Django Unchained

I've been thinking about a couple of things lately related to film and storytelling and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarrantino, 2012) brought them vividly to the fore. This is the fortnight in which I watched The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013) at the cinema, and yawned my way through a ABC drama - The Time of Our Lives on the box. Why do some things work – entertain us, move us – while others fail? Django Unchained, set in the south of the USA in 1858, two years before the Civil War and a tale of slavery, had me hooked from opening frame. Or was that note? The spaghetti western soundtrack signposted its Genre intentions from the get-go.

Lurid beyond measure, comic in the extreme, violent to excess it is a film that is in turn shocking and entertaining and even entertaining with its shocks. There's no doubt that Tarrantino immersed himself in the history of his subject, but what his imagination produced defies categorisation. It includes a verbose German dentist turned bounty hunter (the excellent Christopher Weisz), a brutal Francophile plantation owner by the name of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Django himself, performed with conviction and sensitivity by Jamie Foxx. As a portent of things to come – a free black man – he cuts a powerful and commanding figure on horseback whose presence unhinges every person in his path.

I loved its complicated set-pieces, sequences that were taut with tension and enjoyed Tarantino's easy mastery of the medium, his confidence to revel in silliness and then just as suddenly flip the mood like a switch to serious.

I won't get stuck into The Great Gatsby other than to say maybe this is not the right time for that period film. With all those "modern" characters having their "modern" crisis against a contemporary soundtrack I could not work out why they were not txting their issues or on smart phones 24/7.

And The Time Of Our Lives? The less said the better.

Influenza plus bronchial infection

image: my bedroom curtains and my recent view

This is the first time I have opened my computer in six long days, some kind of record, I'm sure. As the title of this post explains, I have been unwell. Unwell is too benign to describe my condition. Those that know me well know this about me: I am not prone to paranoia or hysteria about health matters. But I've been so sick I actually saw the doctor on three separate occasions, on one of those occasions fainting in the surgery (not crumpling down but actually falling back flat like a plank). On previous occasions when I've been sick I've wondered whether I would be better served by a hospital. But this flu has had me thinking about death, like 1918. Every so often when the fevers have abated for a few hours I've been flicking an eye on my iphone and checking in with my celebrity friends. I only remember them when I'm sick, for some reason. I didn't know Eva Mendes was going out with Ryan Gosling. What was I doing watching a clip of her on American day-time show host Ellen? I also caught up with her on The Conversation (Amanda de Cadenet's "revolutionary" show where she talks candidly to successful American women about their lives). I learnt that Eva Mendes is an Independent Woman most proud of her financial independence much like the host. Apparently they "manifested" their wealth (a Wikipedia search told me that de Cadenet married John Taylor from Duran Duran at 16). Finding new ways to torture myself I have been back on Goop seeing how Gwyneth Paltrow is doing. She's doing great. I particularly enjoyed her brother-inlaw's renovation of his three-storey family home in London. My place? On the days I've been home alone, it feels like a sad, neglected residence, not exactly a junkie squat but possibly somewhere a person with dementia might live. As always I focus my resentment on the abject bathroom. I've been fantasising about calling in a professional cleaner to scrub down this one offensive room. My instructions would be really simple: it needs to be end-of-lease clean.