad ass bounty hunter isn't all that apparent, you see him collect a few bounties and practice his hand at quick draw with a snowman than he's able to gun down almost twenty cowboys later on in the movie.
Django is a good movie, it's by no means Tarantino's magnum opus, but it is still a great film worth seeing, watch it if you can