Review: Django Unchained

"Django Unchained" will probably go down as Tarantino's mastepiece. Yes, it gives "Resevoir Dogs" a run for it's money. He's certainly come into his own and got wonderful performances out of his actors, yet I can't shake the feeling that it might be time for him to leave the pastiche in the past. You get your samurai flick and your spaghetti western, your Japanese craziness, a heaping of blackspoitation and even a little German epic. From the hand stencilled title cards to the theme music to the contrasting over and under exposures, you see his hand in it all. My main complaint is that like most Tarantino films, it climaxes too early and sort of trails from there. Also, the freshmen fratboys sitting behind me laughing hysterically at blood spurts when they really aren't funny and are really just a trademark at this point and cringing at having to see another man's junk (and I bet these kids are watching porno every night) kind of brought me down. Tarantino surprisingly has a good grasp on suspense but occaisionally as he is wont to do will undermine himseld with his knack for sound effects. I suppose it balances the sometimes heavy themes. Jamie Foxx is understated and Christopher Waltz is superb in the overstated character. Is it too soon to whisper "Oscar"? 4/5. Oh, and man, did Quentin get fat! It's a long way from the 90's.

Review: The Green Hornet

I never read the "Green Hornet" comics as a kid so the movie was new territory to me. I couldn't tell you how well it matches up. What I can tell you is that it is a Hollywood blockbuster (that failed to bust any blocks) and as such they spent money on music, action, explosions and special effects. Unfortunately they let Seth Rogen write it. I don't think I've ever found the man to be funny. And there are plot holes you could drive Black Beauty through. The pacing stings like a bee and then dies. 2.3/5.

A Long Way From Columbine

Back in 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up their high school. They were weeks away from graduation. That was also my graduating year. It made no sense to me. Still doesn’t. High school was no picnic for me but I had hopes and dreams, a handful of friends and a future beyond a small town. It wasn’t the end of the world. But for 12 students and one teacher in Colorado it was. It wasn’t the first such tragedy but it seems to be the one that sticks in our minds, perhaps for the publicity surrounding it.

Thirteen and a half years later across the country in another small town we see the replay. We’ll never know what motivated Adam Lanza to steal his mother’s guns and destroy the lives of 20 children, 6 adults and their families. We’ll say he was crazy, depressed, craved attention, was a gun nut who spent too much time playing “Call of Duty,” surfing the Internet and generally being anti-social. Surely we’d be right. But that hardly seems important now.

In the week following the shooting, a debate seems to have grown up between those seeking stricter gun control and those seeking more “awareness of mental health issues.” I’m not sure who isn’t aware of mental health issues in this day and age. It’s why so many of us hate to ride the bus or work in customer service. Raising awareness of mental health or breast cancer or Alzheimer’s or any other disease is pretty pointless. We’re aware of it all. What we want is a cure. And maybe someday we’ll have one. But to me it seems like self-medicating with alcohol or marijuana or opium or hookers or punching a wall have been replaced by prescription pills that do little to even anyone out. I was once prescribed an anti-anxiety pill when I complained to my doctor of fatigue. While I don’t deny a certain level of social anxieties, it’s not unmanageable. A better prescription would have been to lose weight and quit smoking. What I got however was a little white pill that made me stop caring. About anything. I no longer had anxiety. But I also no longer had any drive to get out of bed. And that was a bigger problem. I don’t know what if any medication Lanza was on, but mass prescriptions of little white pills won’t stop another tragedy. Maybe I just don’t understand what people mean by raising awareness. But I’m pretty sure this is it; make pills readily available to those who need them. Having been there, I preach from the mountaintop – it’s not going to work.

Maybe they mean make sanitariums more accessible to those who need them. For whatever reason this reminds me of a gothic past and a Gotham future.

Let me ask you this. Would you rather lock up the guns or the people who have yet to commit a crime? I know some of you will say the latter. Rather than argue with you, I’ll simply tell you to stop reading and go take a law or civics class.

We come to the crux here. It’s time to choose a direction at this crossroads. As I’ve said, many have chosen in favour of some vague sense of comfort that we can lay a blanket on the mentally ill and they’ll just go to sleep. Me, I say get rid of the guns. All of them. “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,” read a bumpersticker my grandfather used to have lying around. I was bemused by this as a child. Now I can no longer grasp that trick of the mind that appreciated that play on words. Now I simply think, “Yep. And we arrest criminals.” Grandpa had guns. And I think I can safely doubt the legality of those guns now. He kept them in a closet under the stairs, wired together with a cable I could have cut with a pair of wire cutters if I’d had a mind to. Hardly the locked gun case required by law in this country. But he was an old-timer and those were old times. At least one of the rifles was his military arm from the war and you could find 50,000 of them in closets across the country if you wanted to. I never saw his sidearm. I held those weapons in my hands and I appreciated them. How or in what sense I can now no longer recall. The power, perhaps. The craftsmanship. The smooth and heavy butt balancing the long grey steel. I held them. I fired others. Shot tin cans off a fence post with the air rifle he bought me when I was about ten. Grandpa, having been in the war, was no stranger to death. He taught me to fear and he taught me to respect. Somewhere in the balance was the value of life. The lives of others.

I don’t understand this second amendment Americans are so fond of. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Read that again. Now to me the key word in that statement is militia. Keeping in mind a historical context of a country fighting for its freedom from a “tyrannical” government and that had no standing army, it seems to me what this means is that a government should keep a force handy and reserve the right to make compulsory military service in defense of its borders. The government represents the people. It is the “people” of the statement, not the general populace. “Arms” is an awfully vague term meaning anything that can be used as a weapon. One imagines the unruly mob with torches and pitchforks of a medieval drama being armed. As Roger Moore pointed out in “Bowling for Columbine,” arms could mean nuclear arms. Chemical arms. Biological arms. Which we rightly restrict. So why is it such a stretch to restrict handguns, shotguns and rifles?

In 1776, the United States’ Declaration of Independence stated that “...all men are created equal....” But it wasn’t until almost 100 years later in 1870 that Amendment XV allowed that black men were considered men. It wasn’t until fifty years later that Amendment XIX allowed women of any colour the right to vote.  The point here is that things change. Time passes and the needs of the people change. Government must change with it and so must its documents. The Declaration, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution are just paper and they aren’t sacred. They are a written representation of the will of the people. America can have its military, but I don’t think it still needs a gun under every pillow.

We the people reserve the right to limit accessibility to any and all consumer products. We tried it with booze. We tried it with drugs. We make shark fin soup illegal. We license people to drive death machines. We reserve pornography from those most interested in it. We put people in jail for acting outside societal boundaries. We limit and enforce so many things. So why not guns?

President of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre made his first speech after the Newtown shooting on Friday. In it he revealed a plan to put an armed officer in ever school in America, scoffing the advances made on the gun free zones. I hardly think putting guns in schools will make schools safer. There was an armed guard in Columbine High School at the time of the shooting. Did you know that? I didn’t. Because it was ineffective. It doesn’t work. And who oversees the overseers? What’s the stop an unstable cop from snapping and killing those he’s supposed to protect? I have a lot of respect for the boys in blue, but let’s be honest, the shit has hit the fan with police forces lately. RCMP scandals, G20, student protests and the like have brought out some of the worst in some of our finest. All it takes is one.

Have you ever stood in line at the convenience store behind a police officer and glanced at their gun? Ever thought how easy it would be to flip that little snap and piece of leather and grab that black metal from its holster? You haven’t done it of course. Because you didn’t intend to use it and you know how stupid that would be. You don’t play games with guns. But how easy would it be for some fucked up kid in school to do that with intent? No, guns in schools are not the answer.

I recall after the Aurora theatre shooting earlier this year one of the patrons of the theatre bizarrely pondering that “if more people in the audience had guns, maybe we could have stopped him.” I’m paraphrasing. But seriously, wtf? Firstly the guy was wearing tactical body armor, which would have made that kind of pointless. Secondly, in a dark and crowded room with loudspeakers blaring explosions, what would make you think that more people with more guns wouldn’t have made it worse by accident? Thirdly, there were trained marines in that audience. Men whose sole purpose in life is to take a bullet and plant one where it would do the most good. None of them were able to stop the gunman. So why would you, Joe Schmuck with a peashooter be the hero of the day? You wouldn’t. Man up and admit that if anyone ever broke into your house, you’d be to shit scared to shoot at another human being because you are a human being and you have some sense of the value of human life. Stop pretending like you’re God’s gift to everyone around you because you have a gun. In the wake of Newtown and the –it seems – impending legislation, gun sales in the States have almost doubled from the week before.

When I support gun control, I’m not half-assing it, either. I mean ban guns, period. All of them. Let the military and the police have them. But I’m not going to pussyfoot and say you just have to register your pistol or your rifle, and maybe we should ban assault weapons. I mean all of them. There’s some shaky ground here, I’ll admit. There are competition shooters who could argue their case. I could argue you could take up bowling instead. There are hunters who will be pissed (and this segment does seem to be the most vocal about denouncing gun control) to whom I respectfully say take up a crossbow or a sling. There are gun collectors who, as far as I’m concerned, if they have removed the firing pins of their collection, I don’t care about.

I’m willing to compromise. Giving up guns won’t come without a fight. Baby steps. You know, those slow short movements that Newtown’s victims so recently overcame. I suggest mandatory civil service. For those of us who don’t desire to join the army, we can be tax collectors and school trustees and road workers for a year. The rest can have a gun. One they are trained to use and respect. Of course, the military might draw some of the more unsavoury and less stable types. That’s why we screen those people. And keep an eye on them. You don’t hear about these sort of things in Switzerland. I mentioned earlier how we tried banning alcohol and drugs and how that didn’t work. I’m not foolish enough to believe banning guns will cause everyone who owns one to turn it in to the authorities. It won’t work either. Not that way. The regrettably struck down long gun registry here in Canada was a good start. Knowing where the guns are helps. Stopping the sale of new guns helps. Taking them off the streets helps. Gun control is not a sword with which you can simply pierce the problems of the world but it is a weapon with which you can fight them.

Here’s my other suggestion. Protect the schools. Not just from gunmen but from the decline in literacy, math skills and problem solving that they were designed for. It starts with the children. Teach them they don’t need guns to solve their problems. Teach them that they can achieve glory through good works. Teach them how to read and process new ideas. Teach them philosophy and respect and to love and live. Teach them all the reasons why we abhor what happened in Newtown. Teach them progress and wisdom and the value of a dollar. Enlighten them.

In the wake of the tragedy the press came under fire. First for interviewing the young children who were there. I can see the lack of sensitivity in this. On the other hand, the press were doing their job. There are supposed to be emotionless. Secondly they were attacked for perpetuating these tragedies with their coverage. I note in particular a photo on Facebook I suppose of Morgan Freeman claiming that these shooters were trying to outdo each other and kill more and more to make a name for themselves. Morgan Freeman has since stated that he cannot be attributed to this quote. Which is good because I would have thought less of him if he had said it. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it. I point you to Bath School Massacre which I had never heard of until I started writing this. In 1927, a man blew up a school. He did it for revenge, not for the national press coverage which ensued and was relatively new at the time. Like most of our modern shooters, he intentionally shot himself at the end of his spree. There was no publicity for him. No book deals or interviews. Only death. In my experience, few people seek infamy and fewer still see value in it after death. The mistake people seem to make is that the mentally ill are mentally vapid, that nothing goes on inside that head or what does go on is utterly erratic. I think any decent psychologist will tell you this is not the case. What’s going on in their heads makes perfect sense to them even if it doesn’t make sense to you. So while we may never understand it, don’t write it off as something that only a degenerate would do or as just some pathetic person seeking his fifteen minutes. I doubt you could be further from the truth in most of these cases. I suspect in Lanza’s case the fact that he killed his mother first will be a telling clue to his motive. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find this an act of revenge for some abuse real or imagined.

It’s been thirteen years since Columbine when we sat shocked on our couches watching the disturbing images of school security cameras and bloodied teenagers crying in anger and pain. Thirteen long years in which to make a change. Another year over and what have we done? It seems shootings make the news every other night. When I first heard about Newtown, I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t even particularly upset. I felt for the victims living and dead. But it was nothing compared to Columbine. What I felt most was ashamed. Ashamed that this happened again and that we as a society both let it happen and that we no longer seem to even take notice. Ashamed that we no longer even live in fear of these things but seem to accept them as inevitable horrors. And that’s just wrong. So I beg you, America, Canada, the world, I beg you, make a change. Do something now. I don’t like who I’ve become. Please, put the guns away. Don’t let the next Albert Schweitzer die before his time.