Nick's Sick Flix Picks

In a short piece at Reason.com, my old friend Nick Gillespie makes a stirring defense of Django Unchained as the only movie that mattered at this year's Oscars.  Just as Tarantino plays off old movies for his effects, Nick plays off the analysis of his favorite cultural critic, Leslie Fiedler, to explain the meaning of Django.

While there was much to like in Django, I ultimately found it a weak sister to the similarly revisionist but far superior Inglourious Basterds. But then, I'm talking about things like plot, dialogue and acting, while Nick has bigger fish to fry.  Decide for yourself.

But here's the part in Nick's piece that especially caught my eye:

In its depiction of stomach-churning sadism and tension that is typically aestheticized in gangster films, Reservoir Dogs effectively closed out an entire genre by refusing to turn the camera away at the exact moments when other directors would. Scorsese, for instance, would have figured out a way to literally and figuratively pull back from such moments [....] (Scorsese's tendency arguably reaches its nadir in Casino, which ends with an unintentionally comic screed against the Disneyfication of casino gambling).

Nick may be talking about their approaches in general, but specifically, he couldn't be more wrong. Reservoir Dog's most famous moment is probably the torture scene, where Mr. Blonde cuts off a cop's ear. But this is precisely where Tarantino pulls back.  Just as the slicing is about to start, the camera goes in the opposite direction so we can't see the actual event.  (This may have been an economic choice, but there it is.)

Meanwhile, in Casino, for all its "distancing" effects, we see, straight on, a man with his head in a vice whose eye pops out.  This, in fact, is only one of many violent and bloody scenes.

I may be taking Nick too literally, but it's just odd that what he describes seems to be the opposite of what I see.