Jackie Brown ★★★★★

Jackie Brown is Quentin Tarantino's third film and finds success in new ways while using the old noir tropes of femme fatale, desperation, and violence. Pam Greer plays the title character as a flight attendant who moon lights as a money trafficker for her boss Ordell Roby (Samuel L. Jackson). She's caught in a sting with ATF and the FBI and that sets up the circumstances for her to make off with half a million dollars fooling her boss and the federal authorities all together. It's a great film as it pays multiple odes to 1970's music, clothes, colors, but situationed in a 90's world. The soundtrack is excellent with multiple noteworthy 70's R&B groups like the Supremes and Delfonics. There is a noticeable improvement or vision by Tarantino with his camera work, using it much more effectively as a storytelling technique. Scenes that come to mind are when Beaumont is about to get into the trunk to be murdered, the trunk almost acts as a character with the camera shooting outwards. Ordell's apartment is shot so that you feel you are sitting in the room with everyone, it feels cramped like the apartment in reality would feel. Everything down to the constant cigarette smoking, shopping malls, and abundance of guns that reeks of a world that is so close to being tangible. Bridget Fonda plays a pot smoking surfer girlfriend of Ordell who at every turn tries to manipulate his business with an old timer associate played by Robert De Niro. She plays an irritating supporting role that is very effective in causing her own demise.  De Niro almost seems out of place but as always he melts into character as Louis, as someone who has lost a touch being an older bank robber recently paroled.

Samuel L. Jackson does a wonderful job again in his 2nd film with Quentin Tarantino as Ordell. Ordell is a man who wants people to know what kind of a big shot he is, talking about selling all kinds of guns to the customers he consequently deals to. This is a great comment on the availability and normalcy of gun access in the United States despite how dangerous and violent they can ultimately be. Robert Forster plays Max Cherry the bail bondsman Ordell asks to bail Jackie out of jail, all with plans to murder her so she doesn't name him to ATF and FBI. Jackie able to foresee this, turns the situation to her advantage as we learn Cherry lends her the gun she pulls on Ordell. From here the film's culmination is setup, as we see a character willing to risk what they have just for a chance to get out. In many ways this film is very much about the American Dream and how desperate some are to achieve it, regardless of cost. Forster really adds a charm as Cherry, he's a man who is morally kind of grey who's really a good guy but helping Jackie elude the feds with Ordell's money. He doesn't take any money other than the 10%, and he lets a woman he loves go even being offered a trip to Madrid with her. It's another very simple story told elegantly by Tarantino, multi layered and bittersweet. It is one of my favorite films of his because it is so deftly done and handled, there is a real intimacy felt that doesn't quite come across his other work.