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Jackie Brown - 2 Disc Collector's Edition [1998]


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Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review

The curiosity of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown is Robert Forster's worldly wise bail bondsman Max Cherry, the most alive character in this adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch. The Academy Awards saw it the same way, giving Forster the film's only nomination. The film is more "rum" than "punch" and will certainly disappoint those who are looking for Tarantino's trademark style. This movie is a slow, decaffeinated story of six characters glued to a half million dollars brought illegally into the country. The money belongs to Ordell (Samuel L Jackson), a gunrunner just bright enough to control his universe and do his own dirty work. His just-paroled friend--a loose term with Ordell--Louis (Robert De Niro) is just taking up space and could be interested in the money. However, his loyalties are in question between his old partner and Ordell's doped-up girl (Bridget Fonda). Certainly Fed Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) wants to arrest Ordell with the illegal money. The key is the title character, a late-40-ish flight-attendant (Pam Grier) who can pull her own weight and soon has both sides believing she's working for them. The end result is rarely in doubt, and what is left is two hours of Tarantino's expert dialogue as he moves his characters around town.

Tarantino changed the race of Jackie and Ordell, a move that means little except that it allows Tarantino to heap on black culture and language, something he has a gift and passion for. He said this film is for an older audience although the language and drug use may put them off. The film is not a salute to Grier's blaxploitation films beyond the musical score. Unexpectedly the most fascinating scenes are between Grier and Forster: glowing in the limelight of their first major Hollywood film after decades of work. --Doug Thomas

Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review

The curiosity of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown is Robert Forster's worldly wise bail bondsman Max Cherry, the most alive character in this adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch. The film is more "rum" than "punch", though, with a slow, decaffeinated story of six characters glued to a half million dollars brought illegally into the country. The money belongs to Ordell (Samuel L Jackson), a gunrunner just bright enough to control his universe and do his own dirty work. His just-paroled friend Louis (Robert De Niro) is just taking up space and could be interested in the money. However, his loyalties are in question between his old partner and Ordell's doped-up girl (Bridget Fonda). Certainly Federal Agent Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) wants to arrest Ordell with the illegal money. The key is the title character, a late-40-ish flight-attendant (Pam Grier) who can pull her own weight and soon has both sides believing she's working for them.

Tarantino changed the race of Jackie and Ordell, a move that means little except that it allows him to heap on black culture and language, something he has a gift and passion for, though the film is not a salute to Grier's blaxploitation films beyond the soundtrack. Unexpectedly the most fascinating scenes are between Grier and Forster: glowing in the limelight of their first major Hollywood film after decades of work. --Doug Thomas


slow crime drama
Review date: 2008-07-16 Rating: 8 out of 10

In Tarantino's third film, Pam Grier stars as Jackie Brown, who is arrested for bringing illegal money into the country which ultimately takes her into a case involving one of her close friends, gun dealer Ordell (Jackson).

Once again covering the crime genre, Tarantino brings the characters and plot to life with cutting edge direction, and specific writing in a great portrayal of the crime world.

A lot of crime films focus upon action and car chases at every possible opportunity but this crime drama exploits the more specific details of what gun dealers and police are like with the unnecessary action. In admiring the realism of this concept, it does last for the entire film with hardly any action and can trail off waiting for something big to happen.

This may be off putting for many action viewers but the direction, script, dialogue and characters are good enough to give that little extra to put this film right up with Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill.

The acting is excellent by all involved. I particularly enjoyed De Niro's (Raging Bull) performance, in perhaps an underrated role for the legendary actor. Samuel L Jackson is again good, but not as powerful as he was in his Oscar nominated role in Pulp Fiction. His character is intriguing to watch and develop as the film progresses into a more personal stage, but with the lack of action and suspense, the characters sometimes end up being a bit dull, all except for De Niro and Grier, who are the stars of the show.

Grier takes centre stage as the air hostess who is under the spotlight from everyone in this film and Brown's actions and skilful planning are a joy to watch and the zest in her actions make up for the lack of suspense and action.

Not Tarantino's best film, but nevertheless great portrayal of real life crime with a good sophisticated plot that will keep viewers intrigued t the very end.

8/10

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Reviews


Outstanding
Review date: 2007-12-17 Rating: 10 out of 10

The film is outstanding.

The memorable opening sequence is typical of the film's mastery of creativity and imagination. A fantastic casting of Pam Grier, Robert De Niro, Samuel L Jackson, Michael Keaton and Robert Forster in a sterling plot and dialogue with plenty of surprises. And it has so much energy to it - at the end of the day, this is the best movie produced by Tarantino.

It is impressive to see it was written by him also. It has a reveting, captivating and outstanding plot so much better than all the Director's other films.

It would be criminal to describe the plot but it has incredible vibrancy maintained throughout. It's always been heavily underrated, but everyone knows this is Tarantino's brilliance because his team manages to make it more crazy and impressive by focusing on storytelling, creativity and pace. That is what will make this film a classic, unlike Pulp Fiction (1996), Kill Bill (2004,3) and Reservoir (1992) which have not been able to equal this film. It's a worthy recommendation for the American National Film Registry - far more worthy than all the Director's other works.

What are you saying?....Tarantino's world is a cool place,
Review date: 2007-12-10 Rating: 10 out of 10

If you were to take this film, and compare it to Tarantino's earlier work, you'd never guess they came from the same director and yes baby he did a great job with "Jackie." This is one of those films which is strange but yet captivating. You'll definitely feel as though you are watching a "Blaxploitation" flick to the point that you'll be wondering what corner Richard Roundtree was hiding behind.

Tarantino slows down a little and shows his skill at plotting an entertaining tale that doesn't tax your patience. In here, you do get less blood and more characterizations than usual and is unlike either of his first 2 movies. In Jackie Brown, Tarantino takes us for a ride as we follow Jackie Brown (Pam Grier), a flight attendant helping an arms dealer named Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) get money where it needs to be. After a flight, she is pull aside by two cops, one being Ray Nicolet (Michael Keaton), who find the cash she is smuggling in for Ordell. Now she faces jail time and Ordell must get rid of somebody who might snitch. What happens now is the bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) and Brown team up to mess with Ordell and his two pot smoking companions, Melanie (Bridget Fonda) and Louis Gara (Robert De Niro). Now it's a nice plot of how Ordell wants the half a million dollars he has coming to him with these arms deals and how Jackie Brown is the only connection between Ordell and the police and Cherry.

This movie received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor (Robert Forster) and many good reviews. Forster isn't the only one giving a great performance. De Niro, Fonda, Jackson, Grier, Keaton, even Chris Tucker who is in the movie for probably less than five or ten minutes gives a notable performance. The whole ensemble is incredibly well casted and deserves to be recognized.

However, this movie is uniquely Quentin T. and exhibits his versatile film making style. When he directs he allows his imagination free rein to experiment and explore. Each of his directorial efforts has been unique, and "Jackie Brown" is another successful experiment. This movie does have great dialogue. Not surprising considering this WAS an Elmore Leonard book with Tarantino doing the scripting. Both men have quite a talent for what they do. It is also clear that Tarantino loves what he does, sometimes a little too much.

I have the soundtrack and just loved it. If you own it you will see how great the songs fit in and the dialogue. Loved the scene when they're all going to the mall at the end, and DeNiro's car is playing "Midnight Confession," and Forster's car is playing the Delfonics, "Didn't I Blow Your Mind" (a song that desperately needed re-discovery, thank you Quentin), and Jackie's car is playing "Street life!" and when Robert Forster first meets Jackie as he's bailing her out and "Natural High" comes on!!!!. Yes, QT is BRILLIANT when it comes to the use of music in his films and soundtracks. At the end of this, all the adventures and bizarre paths taken by these characters converge into a great film. What more can I say but to highly recommended this film along with the soundtrack.


Flawed but intelligent homage to blaxploitation
Review date: 2007-09-25 Rating: 6 out of 10

Jackie Brown is a strange hybrid. A vibrant, entertaining homage to blaxploitation made by the geeky, white boy who famously boasted that he learnt his craft working in a video shop. It jarred with contemporaries like Spike Lee, who no doubt saw himself as more qualified to make films for a 'black audience', but Quentin took the flak in his stride. He's more of a European director in this sense; his films are more socially inclusive. With Tarantino, everyone is welcome to the party.

Based on Elmore Leonard's 'Rum Punch', Jackie Brown merges blaxploitation with film noir, in a twisting tale of money smuggling in modern day America. Pam Grier plays the eponymous heroine, and although it was great to see her back in a proper film after a decade of playing bit parts in lack-lustre made for TV fodder, Jackie Brown was never going to be the film to propel her star back into the firmament. Her prescence here is as a black female icon, in a role that was tailor made for her. It makes it difficult to separate the character she plays from the actress herself. Ultimately, this is Grier playing Grier, as seen through the lingering eyes/lense of her biggest fan. With Tarantino's well documented love of Grier's previous incarnations as Coffy and Foxy Brown (even her name, Jackie Brown, is a homage) it's easy to pick up on the implication that twenty years down the line Jackie is the woman Coffy/Foxy has become. It's an interesting idea, ostensibly that an angry, young, wild cat of a woman has matured into a forgotten forty-something, who is now struggling to make a respectable living as an air hostess, but can't help being pulled back into the familiar world of crime she came from.

Although Grier carries the film, Tarantino provides her with a high calibre safety net in the guise of a superb supporting cast. Samuel L Jackson turns in another slick performance as gun running gangster Ordell Robbie, whilst Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda whoop it up as his unlikely junkie sidekicks. Jackie's own partner in crime turns out to be bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster), his ambivalent, world weary attitude the perfect compliment to her mid single life crisis. Forster's laid back style brings a gentleness to the role of the hard nosed money lender, and provides one of the lovliest, sweetly comic touches of the whole film when he loses his heart to the delectable Ms Brown whilst watching her sashay down the street to the strains of The Delphonics 'Didn't I Blow Your Mind'.

Jackie Brown is refreshingly unpretentious after the flambouyant showiness of Pulp Fiction. The trademark Tarantino dialogue is much more tightly reined, and the story is allowed to flow with a natural rhythm. The only problem with this is that it flows on for much too long, losing all momentum and coherence halfway through. With a running time of just over two and a half hours, what starts out as an entertaining romp begins to drag uncomfortably towards the end, resulting in a contorted, drawn out conclusion. It's a shame Tarantino wasn't a bit more ruthless in the editing suite, as this is actually a very watchable film, revealing a film-maker growing in strength and capability. It demonstrates an honest, intelligent approach to the subject matter, with bad pacing turning out to be its major flaw. A flaw that, noticeably, Tarantino continued to indulge with his next overlong project Kill Bill.


TARANTINO'S MOST MATURE FILM
Review date: 2007-08-16 Rating: 10 out of 10

Quentin Tarantino is one of the few filmmakers that will adapt a novel by a popular and well- received veteran novelist like Elmore Leonard, whose books are famous for not being adapted into very good movies, twist it into a blaxploitation homage, change the settings and a few things about the characters, and make it the best adaptation ever made of that author's work...save for Out of Sight, of course. Tarantino has that way of charmingly ruffling up other people's work and making it his own and somehow getting us to love it. Jackie Brown is wonderful.

This is inarguably Quentin's least appreciated film. This is something like saying the Holy Spirit is not as appreciated as the Father and the Son, because all of his films are appreciated. They're looked at by incredible amounts of people as ingenious, groundbreaking cinema. However, Jackie Brown is not mentioned as often, it's not quoted constantly, it doesn't have a following, where Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and the Kill Bills have their places. I think it deserves more recognition than it gets. l think that the reason it's his least appreciated film is frankly because it's not soaked in blood and it's a battle wits more than weapons. Even though I love blood-soaked gorefests, highlights of such a kind of film being those other four Tarantino films, I think it's awfully shallow to expect such a narrow criteria from such a brilliant filmmaker like him, leaving his other efforts in the shadows. Jackie Brown has a lot to offer: One of the finest ensemble casts I've ever seen, Tarantino's trademark salt-of-the-earth dialogue ("Beaumont ain't got a doin'- time kind of disposition..."), a roller-coaster rush of a soundtrack including forcibly head-bobbing 1970s funk with unforgettable highlights like Bobby Womack's Across 110th Street and The Brothers Johnson's Strawberry Letter #23, and a clever con game that is slowly unraveled.

Jackson ignites the screen with his infectious and eternally memorable portrayal of Ordell Robie, the perfect opposite to his Jules Winnfield. He's an eccentric who doesn't realize it, a nearly laughable pseudo-badass-businessman exterior, but with a cold-hearted interior quietly ahead of everyone else, a clever double-sided mastermind.

Grier naturally gives off that down-home, unsophisticated streetwise woman-trying-to- make-it feeling in the movie's title heroine, especially early on when we're just coming to know her as a character and she's not saying much, tired from nights spent in jail, just wanting a drink and a smoke and to go home, but knowing something about her situation isn't adding up. We learn to love her not just as a badass black chick in a suit with a gun, but as a middle-aged woman trying to cling to that semblance of a life she has and taking such risks to beat the odds.

One surprise in Jackie Brown is the presence of Robert De Niro. It seems appropriate that Tarantino, someone who so embraces the crime genre and having done so much with Harvey Keitel, should cast De Niro as a seasoned career scumbag, the staple of his tremendous career. The surprise is that he plays the character down, which is so rare for him to do. Usually, De Niro takes a character and plays him up, making him a bigger, tougher, more brazen and bombastic character, sometimes just a little bit and sometimes a lot. Jackie Brown is a departure from the majority of his other work. His character shares a lot of the same traits as most of De Niro's other tough guys and crooks, but his disposition is so different. It makes this one of his most intriguing performances.

Those who've overlooked this gem, buried in all the hype of Tarantino's other classics, you're really really missing out.

Product Details/Specifications


Actor(s):
Pam Grier
Robert Forster
Samuel L. Jackson
Bridget Fonda
Michael Keaton

Creators:
Pam Grier (Primary Contributor)
Samuel L. Jackson (Primary Contributor)
Quentin Tarantino (Writer)
Bob Weinstein (Producer)
Elmore Leonard (Producer)
Elmore Leonard (Writer)
Harvey Weinstein (Producer)
Lawrence Bender (Producer)
Paul Hellerman (Producer)

Director(s):

Recording label: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainm
Manufacturer: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainm
EAN: 5017188883245
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 2
Format: Box set, Collector's Edition, PAL, Widescreen,
Release date: 2002-09-16
Number of discs: 2
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audience rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 148 minutes
Theatrical release date: 1997-12-25
Language: English (Original Language)

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