Quentin Tarantino's Western movie "Django Unchained"

http://mindweaponsinragnarok.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/django-unchained-incitement-to-racially-motivated-murder-adn-the-silence-of-the-splc-adl-mass-media-and-professoriat/

This is a ridiculous complaint on so many levels - firstly Django's a fictional character, secondly it's rhetorical hyperbole, & thirdly it's applicable only to a specific historical context (i.e. isn't that the same kind of thing the religious right claims makes pro-genocide statements in old testament acceptable or at least irrelevant today); also, there's nothing even remotely immoral about a freed slave wanting to kill key players in the white slave-supporting power structure at the time.

The link came from this tweet in my twitter feed
heartiste ‏@heartiste
Any white person who sees the movie Django is committing the equivalent of bending over and asking for an ass-ramming. http://tinyurl.com/bzl6yv5
Retweeted by Black Conservative

say whatnow

Lol this reminds me of the conversation I overheard at lunch the other day, two older white woman just fretting over this movie and the "implications" of advocating the murder of white people. If nothing else, lets give QT credit for outing ignorant people.

Some of them appear onscreen during the film, too.

welp i guess I'm bending over asking for an ass-ramming then because I am SO seeing this

lol

Would Marcellus Wallace bend over for an ass-ramming?

has Spike Lee weighed in on this yet?

No, but the NAACP has...

Outstanding Motion Picture
• “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
• “Django Unchained” (The Weinstein Company)
• “Flight” (Paramount Pictures)
• “Red Tails” (Lucasfilm)
• “Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds” (Lionsgate)

I absolutely <3 <3 <3 that they nominated Django and not Lincoln.

Also:

Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture
• Emayatzy Corinealdi – “Middle of Nowhere” (AAFRM)
• Halle Berry – “Cloud Atlas” (Warner Bros. Pictures)
• Loretta Devine – “In The Hive” (Eone Entertainment)
• Quvenzhané Wallis – “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
• Viola Davis – “Won’t Back Down” (20th Century Fox)

i hate quentin tarantino. that blog post was stupid, but each of tarantino's films that i have seen has caused me to feel extremely depressed. brutality, pain, and suffering aren't funny to me, i guess. i can accept dark humor, but i don't find the spectacle of, say, samuel l. jackson psychologically fucking with kids before murdering them funny in itself. also the scene with the "gimp" in pulp fiction is incredibly homophobic. the only thing i've ever liked in his films is brad pitt's attempt to pose as italian at the end of inglorious bastards. "arrivederci".

maybe this isn't the place to debate quentin tarantino's whole career, but i have yet to read a defense of him i found convincing. watching his movies is like watching someone play grand theft auto for two hours.

what's funny if pain and suffering aren't?

doesn't sound like you could ever be convinced? your criticisms are pretty categorical. there's no rule that says you has to like him.

my personal view: i don't find qt to be brutal -- maybe I just like all those revenge fantasies he keeps creating, it's just kind of in my wheelhouse i guess? he hasn't made a movie that I haven't liked/loved. i like his story choices, i love that I can watch inglourious basterds 10 times and still get something out of it each time; and a lot of his movies stand up to multiple rewatches; his movies are always visually interesting to me, i like the way he uses color especially in things like Kill Bill or IB, i like his music choices...and I enjoy the moviegoing experience of seeing QT in the theater. He's one of the few directors whose movies I look forward to for that reason.

i think my issue (re humor in pain and suffering) is that in qt movies we are often invited to laugh at the weak from the perspective of the strong. this makes me feel uncomfortable, i suppose. with inglorious basterds a lot of my friends basically thought it was hilarious to see nazis killed in inventive, horrible ways "because they were nazis". i think there are dehumanizing techniques that qt uses in each of his films to allow the viewer to feel comfortable with ugly forms of enjoyment such as the cathartic infliction of pain on other individuals. this probably sounds stodgy and moralistic, but something about the way violence is framed in his films makes me feel physically nauseated. i don't get this with many other filmmakers.

I think you might be "getting" qt more than yr friends yukking it up do tbh?

in our blah blah whatever society, it takes some doing to make violence on screen actually violent. cf. Pan's Labyrinth, No Country for Old Men

maybe my issue is one of tone rather than with the fact of violence in his film. i don't love the sense of detachment, that all is spectacle and nothing matters. that in itself seems brutal, in a way. i see what you are saying though, vegemitegrrl about how his movies all look and feel a certain way that is appealing. i agree that they are stylish films that all seem to exist in their own unique world that sets them apart from films made by other directors. i love wes anderson and woody allen for this reason as they have similarly idiosyncratic, unmistakable styles.

yeah i definitely agree with you silby. those films are amazing because they kind of "re-sensitize" the viewer who is inured to being emotionally affected by imagery. i think this is a crucial function of art. the russian formalist viktor shklovsky said this - that art should help to enliven our perceptual faculties, to make us more sensitive and imaginative. qt movies, as pastiches of B-movie tropes and imagery, seem to do the opposite of this, like a lot of pop culture products.

http://mindweaponsinragnarok.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/django-unchained-incitement-to-racially-motivated-murder-adn-the-silence-of-the-splc-adl-mass-media-and-professoriat/

This is a ridiculous complaint on so many levels - firstly Django's a fictional character, secondly it's rhetorical hyperbole, & thirdly it's applicable only to a specific historical context (i.e. isn't that the same kind of thing the religious right claims makes pro-genocide statements in old testament acceptable or at least irrelevant today); also, there's nothing even remotely immoral about a freed slave wanting to kill key players in the white slave-supporting power structure at the time.

― Campari G&T, Tuesday, December 11, 2012 11:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

thanks for linking to this white nationalist blog

lol that is what that site is isn't it

great site admin cool boy

pulp fiction is at best equivocal about the moral value of how samuel jackson is living in the first scene, i guess

i'm tempted to claim i think he's a "deeply moral filmmaker" or something like that but film crit isn't really my forte

i mean, i'm not asking the movie to condemn him. i think my main issue is how appealing and "unreal" the violence in that scene is, even as it extracts thrill-value from the fearfulness of his victims as he toys with them. one could argue that tarantino is simplying rendering more transparent dynamics at work in many other films and is thus being honest about the role violence really plays in producing cinematic pleasure. i wouldn't necessarily disagree with that reading.

but i don't think his films constitute a critique of popular cinema -- more of a love letter -- so while they are detached and in some ways have an analytical stance toward the mechanisms of crime movies, this never amounts to more than a pose, in my opinion.

i think QT is a little more morally responsible than people give him credit for wrt violence. like, the violence in his movies is usually pretty horrible and brutal and actually makes you feel something, which i think is a lot better than the much more common type of movie violence, the fraudulent and sanitized sort that fudges it so nobody gets upset. i also think something like Inglorious Basterds does a clever job of playing with audience sympathies so that when the big violent moments come, they're troublingly un-cathartic - you're left a little repulsed at what the Allies have done throughout the movie, and you're asking yourself if violent revenge is what you really wanted. that would be the last movie of his where i would make the charge that he lets the audience off the hook

I recall reading a fairly formalist blog analysis of Basterds outlining the ways in which that film indicts its own audience which you might want to google xp

even with the violence in pulp fiction, which is largely played glibly and for humor, there's moments of real horror. the scene where Marcellus shoots a random lady as he's trying to gun down Butch always makes me recoil...

that reading of inglorious basterds sounds intriguing. i will try to find that article.

it was discussed in the IB thread - which is actually full of good conversation abt that movie

yeah i mean, my interpretation of the horror i felt while watching his films was that i wasn't *supposed* to feel that way -- that the films were supposed to exist in a sort of grand theft auto world where nothing matters -- and so I saw him as the exemplary master of the hollywood blockbuster rather than a critic of it. i guess an argument for his brilliance would assert that he is both.

also re sanitized violence, i think what makes me uneasy about qt is that the violence in his movies is at the same time visceral and sanitized - that the films, through their detachment and meta-referentiality, succeed in creating a space where awful things can be "safely" enjoyed, which is a very troubling thing.

yeah QT seems to have a good sense of ~level~s of violence, and when to dial it up for reaction. and different protagonists/antagonists use it differently, for different effect, to different ends. but i don't feel like he ever really *mis*-uses it.

whether it's overrused is probably down to personal taste/distaste etc

thanks for linking to this white nationalist blog

― turds (Hungry4Ass), Wednesday, 12 December 2012 06:58 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In all honesty, I hadn't the slightest idea this was a white supremacist blog - I skimmed the post then thought its absurdity was worth commenting on. As I stated it was a link that originally came through on someone's tweet - and I follow people all the time on twitter without bothering to vet their pc credentials. I was very specific about how I became aware of these stupid comments, and it was not from browsing white nationalist sites!

Im just bustin your chops Campy. I like to get my stormfront on as much as the next guy

I feel bad about this now. Original tweet had been retweeted by "Black Conservative". Surely on that basis one couldn't expect the blog post approved of by "Black Conservative" would be on race hate site? (A blog post that I was ridiculing in any case.) Sorry, didn't intend to link to such a site.

'heartiste' is a well-known anti-feminist 'pick up artist' blogger. who also goes for all the hard right/old right/scientific racist stuff out there.

I had a lot to say about IB lol

kinda can't imagine QT topping it but I am pretty excited for this

he is definitely a heavily moralistic filmmaker

violence matters a LOT in his movies, baffled that anyone could come away from his films thinking that "nothing matters"

Django has one scene of predominately implied violence that I found almost unbearable. The rest of the violence is the opposite of implied and the opposite of unbearable.

This is prolly the first QT I'll just see on DVD

I was thinking of Django as part 3 of a revenge trilogy with Kill Bill and IB. I'd rather he made an entirely new film than play around in formal exercises.

― improvised explosive advice (WmC), Wednesday, April 11, 2012 2:44 PM

This still applies for me. Still not sure I'll bother to see this on the big screen.

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gives it 5 stars http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/dec/12/django-unchained-first-look-review Don't know what to make of this as he gave IB, which I mostly love, only one star.

Django Unchained also has the pure, almost meaningless excitement which I found sorely lacking in Tarantino's previous film, Inglourious Basterds, with its misfiring spaghetti-Nazi trope and boring plot.

lol @ this idiot

that boring plot about killing hitler

oh THAT one

The details box in that review says 136 minutes, but Bradshaw in the review says 2 hrs 45 minutes. I assume he just can't do the math, or is it actually 2:45:00?

IB was boring! it was "about" a group of misfits tearassing around occupid france, but it filmed all the parts where they sat around talking to each other.