Outpost: Black Sun ***1/2

In the opening scene of Outpost: B.S., an elderly gentleman (Michael Byrne) in a nursing home receives a visit from a young woman, Lena (Catherine Steadman), claiming to be his long-lost niece. Rather than embracing him, however, she turns insolent, grasps his hand, breaks his fingers, and even pilfers the old man’s ring. This, one assumes, is intended to endear her to the audience when the man is revealed to have been a Nazi, and social justice demands that, lest the Fourth Reich rise up and six zillion more Jews suffer another Holohoax, wheelchair-bound geezers must be physically abused.

Whereas this film’s predecessor, Outpost (2008), was an impressive exercise in modestly budgeted horror-action that benefited in macho economy from focusing on a gruff, totally male ensemble of seasoned mercenaries, this 2012 sequel shoots itself in the boot from the beginning by featuring a Jewish Nazi huntress as the heroine, thus injecting a dose of sanctimonious and emotional motivation into the franchise where none was needed. Something of the sense of suspense that drove the first film remains in evidence, however, as the bothersome Nazi zombies are on the loose again and conquering a constantly broadening swath of already war-torn Eastern Europe. It also becomes more entertaining once a British commando unit enters the story, contributing a brusque, confrontational snottiness.

The cast is fine and does what it can with the preposterous material. Catherine Steadman is pretty and hardly to be faulted for her annoying character’s uselessness to the franchise; however, the teaser ending, which suggests that she will also play the lead in the expected third installment, is somewhat disappointing for that reason.

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Outpost: B.S. is:

9. Pro-family. Lena carries on a family tradition of Nazi-hunting and hopes to avenge relatives who died in the Holohoax.

8. Anti-military/anti-nuke. The term “military intelligence” is used sarcastically. Hovering over the whole mission, meanwhile, is the threat of a nuclear option that would probably not be efficacious in any event.

7. Anti-slavery (i.e., pro-yawn). A black soldier (Gary McDonald) winces at the sight of a chain and shackle.

6. Anti-state. The American spokesman for a “UN-backed task force” claims to be looking for chemical weapons, but actually wants to secure the Nazi superweaponry for his government. “Any government will pay any price” for the technology.

5. Anti-Slav. Scientist Wallace (Richard Coyle) claims to have been betrayed by Russian partners. “Don’t do time in one of their prisons. They’re cold,” he says, presumably with reference not just to their penal system, but to the Russian people themselves. Eastern Europeans are depicted as shady, sleazy, and suspicious.

4. Feminist. Self-reliant Steadman succeeds in throwing a monkey wrench into the Nazis’ plans.

3. Anti-Christian. One Nazi is named Christian Gotz, and a house with a crucifix conspicuously displayed on one of its walls turns out to have a Nazi zombie hiding in it. A map shows the concentric spread of the undead’s conquered territory in crosshairs, i.e., with a cross at its center.

2. Paranoiacally Zionist and Holohoax-alarmist. The movie industry, prescient of the day when the passage of time would render too ridiculous the idea of a geriatric Fourth Reich rising from the ashes to conquer the globe, has over the decades foisted on filmgoers such interesting (or not) innovations as the conventional Nazi zombie army in films like The Frozen Dead (1966) and Shock Waves (1977); cloned Hitlers in The Boys from Brazil (1978); vengeful and pitilessly boring Nazi ghost sailors in Death Ship (1980); the National Socialist moon colony in Iron Sky (2012); and now, most outlandish of all, the immortal runic unified field Nazi zombie army of the Outpost franchise. “Two days ago I still thought this was all about what these people [i.e., Germans and gentiles generally] had done,” Lena reflects. “But it’s not. It’s only ever been about what they were going to do.” “There’ll always be somebody else,” Wallace warns. Ironically, treacherous gentile Wallace turns out to have been working against Lena the whole time, hoping to acquire the Holy Grail of Nazi zombie-generating unified field technology not to destroy it, but to sell it back to the Nazis. Hilariously, once the deception comes out, Wallace’s black hair changes to blonde, revealing his truly evil nature.

1. Anti-German. Outpost: B.S. reduces the Teuton to what, in the paranoid and condescending anti-white progressive’s view, is his essence: a dead-eyed, lumbering, growling, killing machine bent on stabbing or cudgeling to death anybody unlike himself.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

Machete Kills ***

Rodriguez’s most recent contribution to the Mexploitation subgenre, Machete Kills is exactly the movie one would expect it to be: a shallow, self-congratulatorily hip, and hyperviolent celebration of Mexican ethnic pride and muscle-flexing Reconquista. Danny Trejo reprises the role of the righteous butcher who in this sequel accepts a presidential offer of American citizenship in exchange for stopping a cataclysmic missile strike on Washington. Machete Kills is sufficiently fast-paced to ward off snores, but the cartoonish tone and the flippant approach to the violence keep it from generating any emotional interest or genuine suspense. One hopes for the sake of the future of film that this big-budget B-movie brand of Tarantinoid, winking, self-aware exploitation fetishism has almost run its course.

3 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Machete Kills is:

13. State-skeptical. “Justice and law aren’t always the same thing.”

12. Anti-military. Corrupt soldiers sell government-issue arms to a drug cartel.

11. Anti-family. A whore recounts how her father raped her. (see also no. 2)

10. Drug-ambivalent. Machete “don’t smoke”, but lights a bazooka like a bong. The drug cartels are his enemies.

9. Pro-miscegenation. Can anyone blame Miss San Antonio (Amber Heard) for being unable to resist Machete’s haggard, wrinkly, and humorless Aztec charms?

8. Anti-gun. Machete prefers blades. A campaign commercial associates Second Amendment advocacy with pork spending on military hardware. The principal villain, Voz (Mel Gibson), is a firearms manufacturer.

7. Globalist and war-ambivalent. “This isn’t about Mexico no more. It’s about the world.” Voz reveals he has installed puppet troublemakers in North Korea and Russia so as to pump government interest in his military wares. While there is truth in the notion that international bogeys are frequently manufactured as pretexts for war, Machete Kills endorses the neocon worldview to the extent that it accepts that Russia and North Korea are legitimately threatening to American national security. “Fuck world peace,” says Miss San Antonio.

6. Feminist. “Don’t call me sweetheart,” bristles Sartana (Jessica Alba) before gunning down a male chauvinist pig. Machete Kills milks the tired non-novelty of women acting tough and shooting their mouths and machine-guns, which here include weapons mounted on the bosom and crotch. Interestingly, the long tradition of sexual violence directed exclusively at the male genitalia finally seems to be coming home to haunt the feminists in the form of the sickening “pussy punch”. Only girls are allowed to play this dirty hand, however. (see also no. 2)

5. Anti-Christian. Voz looks forward to a day when “kingdom comes”. White supremacist Sheriff Doakes uses expressions like “Amen” and “Hallelujah”. Assassin the Chameleon (a shapeshifter portrayed at different points in the film by Walter Goggins, Cuba Gooding, Lady Gaga, and Antonio Banderas) drives a truck called the “Holy Roller”, with kitschy religious knickknacks on the dashboard. “Preach it, Sister,” says villainess Miss San Antonio.

4. Anti-white. Whites – surprise, surprise! – are the bad guys. Those who, like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, concern themselves with America’s sovereignty and security, are represented in Machete Kills by the likes of the dopey Minutemen-like “Freedom Force” and Sheriff Doakes (William Sadler), who calls Mexicans things like “taco” and “beaner”. Voz plans to abscond into outer space with a load of Mexicans to serve him as slave labor. Blonde beauty and secret agent Miss San Antonio lives up to her hair color and turns out to be a traitoress. The decision to cast Mel Gibson, with his off-screen baggage of accusations of anti-Semitism and bigotry, as supervillain Voz reinforces the anti-white/anti-racist theme.

3. Pro-amnesty. Machete is Mexico, observes President Rathcock (Charlie Sheen), who by offering citizenship to Machete is in effect endorsing the wholesale naturalization of everybody south of the border. “Even Jesus couldn’t get through that damn wall.” Sadly, many of the ignorant dupes who see this movie will probably be led to believe that there actually is a wall protecting the U.S. from turd world invasion.

2. Anti-human. The title says it all, with enough red splattering to paint a barn. In addition, Miss San Antonio in her pageant speech endorses “a woman’s right to choose.”

1. Razist. “You fucked with the wrong Mexican.”

Blood Revels of the Puppet Mistress

Lamb Chop’s Special Chanukah (1995) ***1/2

This kooky kiddie relic of the pandemic cultural crappiness constituting the 1990s opens with sock-puppeteer Sonia Hurwitz (alias Shari Lewis) doing some last-minute Chanukah shopping in an open air produce market. Brimming with the supremacist ebullience of the season, Hurwitz launches into a song to tell her fellow shoppers how happy she is, dancing and twirling her red coattail like a vampire’s cape now that Chanukah, like some biblical plague, has finally arrived! She bumps into TV has-beens Pat Morita (Happy Days) and Alan Thicke (Growing Pains) and invites them to come to her house for dinner. That means it is up to Hurwitz and Lamb Chop to cook enough latkes (potato pancakes) to accommodate their guests – all while singing up a funky shitstorm about it, of course.

Meanwhile, Hurwitz’s mutant child, buck-toothed miniature pony Charlie Horse, is trying to win a prize by creating the greatest-ever superhero using a computer game. Thicke and Morita have dual roles as two of Charlie’s botched superhero creations, Weapons Man and Super Ninja, who proceed to tear up Hurwitz’s house like a couple of ungrateful goyische kops. Lloyd Bochner also appears as a disembodied flying head in an existential crisis. Camp factor, needless to say, is high.

Nothing captures the spirit of a Jewish holiday like a Jew with her fist stuffed up the ass of a symbol of Christ named after its own dismemberment. Christians, accustomed to celebrating the birth or resurrection of Jesus and seeing Jews constantly depicted as innocent victims in the massive ass media, are generally unaware that the Chosen, in choosing their holy days, prefer to commemorate the slaughter of gentile enemies and their children.

Chanukah, or Hanukkah, or however one attempts to express by means of the English alphabet the phlegm production signifying the name of this eight-day indulgence in ritual self-worship, celebrates the victory of Judah Maccabee, or “Judas Sledgehammer”, who defeated the gentile forces of the Greeks and the Syrians, two peoples against whom – if recent history offers any indication – the Jews still bear a bloodthirsty grudge.

3.5 out of 5 Stars of David. Lock yourself in this laughing-gas chamber and get exterminated with cuteness.

Shari’s Passover Surprise (1996) ***1/2

Charlie Horse is running for Fifth Grade President at his elementary school, which apparently is so progressive that disheveled Jewish ponies are permitted to enroll alongside human children. Hoping to sway his classmates’ loyalties by means of old country hospitality – and to subject them to weepy tales of Jewish woe to gain sympathy votes – Charlie invites the whole multicultural crew to the Hurwitz home for a Passover Seder. That means lots o’ matzo to make!

Gullible tub Dom DeLuise, tricked into believing himself the recipient of some enviable privilege, is persuaded to play the shabbos goy and cook supper for the bunch, and professes his eagerness to become a Seder “sadist”, while Benson‘s Robert Guillaume is also invited and sings some soulful jive about the plagues visited upon the Egyptians. Rounding out the likable cast of has-beens is Alan Thicke, putting in another brief appearance in the demanding role of himself.

The Seder is a kind of nightmarish house party, with characters crawling around looking for a hidden matzo and Lamb Chop hanging from a chandelier and screaming in vain for help from Shari. This being the 90s, when the children are told the story of the Egyptian captivity, they are told to boo when Pharaoh is mentioned and go “Woo Woo Woo!” like an Arsenio Hall audience whenever Moses gets name-dropped.

Passover occasions the Jews’ deluded gloating over their psychotic god Yahweh’s mass murder of gentile children in Egypt during the period of the Israelites’ supposed enslavement in that land. Notwithstanding the utter lack of archaeological evidence for this, however, Shari’s Passover Surprise goes whole hog and more than once trots out the ludicrous claim that Hebrew wretches were even forced to build the pyramids.

Continuing in the tradition of killing gentile children, Shari’s Passover Surprise cuts loose with a veritable enfilade of politically correct small ordnance, hitting the audience with a cheerful anti-slavery pep talk, multicultural mumbo jumbo, and even an endorsement of bestiality when Charlie Horse determines to ask a black girl out on a date – all designed to murder the mind and squash incipient self-esteem in any white children who may happen to be watching.

There is also a faint echo of Kristallnacht when Charlie Horse and a blond boy are playing catch outside Robert Guillaume’s house and break out one of his windows. The blond boy, naturally being a fink, runs away and leaves the horse to take the whole of the blame. Damn blond kids! It was a perfectly good and wholesomely diverse neighborhood until they moved in!

3.5 out of 5 Stars of David. Press play and get plagued, you hateful goyim!

“Come on, Bubby, light my fire!”

Transformers: Age of Extinction ****

Nothing epitomizes the summer movie season like a big, blustering, CGI-saturated blockbuster about giant, battling, alien robots. This installment stars Mark Wahlberg as Cade Yeager, a down-on-his-luck robotics engineer and single father living in “Texas, U.S.A.” (as a caption conveniently informs those viewers uncertain which country Texas occupies). Cade and his daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz), get swept up in military-industrial machinations and even intergalactic warfare when he discovers the wreck of a truck that turns out to be Optimus Prime.

Inconveniently, CIA eminence grise Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) is secretly rounding up all the Transformers he can find and delivering these to military contractor KSI, headed by arrogant weenie Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), the idea being to corner the technology and create a totally automated U.S. military. Meanwhile, Attinger’s robot co-conspirator Lockdown, along with new creation Galvatron, may not be the controllable assets Joyce and Attinger confidently believe these to be.

Transformers: Age of Extinction is exactly the explosion-packed, lightning-paced action extravaganza fans are expecting, with quite a few close shaves, noisy weapons exotica, nasty, slime-spewing creatures, and one particularly suspenseful moment with characters inching their way along cables suspended high in the air while harried by Lockdown’s robotic hell-hounds. Younger audiences are sure to be in awe. The film’s themes are, however, more adult than juvenile, and parents may be concerned to know that Age of Extinction contains several frightening incidents and one especially noteworthy death scene, that of comic relief slacker Lucas (T.J. Miller), that is too graphically disturbing to be appropriate for children. The film runs a little overlong, and the ending, reminiscent of Prometheus (2012), has Optimus Prime setting out on a new adventure and so setting up the inevitable next installment of the popular toy adaptation franchise.

4 out of 5 stars.

Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Transformers: Age of Extinction is:

8. Anti-torture. “This is worse than waterboarding,” robot Brains complains at being shocked by an electric jolt.

7. Pro-serfdom. Tessa aspires to do her part to inflate the American college bubble by applying for financial aid to go to university. The film attempts to milk sympathy from a rejection letter.

6. New age, lending credence to the idea that Earth was once visited by ancient aliens.

5. Corporate, featuring prominent product placement for Victoria’s Secret, Oreo, Giorgio Armani, and Red Bull.

4. Anti-slavery (i.e., pro-yawn). Negroid-voiced Transformer Brains exults at being “free at last!” Lucas, objecting to partner Cade’s cutthroat business practices, also alludes to slavery.

3. Capitalist, offering a sympathetic portrait of the struggling small business owner in Cade. Early scenes of the hero’s domestic existence convey a definite impression of an America in economic decline.

2. Pro-miscegenation. Joyce falls for the head executive of his company’s China branch (Bingbing Li).

1. Antiwar, anti-state, and anti-cronyism. Attinger, head of CIA black ops and military contractor KSI’s best customer, expects to take a seven-figure salary with the company after leaving government “service”. Since the Battle of Chicago, a cataclysmic 9/11-like event in which America was attacked by Decepticons and defended by the Autobots, a paranoid police state has taken hold, with Decepticons and Autobots alike being hunted down and neutralized by the fearmongering CIA. Transformers: Age of Extinction also gives a timely illustration of federal authoritarian overreach when CIA agents, with no warrant and no regard for human dignity or life, raid Cade’s property and threaten to murder his daughter. The movie expresses Americans’ discomfort over the advent of drones, as well.

 

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A Million Ways to Die in the West **

 

Central to Post-American Hollywood’s hate affair with European-American heritage is its especial loathing for the rugged, expansive tradition of the masculine Old West, a tired spite that found expression in Brokeback Mountain (2005), Django Unchained (2012), and last year’s flop Lone Ranger remake, and now throws a new shovelful of Marxist manure onto the pile with A Million Ways to Die in the West, the latest directorial effort of Family Guy auteur Seth MacFarlane, whose last foray into feature filmmaking was the less heartless and more palatable Ted (2012).

The western spoof was never a genre that held much interest for this reviewer. After Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962), Little Big Man (1970), Thank You Mask Man (1971), Blazing Saddles (1974), and so many others, was there really such high demand for another one of these things? Worst is that A Million Ways to Die in the West misses even the broad target of this underachieving subgenre and fails to elicit a single laugh – with, perhaps, the brief exception of the absurd sight of Gilbert Gottfried dressed up to look like Abraham Lincoln.

MacFarlane, who stars as an Arizona sheep farmer, lacks the charisma and color to carry a gonzo film of this sort, and might have done better to cast Seth Rogen or some other funny Jew in the lead. Monument Valley, at least, was never more gorgeous, and sets off race traitoress Charlize Theron’s earthy beauty to nice effect. Liam Neeson, too, is adequate as the principal villain, while Sarah Silverman is convincing as (what a stretch!) a brainless whore. No coup of casting, however, could offset the fact that A Million Ways to Die in the West is too explicitly nasty, self-aware, and mean-spirited to evoke any genuine mirth.

2 out of 5 stars. ICA’s advice: watch Shane (1953) again instead. That is, unless the viewer is absolutely determined to see a sheep urinating in Seth MacFarlane’s face or Doogie Howser, M.D., dumping noisy splats of diarrhea into a Stetson.

Ideological Content Analysis indicates that A Million Ways to Die in the West is:

13. Pro-miscegenation. Giovanni Ribisi dirties himself with Jewish floozy Sarah Silverman.

12. Anti-capitalistic. Merchants receive unfavorable depictions in an arrogant mustache cosmetics salesman (Doogie Howser) and a quack medicine hawker (Dennis Haskins). Other representative forms of commerce and industry are prostitution and mining, which leads to health problems.

11. Anti-tobacco. MacFarlane has a coughing fit when he tries his first cigarette.

10. Anti-Arab. Theron, after hearing him do a mock rendition of an Islamic prayer, is relieved to learn that MacFarlane has no Arabian ancestry.

9. Anti-slavery (i.e., pro-yawn). Django himself, Jamie Foxx, shows up in a cameo to murder the proprietor of a “runaway slave” shooting game at a fair.

8. Anti-human. Among the sights MacFarlane expects the viewer to find hilarious are a family catching on fire and men being shot, gored by a bull, and smashed into bloody bits by a falling block of ice.

7. Pro-slut. Sarah Silverman with a gob of semen stuck to her cheek. How charming.

6. Anti-Christian. Parkinson’s disease is sarcastically described as one of the ways God shows His love. A pastor and his son are murderers. Silverman plays a prostitute who bangs ten customers “on a slow day” but refuses to compromise her Christian beliefs by having premarital sex with her fiance.

5. Pro-castration. MacFarlane’s girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) dumps him, mainly because the guy is such a wimpy, needy schmuck with no potential. The movie’s somewhat ambivalent solution to his woes, however, is not for the hero to turn himself into a stud and a macho gunslinger, but for him to become more open-minded, study under the tutelage of a feminist, take drugs, and embrace diversity. Sissy, progressive, ethnomasochistic men like MacFarlane and Ribisi are the characters the viewer is supposed to like, while traditionally masculine types are antagonists, with rough-loving outlaw Liam Neeson getting a daisy stuffed in his ass. Men, the message seems to be, ought not to toughen up so much as opt for moderation in wimpiness.

4. Gun-ambivalent. A Million Ways to Die in the West is naturally eager to depict the typical gun owner as a rowdy Caucasian who likes nothing better than to find an excuse to put a bullet through a stranger. The film finds itself in a bit of a quandary, however, in that it is difficult to tell an entertaining story about the Wild West without making use of heroic gunplay. As a compromise, the film features an unlikely, reluctant hero in MacFarlane, a man with no natural talent for shooting and who avoids confrontation when possible, but does learn (from a woman) how to handle a gun in order to protect himself from all of the horrible, unprogressive white men in town. A Million Ways to Die in the West appears to suggest that firearms are best left as a monopoly of responsible feminists like Charlize Theron.

3. Pro-drug. MacFarlane and Theron share a marijuana cookie. The hero later attains “true courage” by drinking a psychedelic concoction given to him by an Indian tribe. Group freakout sessions, explains their wise chief (Wes Studi), constitute the way to “true happiness”.

2. Feminist, anti-marriage, and anti-family. Theron heroically liberates herself from bossy, abusive husband Liam Neeson. MacFarlane’s parents are lifeless sourpusses who never show him any affection. Ribisi, meanwhile, mentions being molested by an uncle. (cf. nos. 5 and 8)

1. Anti-American. “The West fuckin’ sucks.”

Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies *1/2

As little excuse as the execrable Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter had to exist, the coattail-clawing clunker cash-in Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies has even less – and it knows it.  Dimly lensed, indifferently scripted, and uninterestingly cast, this tale of a covert mission behind enemy lines to halt a Confederate zombie plague is itself no livelier than a lumbering, moaning member of the living dead.

Stifling any potential from the beginning is the film’s confused sense of its own identity.  With a ridiculous rip-off premise begging for high camp comedy treatment, Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies opts instead to play its material straight, offering only the driest and crumbliest crumbs of attempted humor and usually preferring to bore the viewer with Spielbergian solemnity and sentimentality: “Be brave, Abe.  You’re resolute.  You know what must be done.”  The titular zombies, laggards all, provide paltry suspense as America’s worst commander-in-chief (Bill Oberst Jr.) again rises to the superheroic occasion by shooting and slicing through the evil hordes with his trusty populist scythe – or is it a commie sickle?  (Like a good Jacobin, Lincoln prefers to behead the unenlightened.)

Had it been made in 1990, starred Leslie Nielsen, and laughed at itself with a go-for-broke gonzo parody approach, Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies might at least have had the potential, like Nielsen’s Repossessed, to become in retrospect a cheesy and groan-inducing but ultimately pleasing artifact of lame comedy nostalgia.  As is, however, the film offers next to nothing to make it worth the viewer’s while.  “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here,” Lincoln says as part of his Gettysburg Address – and no more fitting tribute could possibly be paid to Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, a wholly superfluous, tedious, and forgettable offense on film.

A star and a half.  Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies is:

7. Family-ambivalent.  “I’d rather start a family and ride horses,” Pat Garrett (yes, the Pat Garrett, played by Christopher Marrone) says when Lincoln suggets he enter politics or law enforcement.  “An appealing path, to be sure,” Lincoln concurs.  It should also be noted, however, that the president’s superhero origin prologue depicts him executing his own zombified mother.  (Cf. Warm Bodies no. 6)

6. Class-conscious.  “What would the cream of Washington society make of you, my dear?” John Wilkes Booth (Jason Vail) muses judgmentally, contemplating a whore as she sleeps.

5. Feminist/pro-slut.  A poor, oppressed prostitute excuses her whoredom by complaining that the oldest profession is the only work available to unmarried women in her area.  Old unprogressive fogey Stonewall Jackson (Don McGraw) objects to the presence of a “fallen woman”.

4. Bi-partisan.  General Jackson redeems himself by joining forces with Lincoln and, like Dr. King in Django Unchained, playing the sacrificial honky.  “We are all Americans.”  All of the biologically and morally unsalvageable corpses, however, must be exterminated.

3. Anti-white.  Mary Owens (Baby Norman) hints at the symbolic significance of the plague when, describing her own zombification experience, she says, “It’s like a fog is descending . . .”

2. Statist.  Lincoln avuncularly passes the torch to future fellow office-abuser Teddy Roosevelt (Canon Kuipers), who gets to perch on the Great Emancipator’s shoulders to aim his rifle over a wall and pick off zombies.

1. Anti-racist/anti-slavery (i.e., pro-yawn on both counts).  “I’m not your boy,” token black character Wilson Brown (Jason Hughley) sasses when someone good-naturedly calls him “m’boy”.

Django Unchained ****1/2

Quentin Tarantino is a man with perhaps one great film to his name and who has managed to coast on the strength of that beloved opus for the better part of two decades; he does, however, have more than one very good film to his credit, and the gorgeously realized Django Unchained can, happily, be added to that list.  His love letter to the spaghetti western and blaxploitation genres, it is also his rabble-rousing death threat to civilization and as such is something of a triumph of self-loathing.

Jamie Foxx is affectingly earnest in his portrayal of Django, Rousseau’s chained man, suddenly presented with the opportunity of achieving his liberty and reuniting with his enslaved wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).  Christoph Waltz is no less charming as the German dentist (who, in a gratuitous irony, has been named Dr. King Schultz) who offers Django his freedom in exchange for a profitable partnership in tracking bounties.  Leonardo DiCaprio, who shines most brightly as a villain, plays Calvin Candie, the handsome, debonair slavemaster in possession of Django’s woman.

The fabulous cast is, typically for Tarantino, filled to the brim with familiar character actors and pop culture favorites of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with Michael Parks, Russ Tamblyn, Bruce Dern, Don Johnson, James Remar, and Franco Nero, star of the original Django, all putting in appearances.  Samuel L. Jackson, meanwhile, has probably the funniest role of his career in Stephen, Candie’s loyal but sassy domestic slave – the representative Uncle Tom, in other words – who resents freeman Django at first sight and who, in the race-baiting theology of Django Unchained, embodies what may be the worst of evils: the complaisant betrayal of his own long-suffering people.

That Django Unchained is so successful and involving is proof of writer-director Tarantino’s dangerousness as a filmmaker.  Tarantino, who bears major responsibility for foisting the torture porn genre on humanity through his endorsement (“Quentin Tarantino presents . . .”) of Eli Roth’s execrable anti-human hit Hostel, continues his desensitization of the American public with his obsessive fetishization of the splattered blood and played-for-laughs agony of bullet-riddled unprogressive white men.

With humor but also an unintentional irony, Tarantino has cast himself in a cameo as one of the slavers revolutionarily liquidated by Django.  It is ironic because what what the man is peddling is in effect hatred of himself – of successful whites and of the rich – as an unwitting accomplice in what Yuri Bezmenov describes as the systematic demoralization of Americans by useful idiots through cultural Marxist contamination.  Exhibit A: the critically heralded oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino.

This reviewer can sympathize with Django’s violent impulse to liberation and even the pleasure he takes in killing the men who obstruct his enjoyment of natural rights.  Where the film flies off the ethical rails is in celebrating the shooting not only of those directly imperiling Django’s liberty, but all of their associates, including Candie’s unarmed and mild-mannered sister.  Her crime is one of complacency and, one suspects, of blood relation to the oppressor – of having inherited slavers’ genes.

This is particularly reckless in a film that makes a point of alluding constantly to the contemporary – with hip-hop music, “fuck”-sprinkled dialogue, joking reference to the Holocaust, characters named after Martin Luther King and an Italian western hero, and Tarantino’s endless self-referential postmodern hipsterism – and through these conscious anachronisms advertises some imagined relevance to the race relations of today.  Designed with the express purpose of ripping open and poking the synthetic psychological wounds of crimes not experienced by anyone alive in America today, Django Unchained is nothing if not a wholly superfluous incitation to racial hatred, genocide, and redistribution of wealth.  It is all the more egregious for being so good.

4.5 stars with accompanying whip-scarred stripes.  Goodbye Uncle Tom remains the most incendiary and entertaining treatment of slavery on film, but Tarantino’s new contribution is certainly no slouch.  Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Django Unchained is ominous in its flippancy and:

9. Anti-Christian.  White slavemasters return from a funeral singing a hymn.  Religion that allows for such injustice is a fraud.

8. Anti-tobacco.  Monsieur Candie smokes from a cigarette holder like the bourgeois swine he is.  Rank-and-file southern hick psychos chew and spit.

7. Anti-police.  A racist sheriff turns out to be a wanted criminal.

6. Anti-science.  Study of human biodiversity is represented by pseudoscientific phrenology.  Science = racism.

5. Pro-miscegenation.  A Texas woman eyes Django with interest from her window as he rides through her town.  Black love is described as a tar pool that refuses to let go its hold on the fancy of those who enter (i.e., once you go black, you never go back).  The camera seems to want to lick Foxx’s nude physique.

4. Anti-business.  Thoroughly hostile to private property, the film’s representative forms of commerce are vengeful bounty hunting, the slave trade, and mining – the latter utilizing slave labor, naturally.  Wealth is accumulated through cruelty and murder.  A saloon keeper who objects to Django’s presence is chased out of his own establishment.  Private property = slavery.  “I’m runnin’ a business here,” Candie says during one of the most savage scenes of meanness.

3. Anti-South/anti-white male.  While critics will complain of what was previously the “whitewashing” of American history in films, Django Unchained demonstrates that, if anything, brownwashing and brainwashing are at present the order of the day.  Southerners are without exception vile sadists with bad teeth who live to beat, whip, humiliate, muzzle, brand, and castrate blacks.  The effeminate swagger of Billy Crash (Walton Goggins), the most vicious of Candie’s toadies, suggests that white loathing of and desire to neuter blacks is a function of white sexual inadequacy and salivating, latently homosexual penis envy.  Those not participating directly in these activities remain equally guilty for tolerating the status quo and therefore must receive equal punishment.  The conventional incestuous southerner smear receives a nod with what may be hints of Candie’s overly enthusiastic affection for his sister.  Black-on-black violence results from white manipulation.

2. Anti-slavery/anti-racist (i.e., pro-yawn on both counts).  Django Unchained perpetuates the myth that slavery existed not as an economic expediency, but principally as the plaything of whites’ sadism.  Where anti-racist films have previously presented viewers with the “sacrificial Negro” archetype, Django Unchained breaks new ground by inventing the sacrificial honky, the man who absolves the sins of his racial inheritance by dying to liberate blacks.

1. Black supremacist/genocidal.  They mo betta.

Lincoln **1/2

Slightly less simplistic and ridiculous than this past summer’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Steven Spielberg’s snooze-inducing Lincoln – which, for the purposes of this review, shall go by the more appropriate and poetic title Stinkoln – is a study in arrogant Hollywood leftism thinly disguised as a prestigious period piece and civics lesson.  The essence of bare-assed propaganda, Stinkoln has multiple ulterior motives, which, however, are unified by the idea that the United States are a cess pit of ethical retardation and gross injustice, a situation that can be remedied only by a dictatorial executive beloved of “the people” and “clothed in immense power”.

Stinkoln fires its first shot with inspiring footage of black soldiers shooting, stabbing, and strangling white soldiers in open race warfare, after which two of the heroic Negroes pester the president himself for a raise and complain about their second-class citizen status.  Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis, doing his best Walter Brennan impression) gives evidence in this, his first scene, of what a shrewd politician he is by listening sympathetically, but then pretending to be half-senile and abruptly changing the subject, telling unfunny jokes instead of answering the Negroes’ concerns.  Lame comedy, unfortunately for the viewer, is a tactic that will be shamelessly employed by the commander-in-chief throughout the film, which focuses specifically on Lincoln’s crafty intention to stall peace negotiations with the Confederacy in order to force the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, finally abolishing slavery.  Opposition is strong in that “rat’s nest” of “hicks and hacks” the House of Representatives, however, and securing the necessary votes is no easy task for the Anointed.

David Strathairn, veteran of another self-congratulatory and horribly overrated liberal propaganda film, 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck, appears as Lincoln’s David Axelrod, William Seward, the unscrupulous muscle whose duties as Secretary of State also include overseeing a posse of political operatives engaged in bribing and browbeating representatives into enacting the people’s will.  Alternately aiding and irritating the president is First Lady Mary (Sally Field), an erratic, self-important ditz who characterizes her headaches as “another casualty of the war”.  Tommy Lee Jones steals the show, however, as Lincoln’s cantankerous, insult-spouting Marxist id, the abolition-uber-alles Radical Republican Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt also figures in the cast of hundreds, wasting a few minutes of his promising career as Lincoln’s idealistic first son Robert.

As a costume drama Stinkoln succeeds in recreating the look and feel of a place and time.  It sacrifices most of the entertainment value it might have had, however, in functioning as a political passion play.  Sanctimonious, rigid, hateful, and partisan, Stinkoln has nothing but smiling contempt for its audience, the American people.  Presenting a righteously reconfigured genocidal Ozymandias archetype for popular adoration and executive imitation, this freak-bearded Kool-Aid pitcher of a film is not only irresponsibly subversive but – arguably more unforgivable – actually boring. Lincoln’s dialogue consists almost entirely of purple prose that constantly chafes the viewer’s patience and makes this two-and-a-half-hour lecture on freedom feel more like four hours of chain-dragging bondage.  One of the kookiest, most cocksure, cruddy, overstuffed, oversimplified, overwrought, overbearing, and overlong offerings of Steven Spielberg’s overly hyped career, Stinkoln earns 2.5 of 5 stars.

Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Stinkoln is:

7. Anti-tobacco.  Second-hand smoke agitates emphysema.  An evilly racist representative rudely spits tobacco juice after voting against the Thirteenth Amendment.

6. Pro-miscegenation.  Thaddeus Stevens, Stinkoln reveals, has secretly been balling his black housekeeper, and therefore has more than a humanitarian motivation to pass the Thirteenth Amendment if he wants to keep the taste of that sweet brown sugar on his crusty, lusty old white lips.

5. Militarist/pro-NWO.  Government-directed bloodshed is the Philosopher’s Stone of social justice.  Brainwashed Robert, after seeing a patriotic heap of severed body parts, decides he is “nothing” if he fails to enlist to assist in the extermination of the enemies of the state.  Featured prominently in one scene is a George Washington statue by Frenchman Jean-Antoine Houdon (who also sculpted Rousseau and Napoleon), depicting America’s first president resting his left hand significantly on a fasces.

4. Anti-South.  Southern diplomats are pale, vampiric creatures who wince at the sunlight on emerging from the coffin-like darkness of their carriage (cf. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter).  Robert E. Lee is, however, granted at least a measure of dignity of bearing in his brief appearance to throw in the towel.

3. Egalitarian, and specifically espousing a form of liberation theology.  Lincoln derives his power to redistribute property from “the people”, who, however, have defective moral compasses and require a man of superior fiber and spirituality to lead them to glory.  Equality = Fairness = Justice in Lincoln’s sophistic recipe for a moral economy.  Before his assassination, the president tells his wife he would like to travel in the Holy Land and visit Jerusalem, thus setting up the tacky Jesus comparison that finds its explicit expression in the beatific deathbed tableau, with Daniel Day-Lewis aglow in demise and looking like the figure in Bernardo Strozzi’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ.

2. Anti-slavery (i.e., pro-yawn).  Tad Lincoln (Gulliver McGrath) appears as a whiny, neurotic mess wracked by acute white guilt.  He divides his time between playing with toy soldiers and staring with naked self-loathing at photographic plates of miserable slaves.  One of the White House domestics recalls being beaten with a shovel as a child.  The horror!

1. Obamist/Machiavellian.  Political oppostion and pesky legal restraints are to be overcome by any necessary means.  What this country needs, Stinkoln dares to suggest, is an enlightened despot “clothed in immense power”.  It helps the masses to swallow the bitter pill of tyranny, however, if their dictator presents himself as Main Street incarnate, a folksy figure of Andy Griffith wholesomeness (think A Face in the Crowd) who tells jokes and anecdotes and whittles during strategy meetings.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter **

America’s worst president gets the superhero treatment in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  Actually dumber than I thought it would be, this reeking hunk of historical brain damage comes packed with boring characters, endless speed-up/slow-down bloodletting, and enough sanctimonious posturing to stock White House larders until John Brown’s apocalyptic resurrection.  A description of one moment from the film should suffice to indicate its level of stupidity.  In one scene, stampeding horses come thundering out of nowhere, and a vampire picks up one of the horses (!) and throws it on top of Lincoln, who gets up unhurt (!) and jumps from horse to horse like an acrobat.  Utterly condescending trash.  2 stars that belong behind bars.

Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is:

6. Pro-drug.  Lincoln’s vampire hunter mentor takes a toke from a hookah, which is probably an indicator of this film’s intellectual genesis.

5. Feminist.  Even Mary Todd gets to play rough at the end.

4. Egalitarian.  Lincoln calls for silver tableware to be sacrificed to forge vampire-annihilating, racism-destroying weapons.

3. Pro-miscegenation, with slavemasters’ intense desire for black flesh sublimated into hissing vampiric bloodlust.

2. Anti-South.  This film actually manages literally to dehumanize
southerners, who, as it turns out, comprise a vast empire of the vampires.  Not only slavemasters, but whole Confederate armies, apparently, are inhuman.

1. Anti-slavery (i.e., pro-yawn)