Django Unchained

[bobover3 (imported)]

Saw Tarantino's latest last night. In his last film - "Inglorious Bastards" - he struck a bold stance against Nazism. With "Django Unchained" he takes an even bigger risk by opposing slavery. Sarcasm aside, Tarantino wants to entertain audiences with violence, but he sees the advantage of letting the audience feel virtuous for its 2 hour 45 minute excursion into slaughter. So he makes films about killing Nazis and slavers, and the audience can enjoy conscience-free blood-baths. That the stories are far fetched to the point of incredulity is irrelevant.

I must concede that Tarantino is a technical master. His cinematography, editing, sound, lighting, and direction are always superb. For good or ill, his expertise as a movie maker lends maximum impact to his films. Django stars Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, and Leonardo DiCaprio, who are all in top form. Waltz won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for this performance.

Django uses one more clever bit of audience manipulation. Since the movie is about Foxx taking vengeance on evil slavers, white audiences might squirm, feeling they were damned by their pigmentation. That's why Waltz is there. He plays a bounty hunter from Germany who forms a partnership with Django and becomes his best friend. He helps Django carry out his violent schemes, absolving white audiences of guilt. We watch, happy in the knowledge that we are like the good Waltz and not the vicious slaver DiCaprio. (I don't remember DiCaprio ever playing a villain before.)

This leads to my one quibble with the film, which may seem trivial to many. Django remarks more than once that he abhors (white) Americans. It's made clear that it's not whiteness Django hates (like the white German Waltz) but Americans. Tarantino says the moral taint of slavery is found only among Americans. When one considers what the European countries did throughout their empires, and the history of slavery around the world, including Africa, Asia, and South America, Tarantino's scolding is a bit rich. But it's consistent with the anti-Americanism of the left, so it passes Hollywood's sniff test.

To justify Django's cruelty toward slavers, we must see some of slavery's cruelty. So the film alludes to whipping, castration, branding with hot irons, wearing iron masks, making black men fight to the death for sport ("mandingo fighting"). One runaway slave is torn to pieces by dogs (and by white overseers depicted as so backward they're little better than dogs). The worst of this happens off screen. We see snippets just long enough to suggest what's happening without actually sickening the audience.

Django wants to recover his wife, who was deliberately sold away to punish him. This is what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin - something the characters care about and which motivates their actions, though it may be irrelevant to the audience.

You may be sure that the bad guys Get Theirs, and that Django triumphs.

A highly entertaining 3 hours, if you're entertained by violence and cruelty, which most people are. Just don't take it as anything more than entertainment, unless you know anyone who still favors slavery.

P.S. "Django Unchained" excited controversy when first released because of its hundreds of uses of the word "nigger." The film is set in the pre-Civil War South on slave plantations, so the word seems historically accurate. I suspect this controversy was courted as publicity for the film.

[moi621 (imported)]

Oh, for a good, classic film of the old South and its' peculiar institution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_of_Angels

So dyathink Django will be regularly scheduled TV each and every February like Roots repeats?

And Band of Angels isn't.

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/3839 ... usand.html

I was not impressed with Inglorious Bastards. I doubt Django will impress me.

Moi

Sorry I could not find the chorus scene from the movie. How happy they were.

And no part 2 about their lives under Reconstruction & Northern carpetbaggers.

[Dave (imported)]

The one word that I never hear even on the Pay Cables like HBO and STARZ is the "N" word.

Even when the best of the cable channels show BLAZING SADDLES (which has quite a nasty vocabulary) is the "N" word. I ahve the uncut version on DVD and Mel Brooks has amazingly delightful fun with profanity and the "N" word in the movie.

Tarantino filled DJANGO with the "N" word so it would seem harsher and wickeder on the screen.

I can illustrate better with a story about a neighbor (nice kid, wholesome, religious, a good boy in the best of the good kids) came over and asked me if I had seen the movie when "THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST" was in the theaters. His entire church went en-masse and they took their children to it. I would sooner have a heart attack than take kids to a bloody movie like that.

I told the kid that I hadn't and didn't intend to go to see it. Why? There is a church on the South Side of Pittsburgh has a Passion Play every year. I that play twice and know the story of the Passion. Plus, in the Catholic Church, the Gospel from Palm Sunday to Good Friday is the Passion and each of the Evangelists get their turn as a cycle through the years. I didn't need a graphic movie to know what crucifixion was and is and what the Romans did.

I might watch Django Unchained when it gets down to the channels where they take the "N" word out.

Until then, not the afternoon's entertainment I want to see.

[moi621 (imported)]

Sure, and digitize in walkie talkies for the hand guns in ET

:shakemitk

It is a base script, just like Inglorious Bastards and for that alone deserves base recognition.

Mr. T. or not. He is capable of better in the case of these two films.

Moi

Bad is as Bad is.

Like pimping a shallow, PC correct, story

[StefanIsMe (imported)]

Hi, Dave !!

(Cough, ahem...)....

(look below)

....

....... Wait for it....

Nigger.

(Used on pupose, in reference, let's not be afraid of this word. 'Course, I'd never use it to call my friend Mark's attention in a crowded bar, but reasonable people recognize when it's just a word ).

As to the OP's post; I think it's easy to read too much into Tarantino's work. You see him as working hard to absolve the audience of guilt; I think he would admit it's even baser than that... sure, he used that guilt-wash as a tool to make his film acceptable, but in the end, all of Quenton's purposes boil down to one simple thing.

He's a little kid, who plays very (VERY) excellently with his toys of film, cameras, and such. He thought up a cool story and has the balls, money-backing, and chutzpah to make it, so he did. I dunno... he's all about the game, the act of Making Movies, writing cool ideas and dialogue, and being referential; the McGuffins are just tools that allow him to get away with it (and still make money).

I had a total blast watching the movie. Waltz is freaking awesome.... he totally MADE Tarantino's last two movies.

[Twinsenboy (imported)]

Hi, Dave !!

(Cough, ahem...)....

(look below)

....

....... Wait for it....

Nigger.

(Used on pupose, in reference, let's not be afraid of this word. 'Course, I'd never use it to call my friend Mark's attention in a crowded bar, but reasonable people recognize when it's just a word ).

As to the OP's post; I think it's easy to read too much into Tarantino's work. You see him as working hard to absolve the audience of guilt; I think he would admit it's even baser than that... sure, he used that guilt-wash as a tool to make his film acceptable, but in the end, all of Quenton's purposes boil down to one simple thing.

He's a little kid, who plays very (VERY) excellently with his toys of film, cameras, and such. He thought up a cool story and has the balls, money-backing, and chutzpah to make it, so he did. I dunno... he's all about the game, the act of Making Movies, writing cool ideas and dialogue, and being referential; the McGuffins are just tools that allow him to get away with it (and still make money).

I had a total blast watching the movie. Waltz is freaking awesome.... he totally MADE Tarantino's last two movies.

Our brains are wired to empathy reseptors. When we are exposed to too much violence, we do become numb to it.

Somebody in Hollywood knows this for sure... I don't know is Tarantino is just a wicked slave or in the know, but.. It's still kind of embarassing, how they try to make violence and sickness cool and normal, and it's like you're not accepted if you don't pretend to like it too. To me that all speaks volumes about they themselves, that's all. If you're being a fool towards others, that makes you a fool just like them. Don't know if I'm gonna watch it yet. Inglorious Basterds stank. But I did like Death Proof. Although the sudden/shocking desensitizing factor was high in that movie as well. Like Stuntman Mike says: "Scary tends to impress."

[Eunuchorn (imported)]

Bobover3, you lost all credibility when you said "

But it's consistent with the anti-Americanism of the left,

"

The left are not Un-American, nor are they Anti-American. They don't think like you, for certain, but that does not in the slightest mean they have no love for country.

[Twinsenboy (imported)]

Bobover3, you lost all credibility when you said "

But it's con

sistent with the anti-Americanism of the left,

"

The left are not Un-American, nor are they Anti-American. They don't think like you, for certain, but that does

not in the slightest mean they have no love for country.

No need to fight, that's a distracting trap. It is those few that makea you still believe in the fundamentally mixed up left-right paradigm that is against you and your America.

[bobover3 (imported)]

Eunuchorn, you're confusing the left with Democrats. The majority of Democrats are certainly not anti-American. But the true left, including the left wing of Democrats, is intensely and essentially anti-American. They may tell you they love America, but it's not the America that is or was. They love the America they want to make in their own image.

I'm sorry for this deviation from the thread, but I wouldn't want to leave the impression I disapprove of Democrats. (There's a difference between disagree and disapprove.) I do strongly disapprove of the left.

Now back to the movie.

[bobover3 (imported)]

I agree with the posters who say Tarantino is an entertainer who is first entertaining himself with his mastery of his medium, and that his films are amoral.

I'd add that few Hollywood films pass a searching moral examination. Long ago, trespassers of the moral code had to come to a bad end. That's no longer true. Hollywood realized that people watch movies in part to fulfill fantasies, including the indulgence of otherwise forbidden impulses. That's why so many of the most popular films tell of charming criminals who get away with it. Let's look at the five movies with the biggest box office last weekend.

Oz the Great and Powerful - con man and seducer goes on to lead a victorious war and become beloved ruler.

Jack the Giant Slayer - handsome loser has string of luck killing outsiders and becomes beloved ruler.

Identity Thief - victim of identity thief goes on cross-country crusade to catch the thief and becomes the criminal's best friend.

Dead Man Down - a crime lord's right-hand man is seduced by one of his boss's victims.

Snitch - A father kills many drug dealers and entraps others for arrest in order to free his son who was imprisoned after being set up in drug deal.

Entertaining? Maybe. Morally edifying? Hardly.

The message of all these films is that violence and deceit are the paths to success. Tarantino is not alone. The difference is that he's up front about what he's doing.