White House Down (2013)

For reasons best discussed between German-born director Roland Emmerich and his therapist, the king of disaster porn once again engages his fetish for destroying 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in White House Down. After what he did to the Capitol Building, Washington, D.C., this country, and the world in Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, one wonders if he should be put on some sort of government watch list.

However you feel about the Oval Office, this country, or Emmerich’s compulsive need to re-enact the annihilation of everything that America holds dear, his latest is as ripping and riveting as it is ridiculous. A welcome throw-back to an earlier and more generous tradition of summer blockbusters that didn’t involve superpowers or science fiction, White House Down is cheerfully preposterous, marked with a simplicity, wit, and playful innocence so often missing from current action films.

Even rarer perhaps, it’s a slick, high-concept takeover movie with an inkling of shrewd political awareness. This time around there are no aliens, natural disasters, or even non-domestic terrorists—although the media in the film unanimously describe the White House seizure as an al-Qaida attack. The viciously violent coup is an inside job; in a way that would make Kubrick proud, the enemy comes from within. The villains are all disgruntled Americans with ideological axes to grind, right wing sociopaths, white supremacists, malcontent war vets and assorted bureaucrats with nasty agendas. Mixing fear, hope, and paranoia, White House Down is a dire political fable told with a pearly-white smile as tongue-in-cheek pastiche. It’s a sturdy, cheerfully preposterous, old-fashioned bit of escapism.

Django Unchained (2012)

If it wasn’t over the top, it wouldn’t be Tarantino. Django Unchained, the filmmaker’s nearly three-hour long tale of antebellum empowerment set in the Deep South, reaches the screen in bounds of unbridled joy and leaps of feeling. As desperately entertaining as it is dark, this movie explodes and exhilarates. It’s pulpy, profane, giddily violent and gleefully gory, but some scenes stand at the borderline between farce and tragedy. Although brutally funny, Django Unchained is also an important—if not too serious—movie about slavery and racism in pre-Civil War America.

Steeped in the director’s distinct brand of movie love, which sometimes makes him tread the thin line between homage and plagiarism, the film marks another of Tarantino’s tributes to the more outlaw, outsider, and less well-regarded genres: the spaghetti western and blaxploitation pictures of the seventies. The highly stylized movie, however, is notable as the filmmaker’s first real love story, its comparatively straightforward narrative centering on freed slave Django’s  (Jamie Foxx) journey to reconnect with his wife Hildi (Kerri Washington).