Just to de-stress!

Bullet Train (2022)
Director: David Leitch

This movie gives a feeling of watching 'Kill Bill' or 'Pulp Fiction'. There is a Quentin Tarantino feel to it with much chaos and twists in its storyline. There are mindless fighting and meaningless killings. The storyline is so convoluted that it makes a Bollywood offering an Aesop fable with a straightforward storyline. Despite the violence and gore, the dialogue paints a picture of a dark comedy. And the scriptwriter must have been trying very hard to sound philosophical by inserting Eastern philosophy here and there. Coincidentally, the film is an adaptation of a Japanese story.

The story revolves around the high-octane somersaulting and shooting action upon a speeding bullet train travelling between Tokyo and Kyoto. A self-proclaimed harbinger of bad-lucked assassin codenamed 'Lady Bug' embarks on the train with a mission to seize a particular suitcase. He is merely filling in for another hitman who is hit with a bug. Unknowest to him, a gang leader and his henchmen are to get the absent hitman. Now, the gang leader's daughter also wants to kill her father. To lure another old enemy of his father aboard the train, she drops his child from a building.

This confusing plot forms the background of a CGI-filled meaningless entertainment that would excite the feeble-minded. Along the way, to lure intellectual discourse, they threw in hints of chaos theory, the randomness of life and the possibility of how the flutter of a butterfly can start a tsunami!

The makers of the movie have been accused of whitewashing the whole story. Even though the setting can be anywhere, not necessarily in Japan, and the characters just carry codenames, the filmmakers cannot be made to go off the hook. They stereotype Japanese service workers as docile, unresponsive people who are ready to take a proper bow in salutation even though there is total destruction and mayhem around them. And that is supposed to be light entertainment.

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OK Boomer?

Once upon a time in Hollywood (2019)
Screenplay and Director: Quentin Tarantino

It is funny that every young generation feels that they have been taken for a ride by the generation before them and that there is a dire need to put things in order. Invariably, they all fail miserably. Look at the timeline at which this film is based. It is the late 1960s. The world is in chaos, yet again. After getting the world crippled with two world wars, the baby boomers got the world upon its feet again. But that was not to last. Within a decade, the world nestled back into two camps yet - the 'good' and the 'bad', and the whole imbroglio of violence and killing is to repeat. The youngsters see this as the failure on the part of the adults to set a just world. They venture into the realm of the unknown to set into motion a new world order. 

Just like Greta Thunberg and the angry kids around the world in the 21st century, the 60s had their share of anti-establishment. The anti-Vietnam demonstrator, the hippie culture and the flower power movement are examples of the above. Unfortunately, they chose many self-destructive avenues to mull their pain of an unknown future. A group of them built a commune in the middle of the Navajo desert with an ambitious plan to plant crops. The plan failed miserably, and they end up having free sex, booze, illegitimate children, drugs and crimes under their belt to support their sustenance.  Their dreams of living in a free world never saw fruition. They ended up in the same world that they abhor, of subjugation, control, dominance by one party and victimisation. The ladies thought they were liberated by burning bras. They felt they attained women empowerment through contraception. They got neither. They found themselves getting unknown diseases, unshakeable baggage and answering to the dominant force they were trying to shake off.

We are angry, and it is your fault!

It must be the curse of mankind. They are forever trying to find the best way to find peace with themselves and their surroundings. They have trying multiple economic modules with the same disastrous results. Trickle-down economics, fountain effect using the market forces or a utopian leftist agenda, it gives the same answer -disappointment.

Coming of age around the mid-70s and early 80s, we are all too familiar reading of Marilyn Manson and his occult cult. The tabloids kept us informed of the pretty Natalie Wood and the mystery surrounding her yacht accident and the gruesome murder of a gravid Sharon Tate in her exclusive Hollywood home.

Not knowing what to expect but deciding to watch it anyway after finding out that it is a Tarantino movie, I was wondering what the movie was all about. At first it about the story of a struggling actor and his stunt double. Then it moved on to 1969 Hollywood, the commune of hippies, Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski and the murders towards the very late part of the show.

The author took the liberty to give a totally different twist to the course of history as we know it. The three members of the Manson cult/family end up having a duel with the actor and his stunt, as well as dying in their hands. Tate is nowhere nears the assassins. In fact, at the end of the movie, she calls her neighbours over for drinks. 

Maybe Tarantino is hoping for an alternate universe where Tate becomes a big star, and the world would come together and sing Kumbayah! 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Disjointed, still made sense, though!

Pulp Fiction 1994

Never had the chance to watch this movie the first time around, the movie that catapulted John Travolta's acting career back into orbit after many repeated failures since Saturday Night Fever. As in other Quentin Tarantino's films, the layout of the movie is different and is full of gore, violence and flowery explicit language. Bruce Willis career too had a kick-start here. I kind of liked it with its unique brand of humour, the right chemistry between the main hitmen, Samuel L Jackson and Travolta and the witty dialogue.

The story is basically disjointed and is told in a non-linear fashion, but they all make sense in the end. You would be wondering why Travolta gets shot dead in the middle of the show but reappears later.

It starts with two novice robbers chitchatting and decides to rob a diner. When they (one of them is Tim Roth of 'Lie to Me') hold a gun to hold up, the credits roll in. The story stops there and continues at the tail end of the movie. But then the tail end is not sequentially the end of the story as the end is told in the middle! A new concept, a breakthrough that was earth-shattering and earned many accolades.

Vincent (Travolta) and Jules (Jackson) are hitmen for Wallace. They are mean killers who collect some merchandise from double-crossers. Then there is a scene where Vincent has to babysit Wallace's wife, Mia (Uma Thurman). She overdoses herself with heroin and creates a heart-stopping scene for Vincent.

Another plot is the story of Butch, a boxer, who is supposed to lose a fight on Wallace's orders but defeats his opponent instead! The mob is hot on his heels while he makes a dash. He has, however, to return to his apartment to retrieve an old wrist which he inherited from his great grandfather! Vincent is waiting for him there but is shot by Butch instead.

In a twist, Wallace and Butch get entangled with a shop owner who apprehends them.

In another scene, Wallace accidentally shoots a victim and calls upon Jimmie (Tarantino) to clear up his mess.

The scene finally returns to the diner where the two robbers are. Coincidentally, Vincent and Jules are there. Because of what Jules perceived as a miracle and a message from God, he gives his money to the robber and leaves his profession.

An entertaining flick...

Fastest draw in the South!

Django Unchained (2012)
Director: Quentin Tarantino

This film has been praised to high heavens for its boldness in depicting American's not so pleasant past. Even though , the powers that be always paint a sanitised and just past of the invaders who not only raped the American continent of its resources and systematically annihilated an advanced civilization already present before their gungho appearance in the New World, it takes a renegade son of the soil like Tarantino to highlight their equally unpleasant past with the workers who were slaved and treated worse than livestock.
This film can be best described as one of those spaghetti westerns which Clint Eastwood is commonly associated with. In keeping with Tarantino's penchant for gore and violence (as in Kill Bill and Hostel), there is plenty of spurting of crimson sanguineous fluids to make Dracula go into ecstasy. It is set at a time before the American civil war and has very eloquent dialogue with poetic words that would fascinate any student of English Literature albeit its liberal lace with profanity.
A maverick fast talking and fast drawing dentist, Dr Schultz (Christopher Waltz), rescues a gang of black slaves from captivity in the pretext of looking for a particular black slave who could identify a particular band of outlaw brothers. After picking out Django (Jamie Foxx), Dr Schultz just shoots them with a small pistol, the sound of menacing enough to be an assault rifle!

Slave Baron DiCaprio

A smart talking fast drawing dentist rescues a gang of black slaves from bounty hunters. He takes Django away from the group in text of trying a group of brothers.
Dr Schulz is a bounty hunter who gave up his dental practice to gun down outlaws for a living. He deputise Django (now a free man) as his assistant and they go all around from Texas on hunting spree all through winter with good returns. After finding out about Django's own sob story, both of them go in search of Django's German speaking black slave wife.

They track her down to be at Candiland in Mississippi, in the heart of slave land, owned by a ruthless rancher, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). They are looked at suspiciously, seeing a black man on horseback. With the intention of purchasing fighters for a blood sport (mandingo), they get in close with Candie and his confidantes.
Candie's chief butler, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) smells a rat and alerts his boss. The slick Dr Shultz manages to gun down Candie before after which a blood bath takes part in Candieland. Dr Shultz is killed and Django is captured and sold off to a mine. He outwits his captors and returns to rescue the love of his life and avenge in the true style of a spaghetti western as Django rides in the sunset with his girl and a flaming southern mansion on the background.
If all movies from Hollywood are guilty of racial stereotyping, portraying the whites as saviours and the coloured as crooks and uncivilised, this film is also guilty of the same. It, however, paints the whites as aggressors with bad attitudes, bad manners, bad teeth and barbaric, save for the German speaking Dr Schultz. The blacks, on the other hand are all victims of abuse and are sincere. Even Stephen who is his boss' faithful dog is loyal.
The background music score is warped. The potpourri of songs spread range from country folk to hard rock and even hip hop. An entertaining flick despite the extreme unnecessary gore and violence.