JACKIE BROWN **** of **** grade is A
Jackie Brown is not the film you'd expect from the phenom director Quentin Tarantion. In Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs he used an offbeat amount of quirky dialogue spiced with suprising, comic shots of violence. Jackie Brown tells us that Mr. Tarantino is the real deal, making one of the most grown up crime movies I've seen.
In Jackie Brown, based on novel Rum Punch by the wondeful Elmore Leonard, the title character must outsmart a drug/gun dealer in Sam Jackson and find time to fall in love with Max Cherry (played by Robert Forster, WHO SHOULD HAVE WON THE BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR AWARD). These scenes are handled with Tarantino's trademark great dialogue and humor. The film is also decisivly less violent than his previous and much more human.
There are two common complaints about this film. One of them is Sam Jackson's character Ordell Robbi's use of the word "nigger." I want to strain that this is Ordell Robbi saying this and NOT Tarantino or Jackson. Spike Lee has spoken out about this very point asking weither Quentin wanted to be made "an honorary black man." This is absurd, are white people not aloud to write black characters? Are white writers not aloud to have their characters saying offensive material? Are there not people who talk the way Robbi does? Spike you made Get on the Bus, a movie I appreciated, and the black Lexus dealer uses the word prevasively throughout his FEW MINUTES of screen time.
The other complaint about the film was the length. It runs long but was not at all boring and much better writen that Titanic. This film also has many strong performances from Sam Jackson, cute Bridget Fonda, funny Robert DeNiro, and two great performances from Robert Forster and Pam Grier.
On a side note I am very happy to see Pam Grier back in good films. She had quite a career in the seventies blaxploitation films. She was notable as the one that got naked and showed off her impressive bossom, and for her charasmatic acting. Her body left such an impression I remember one critic of this film complaining that we didn't even see her shoulders. She gives a great performance here and in films like Coffy and Foxy Brown, lower scale but still very entertaining.
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