Quentin Tarantino's Western movie "Django Unchained"

Even in the old spaghetti days most Django movies weren't even Django movies.

will smith is an inspired choice. dude has a ton of charisma, he's just in shitty movies.

if will smith is in this i'm gonna camp out for a whole week star wars style

long as he's better than brad pitt in that last one

YOU AND ME YO xp

LETS DO IT

doubt very much that will smith will agree to be in a tarantino movie

tarantino is more comfortable with the n-word than smith for one thing

i agree with max BUT STILL

will smith is an inspired choice. dude has a ton of charisma, he's just in shitty movies.

― iatee, Tuesday, 10 May 2011 03:51 (10 minutes ago)

He has had charisma in comedies, but what was the last drama/action movie where he wasn't stone-faced and sullen?

i see you hoos

haha yeah that's a good point, will smith prob wouldn't be willing to ruin his family-friendly image

he does seem to like money though, and has he been in any $$$$$$ pictures lately?

since when are tarantino movies not comedies

matt, all quentin tarantino movies are comedies, so it wouldn't matter!

xp voila

and has he been in any $$$$$$ pictures lately?

― iatee, Tuesday, May 10, 2011 12:04 AM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark

dawg he's will smith -- he could probably spend inglorious' worldwide gross upgrading his pool

yeah but still, dude's been out of the game

wikipedia says men in black 3, bad boys 3 and some pharaoh movie are on his plate tho

he's busy being a dad, just enjoying taking his kids to school in the morning

doubt very much that will smith will agree to be in a tarantino movie

― ban drake (the rapper) (max), Tuesday, May 10, 2011 12:01 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

tarantino is more comfortable with the n-word than smith for one thing

― ban drake (the rapper) (max), Tuesday, May 10, 2011 12:01 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

great point. there's also the fact that will smith has his people rewrite any movie he's in; nobody rewrites tarantino. plus the role is for a SLAVE which i doubt he'll be comfy with.

he does seem to like money though, and has he been in any $$$$$$ pictures lately?

― iatee, Tuesday, May 10, 2011 12:04 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

you'd be amazed by how much money even shit like Seven Pounds makes

there's also the fact that will smith has his people rewrite any movie he's in; nobody rewrites tarantino.

think tarantino surrenders final cut & considers comments from his producers?, iirc. according to jon rosenbaum i think.

he does seem to like money though, and has he been in any $$$$$$ pictures lately?

What are we considering "lately?" I Am Legend was 2007 and made over $250 million + in the US alone. Hancock made over half a billion worldwide, and Seven Pounds made over $160 million on a budget a third of that. Since then he's been exec-producing his kids' careers and getting good return on his investment.

tarantino really surrenders final cut? that's surprising. i can believe that he'd take comments, but not that he'd let will smith steamroll him.

I'd be willing to bet that Tarantino has had more plastic surgery than Will Smith. Which is weird since looking good isn't even Tarantino's job.

this was from a long & convoluted description of 'what constitutes indepedent filmmaking', with the eventual criterion being owning your own prints. it's a while since i read this (in rosenbaum's (great) dead man book?, perhaps?), so don't take it as gospel, but it seemed sorta persuasive at the time.

during a Q&A for Grindhouse, someone asked Tarantino about Biskind's Down & Dirty Pictures bk and he made a point, unprompted, of v v strongly refuting the claim that he ever let the Weinstein bros have ANY input into his scripts.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/5706383149_ab135f55d9_o%20%281%29.jpg

Hi Sarah

Thank you for your very lovley letter. It's the best letter I've gotten all year long. I'm glad you loved "Dusk", it was one of my favrote times making a movie. And I feel my best performance so far. It's cool to hear a girl into horror flicks.

Rock on Sarah!!

Do you know about Itallion horror film maker Mario Bava? He did Blood and Black Lace, Black Sunday and Black Sabbith. He's one of my favrotes. I read your letter to Mira, she loved it too. Write me anytime. I can't wait for you to get your hands on a camera too.

With all my love

(Signed)

P.S. Sarah, since you liked Dusk so much, coming out soon is a movie we did about the making of "Dusk" called "Full Tilt Boogie". It shows how much fun we had. I hope you like it.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2623/5706949992_7b115298f8_o.jpg

<3

idgi

a girl named sarah wrote him a fan letter abt 'dusk til dawn'

that is his response

right

problem solved.

also included

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3005/5706949910_8aaeaaf8ce_o.jpg

maybe I should have clarified that idgi - do you think these are funny or something?

no, i just think they're sweet.

quentin otm abt mario bava

do you think these are FUNNY or something, BIG HOOS??

Movie Prediction: Characters have a long conversation about something esoteric. Then someone dies creatively. Then a comic book style spaghetti western montage. Rinse and repeat

*dies creatively*

definitely going to a barefooted woman riding a horse at some point.

someone gonna be a taboo kind of evil at some point

maybe necrophilia

he'll really never run out of shit movies to quasi-remake or room to disappear further up his own asshole

because his asshole

it so so big

^dialogue from Chinese washerwoman character in Django Unchained

as a handwriting nerd I find QT's handwriting just a tad disturbing ...

but also might just be "dude who has been writing on computer/typewriters for most of adult life" lol

i sort of assumed it was "dude writing an excitable letter in the style of a 13 year old girl"

nah his handwriting always looks like that (and his writing always reads like that)

Found the script online and am reading away. Crazy - but so was the IG script I thought and the final film stuck fairly close to it. All I gotta say at this juncture is - would be shocked n' amazed if Will Smith actually signs on to do this as written. The "yessuh"'s, etc are the least of it.

http://d.yimg.com/a/p/ap/20110511/capt.d9755d5e3604418cb7f5bbdec4e45edd-30b55fb2de2f4d6baaeae06efb26a3cf-0.jpg?x=400&y=266&q=85&sig=wqRRm8y32ytnAiSZ8qWhrA--

^^ Will's trailer in NYC

narratively it just goes from point A to point B (with a couple inconsequential flashbacks), which is very unusual (maybe unique?) for his filmography, and as result it drains the film of a lot of the tension and off-kilter surprises that litter his other films. it's sprawl is comparatively pointless, things just kind of ... happen, eventually rambling to a predictable and unsatisfying climax that nonetheless makes little narrative sense. I feel like there was a good movie to be made out of this - the premise, the cast, and overall approach are all promising - but this was not it.

yeah that seemed the most obv reason but i think he was torn between the movie he probably started out wanting to make (the more typical tarantino movie - 'i got a name' montage, jamie foxx as little boy blue at the first plantation) and the movie he realized he needed to make if he was going to deal w/ slavery, plus the little digressions that seemed to come out of some jimmy the greek fever dream (hello mandingo fighting). maybe if he'd made the movie he'd started out to make - post-civil war so he can just have this great, difficult evil offscreen and unspoken like it is w/ inglorious basterds, more trad western - it might've been better but the sloppiness and generally unexceptional performances and (leone was right) surprisingly poor use of music (croce excepted) would've still been there so probably not imo.

and maybe this is just me being a bleeding heart and patronizing and i know i'm gonna regret posting this but man if i was black and i was watching this and relieved that tarantino had managed to avoid any 'oops i whipped marvin' type violence lols and had even thought stuff through enough to realize you needed to give django agency i would've been crazy pissed that nonetheless tarantino feels the need to do his fucking awful acting in the movie. it'd be like watching schindler's list and then they get to auschwitz and hey look it's kate capshaw in drag as josef mengele. swear to god you could hear half the theater sigh when he popped up on screen. and then he started talking.

I don't think he gave django agency

he made django 'generic tarantino badass'

says cool things, looks cool, kills people, out for revenge, great, but totally a 2d character

it's sprawl is comparatively pointless, things just kind of ... happen, eventually rambling to a predictable and unsatisfying climax

agree w/ this

relative agency, he at least realized that django needed to 'free himself' and kill whitey himself (just thinking of other movies where guess who the hero of this tale of this racial injustice is? this white guy who realizes black ppl should be treated ok. branch rickey syndrome.), agree that totally a 2d character and barely that, doesn't help that for 80% of the movie he's pretending to be someone else.

and man i hate to give will smith credit for passing on this since i'm sure it was more him not remotely taking risks and only doing stuff that conforms to whatever formula he and his agent derived back in 95, but he was right that django is underwritten and hans gruber or whatever is the real lead of the movie.

yep

and man i hate to give will smith credit for passing on this since i'm sure it was more him not remotely taking risks and only doing stuff that conforms to whatever formula he and his agent derived back in 95, but he was right that django is underwritten and hans gruber or whatever is the real lead of the movie.

― balls, Wednesday, May 29, 2013 3:57 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah ive come to see this as the movie's crucial flaw. i think schultz just got away from QT when he was writing the movie, he was too in love with the dialogue he was putting down and knowing how waltz was gonna sell it. sam jackson runs away with Jackie Brown in a similar manner, though way more entertainingly imo

Waltz's delivery and purple dialogue threw me out of the movie five minutes into it.

he at least realized that django needed to 'free himself' and kill whitey himself (just thinking of other movies where guess who the hero of this tale of this racial injustice is?

QT sort of has it both ways with Waltz killing Candie and leaving Django to come back and ... kill everybody else I guess

I still think the movie boasted a few scenes that were powerful and strange if not quite compelling but ultimately I couldn't accept the conception of Django or how Waltz would suddenly go from being the heir of the European Enlightenment to doing an absurd, out of character action just when the movie begged for it.

the succession of scenes in the last reel or two feel kind of arbitrary. you could reshuffle them without any huge narrative impact, in a way. the film has two climaxes, which isn't inherently bad--the godfather has at least two--but i do think the deadly confrontation in candy's study could have been (1) handled better (2) moved to the end so that the film doesn't lose steam.

it's ironic that samuel jackson criticized "lincoln" (very rightly) for having about eight endings when this film boasts a similar problem.

tarantino does a lot of great things in the movie but there are just enough structural and conceptual flaws to make this kind of 2nd-rate. maybe his worst film? but still not a bad one, really.

death proof is different -- it isn't a failure by any means, it's just unambitious. i enjoyed it.

http://www.hollywood.com/news/movies/48656235/quentin-tarantino-says-next-movie-more-like-jackie-brown-why-that-s-a-great-idea

Kinda weird to give Tarantino credit for Jackie Brown's characters without even mentioning Elmore Leonard.

Yeah, wtf? Elmore Leonard >>>>> Quentin Tarantino.

I like Tarantino, but most of the greatness of Jackie Brown came from the pages of Rum Punch.

I tried to watch this for a second time the other night and... I just couldn't do it. I couldn't even make it past the first half hour. A real failure, this one. The characters just don't work, there's no tension, there's no narrative drive, it just kinda aimlessly ambles from one flaccid scene to the next, hoping that we find the Nazi Dentist's hamminess amusing enough to sustain interest. makes me sad.

i'm not quite that hard on it, but it is probably his worst film, barring possibly death proof (i can make a case for DP being not that bad, though).

the biggest problem here is structural, i think -- i can justify the two endings in the abstract, but in practice the film just loses a ton of momentum at a certain point and everything after it feels awkward and unconvincing.

i do think it has the best use of jim croce in a film (or possibly anywhere), though.

well what other uses of Jim Croce are there

more than you probably wish to know

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0188321/

oh actually i forgot that like most things in tarantino movies, the use of "i got a name" doubles as a film reference, to the rather good "last american hero" starring a young and very beautiful jeff bridges.

I tried watching it last night for the first time. I didn't get past the first hour, found the way he used the iconography of slavery for cheap emotional cues unbelievably crass. He seems disengaged from the characters beyond their florid tics. When the Klan starts quibbling over eyeholes like it's a scene from bizarro Seinfeld, I was like "fuck this shit."

Blazing Saddles surely.