Flight

Starring: Denzel Washington, Kelly Reilly
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Rating: ●●●○○ - Missing something

I was wondering what happended with Robert Zemeckis.
The Oscar Winner director of Forrest Gump (but also of Back to the Future) had not been directing a "traditional" movie since Cast Away with Tom Hanks in 2000, having switched to digital movies (The Polar Express, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol) in the mean time.
Now after 13 years Zemeckis returns back with Flight.
If you watched the trailers, this is not really the hi-adrenaline/catastrofic movie that may appear from the flight emergency landing scene.
Flight is the essentially the battle of a man against his addiction to alcool, skilfully interpreted by Denzel Washington and a story about fall and redention and about having a second chance.
A good movie overall that however appears to lack some flavour and intesity. You wonder what would this movie be if directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, Biutiful, 21 Grams, Babel).

Django Unchained

Starring: Leonardo Di Caprio, Jamie Foxx, Christopher Waltz
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Rating: ●●●●○ - The Revenge

Here is the second episode of Tarantino's personal remix of Italian genre movies, after Inglorious Basterds (from Italian Inglorious Bastards of 1977 by Enzo G. Castellari).
Genre movies (in Italian "Cinema di Genere") refers to a style of Italian movies of the 60s and 70s by which the Hollywood colossal films were reinvented compensating a lower budget with a stronger, edgier, violent and expressive cinema.
Among the themes that encountered higher international success were Horror, with the movies of by Dario Argento, and the so called Spaghetti Western, mostly with the movies by Sergio Leone (true masterpieces) and fellow Sergio Corbucci (all with the unmissable Morricone soundtrack).
Sergio Corbucci, in particular, directed Django in 1968, a western based story of revenge starring Franco Nero.
The first sequences of Quentin Tarantino's Django start from here, with opening titles and direction style taken directly from 1960s Spaghetti Westerns.
But this movie is not a remake, its a new interpretation of the original theme of western revenge. Therefore, soon after the opening titles, Tarantino's Django walks with its own feet, following the original plot assembled by Tarantino, who confirms to be the best movie writer out there.
The links with the original Django are present in Morricone's soundtrack and in a small part played by Franco Nero.
Tarantino's movies usually don't have anything to teach, there isn't a good or cause cause.
However, in Inglorious Basterds things started to change, Nazis were the bad guys bad and deserved to die. A bit too simple.
Here Tarantino wants to show how horrific was slavery. This time the theme touches directly the conscience of the Unites States. Its shameful slavery and racist past has been exposed several times recently at the movies, the last one being the excellent "Lincoln" which has just been reviewed in this blog.
But while these other movies focus on the humiliation of the discrimination, Quentin uses his violent and sadistic point of view to show us how horrible slavery was. And for once, with all the blood and the gore, Tarantino is not exaggerating.