From LISTSERV@umdd.umd.edu Mon Jul 6 17:40:33 1998 Date: Mon, 6 Jul 1998 17:36:23 -0400 From: "L-Soft list server at UMDD (1.8c)" To: Larisa Kofman Subject: File: "FILM REV227" "Jackie Brown" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL January 17, 1998 It takes me a while to get around to seeing Quinten Tarantino films. I have to debate with myself whether the lure of his acknowledged brilliance with a camera and delightful allusions to film history is stronger than my distaste for his penchant for aestheticizing and glorifying drugs and violence. What I never expect to see in a Tarantino film is anything remotely feminist. Last night, the abovementioned lure won out over the anticipated distaste and I went to see "Jackie Brown." Not to mention the fact that there is nothing else playing at the moment that seems to be even remotely related to women and this one, after all, takes a middle aged woman no one has heard of in years and puts her in a starring role. That intrigued me. I am happy to report that none of my fears were justified and that I found "Jackie Brown" to be one of the more entertaining evenings I've spent at the movies in recent months. Entertaining the way a good mystery novel with a strong female protagonist is entertaining. First of all there's the plot that keeps you wondering who's going to come out alive in this battle of guts and wits between illegal gun dealer Odell (played incredibly well by the amazing Samuel L. Jackson) and Jackie Brown, flight attendant on rinky-dink Cabo Airlines that flies between LA and Cabo San Lucas on the southern tip of Baja California, played just as well by Pam Grier, whom you've probably never even heard of if you're under 30. Her previous moment of fame came when she played a character named Foxy Brown, I believe, a Uzi-toting, Amazon hero during the 1970s. I never saw the films, but who could forget the poster! (Kind of a Black equivalent of "The Revenge of the 50 Foot Woman" poster I love). And this film has plenty of allusions back to those films, even leaving open the possibility that Jackie Brown in her younger days could have been pretty much like Foxy. To remind us further of that genre, this film features a video of scantily clad women demonstrating various automatic weapons (and Tarentino gives the die hard credits readers another little chuckle over this by letting us know that one of the women in this sequence has her M. D. degree). Anyway, Jackie is smuggling cash from Cabo back to LA for Odell when she gets caught. The trick is for her to keep Odell from killing her, as he did another associate who had been picked up and questioned by the police the day before. He needs his money and he needs to make sure no one the police know about lives to rat on him. He bails Jackie out and comes that evening to kill her to sure she doesn't squeal to the police in order to keep herself out of jail. She, however, is a step ahead of him and when he seems to be embracing her but instead puts his hands around her neck in a threatening way, it is she who is holding a gun to his private parts. Then she take control of the moment and tells Odell what it is she needs from him, not vice versa. It's a moment that will cause feminists great rush and make you want to stand up and say "Yes!" Jackie spins a convoluted plot involving money exchanges, real and fake, in which she tries to out wit both Odell and the police, keep from getting killed, and make off with a sizeable chunk of Odell's money herself without getting caught. A tall order. She has one ally in the person of the quintessential nice guy bail bondsman (Robert Forester) who basically falls in love with her at first sight and is willing to risk his life and, at least momentarily, his integrity to help her carry it all off. Others in the stellare supporting cast are Robert de Niro as a not too bright ex con Odell takes on as an associate, Briget Fonda as Odell's white "surfer gal," and Michael Keaton as a gung ho cop who's dying to catch Odell selling guns. This is a film that works on many levels. It's just a great suspense yarn and you don't have to get any of Tarantino's visual quotations to have an entertaining evening. But if you're a film buff and into these things, it's unbelievable what a virtuoso Tarantino is as a director and how many "quotations" he can squeeze into this film, not to mention techniques that seem to be all his own. One example of the former that struck me particularly were two shots that seem to be allusions not to his Hollywood predecessors, but to feminist filmmaker Laura Mulvey. There's a shot of a map with a little animated airplane going from Cabo to LA that is for all the world a citation from Mulvey's film "Amy!" about an aviatrix attempting an around the world flight which used this technique to plot her progress and there's another shot where the camera is on a turntable of some sort that is rotating 360 degrees rapidly panning a section of the Del Amo Mall while Jackie Brown, apparently also on the platform is moving and turning herself. This, too, is reminiscent of some of the camera work Mulvey used in her film "Riddles of the Sphinx." I guess I have to conclude that "Jackie Brown" is Tarentino's homage to '70s feminism on at least a couple of levels. I loved it. Go see it. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1998. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu. Linda Lopez McAlister, Chair||HMS 413 Department of Women's Studies||University of South Florida mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu||Tampa, FL 33620 http://www.cas.usf.edu/womens_studies/mcalister.html