Quentin Tarantino's Western movie "Django Unchained"

i may regret this post but: IB is perhaps kinda interesting but calling it "formally daring" is a bit of a stretch, imo. i dont really think his appropriation of exploitation tropes is really as transgressive (or as entertaining) as his champions seem to feel they are. i think he has kind of a "knack" for putting together moments that have a certain pull or power but it's hard, for me anyway, to ever really connect that to anything more interesting. his films are impeccable in many respects but oppressive for that same reason: there's not really *any* risks in a QT film, as far as I can tell, and that's boring. even the supposed emotional core of his films strike me as ultimately vacant, borrowed, appropriated. he wants to tell stories of empowerment but only though HIS voice, HIS obsessions. his films are designed to flatter his audience. and i've said it around here before, but maybe i only feel that way because i dont have the same taste in movies that he does.

sorry for that, but QT films just rub me the wrong way, and i have a really hard time figuring out why.

seems you've figured out why pretty well. nice post.

yeah. there are a handfull of QT films that i like a whole lot but daring isn't a word i've considered throwing at them. his movies are fun because they're vacant. it's sort of the point. idk maybe QT thinks otherwise, i don't really care. it's what i get out of them.

i think that's a totally fair point and honestly the source of what I enjoy about them too

THE APU FRANCHISE

Kael OTM.

i get weirdly defensive about IB for some reason, i guess because seeing it in a theatre is a really good memory for me, i'm not even QT superfan or anything,

"doesn't surprise me that Generation Doof enthusiasts of this guy use MARKETING lingo (inaccurately) when trying to describe aesthetic virtues."

i'm forming a tentpole in my pants at this post. i wrote a whole message about wikipedia and the 75 million budget and how i wasn't describing aesthetic values i was describing how it was an iconoclastic move (my whole point) but then i was like "wait i'm trying to actually engage with dr morbius in a conversation about tarantino" and was like
http://i1354.photobucket.com/albums/q686/tinyservants/nin_zpsdb8e8d5d.gif

and ryan, fair enough, but for me the way that IB appropriated exploitation tropes as a way to deal with the unimaginable horror of ww2 and the nazis was very powerful, like the movie was saying that the only way to cope with such a horrible event was to insert revenge fantasies learned from a 1970s childhood/adolescence spent in front of tv and movie screens, in the same way that mel brooks dealt with it by using the catskills comedy tropes that he knew, and the way that "to be or not to be" used screwball tropes.

no offense to mel brooks, but it was kinda more daring when the original film of to be or not to be came out in 1942. lots of people were shccked that there was a comedy about nazis. in the 80's, not so much...

well with mel i meant "the producers" et al and not his shitty remake of "to be or not to be" but yeah lubitsch is a hero of mine forever for the '42 "to be or not to be", a kind of courage that filmmakers now can only dream of..my point was that IB gave my scalp a tingle in the same fashion that TBONTB did

also kirby and simon depicting captain america punching hitler in the face pre-pearl harbor...IB hearkened back to a way of dealing with the rise of the nazis in a way that was really touching to me

oh okay srry you mentioned to be or not to be...anyway, even with the producers he was kinda decades late to the screwball nazi humor party. ask bugs bunny if you don't believe me.

and donald duck! i liked that mel brooks made making fun of hitler seem like this ho-hum journeyman jewish comedian thing though, like hooboy controlling mothers, yiddish phrases, hitler...i just flew here from boca and boy are my legs tired because the seats are too small. amirite....what better way to express bitter anger

you know what else i can nestle into this comedy routine, a murderer so vast that it will take decades to decipher him

what better way can i belittle him? make him a cliche

don't be shtupid, be a shmart, come and join the screwball nazi humor party

shmarty

spike jones to thread...

i get weirdly defensive about IB for some reason, i guess because seeing it in a theatre is a really good memory for me, i'm not even QT superfan or anything,

"doesn't surprise me that Generation Doof enthusiasts of this guy use MARKETING lingo (inaccurately) when trying to describe aesthetic virtues."

i'm forming a tentpole in my pants at this post. i wrote a whole message about wikipedia and the 75 million budget and how i wasn't describing aesthetic values i was describing how it was an iconoclastic move (my whole point) but then i was like "wait i'm trying to actually engage with dr morbius in a conversation about tarantino" and was like

http://i1354.photobucket.com/albums/q686/tinyservants/nin_zpsdb8e8d5d.gif
― slam dunk, Sunday, December 23, 2012 5:25 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

nice post

thank u
ilx makes monsters of us all

and i've said it around here before, but maybe i only feel that way because i dont have the same taste in movies that he does.

― ryan, Saturday, December 22, 2012 9:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

do you really think that, or are you just being generous?

i do think that--i mean it in the sense that he's speaking in an idiom that's somewhat foreign to me so like slam dunk's very eloquent point above--if he's presenting IB as some kind of catharsis that goes right over my head because it would never occur to me to cope with the trauma of WW2 (and all that entails) that way. (but let's be clear, that's not MY trauma, nor is it really QT's)

i don't think it's a moral sin im charging him with. but when you take the language of a so-called "marginalized" text and then appropriate it for a more general audience that certainly be challenging but at the same time something is most certainly lost. JB is by far my favorite movie by him because there's some pushback against his sensibility in Pam Grier's performance, and Leonard's novel i guess.

he hasn't seen it of course, but he thought he'd weigh in anyway as per
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/spike-lee-django-unchained-movie-disrespectful_n_2356729.html

Lol spike

thanks spike

respect but man wait til spike hears about BLAZING SADDLES

"I cant speak on it cause I'm not gonna see it," Lee said in an interview with VIBETV. "All I'm going to say is that it's disrespectful to my ancestors. That's just me...I'm not speaking on behalf of anybody else."

Black Morbius

^^ post of genius

Been waiting to see what Jackson looks like in this.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1226760!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/django25f-1-web.jpg

"I'm not going to engage with this work at all but here's what's wrong with said work" is only a defensible position if you have a massive brain injury.

I don't see what's wrong with Spike Lee making the statement he made.

i thought about goodbye uncle tom when i heard about this movie. being obsessed with those movies in 2012...it all depends on what you make out of them. but i can see people being angry. doesn't help that he's such a cringe-y goofball. tarantino that is.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/samuel-l-jackson-talks-tackling-slavery-in-django-unchained-calling-it-honest-very-dramatic

Yeah, this feels about equal parts Blazing Saddles and J&P.

Django Unchained is, I think, the first thing I've seen to strive to get across that American Black slavery was an institution that had bodily, life and death control over its victims. Not just a system of involuntary indenture and omnipresent racism, but the constant, violent denial of personhood to an entire class of people.

But I'm not a critical race theorist and neither, I should imagine, is QT, so maybe we'll all just say he stumbled into this by accident again.

they do, but he could've very very easily just coasted and adapted elmore leonard for the rest of his life and it's weird to me when ppl dismiss it as the flailings of an attention whore or mindless grindhouse enthusiast when its clearly to me a carefully measured artistic statement

― slam dunk, Saturday, December 22, 2012 7:39 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

would really just rather have him coasting tbh

great film. not a tarantino fan but thought the subject matter gave his shtick some semblance of a purpose

will have to see IB

i thought it was very entertaining, not a whole lot more than that

i lol'd when the rick ross song came on, felt v anachronistic

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/12/django_unchained_tarantino_s_movie_seems_tame_compared_with_the_blaxploitation.html#comments

I've never seen the Fred Williamson films cited

OK first I'll say this is great! Way better than I expected, and I haven't come close to loving a Tarantino film since Jackie Brown. (Granted, have yet to see IB.) Clever with the source material -- westerns spaghetti and otherwise, blaxploitation, buddy movies, antebellum dramas. But not just clever, mcoll is otm with this: "the subject matter gave his shtick some semblance of a purpose." And silby's right about the treatment of slavery, but I think it's unfair to QT to think he stumbled into it. The whole thing could have gone wrong in so many ways and in so many places, but it's amazingly surefooted just about all the way through. (Some things don't work, but it's mostly the side stuff, some scenes that go on too long etc.) The scenes that should be hard to watch are legitimately hard to watch, I don't think Spike Lee has to worry about any trivialization. That those scenes exist within the framework of a piece of pop entertainment doesn't diminish their power, it increases it. They are designed to stick uncomfortably in your head.

And Foxx/Waltz are the best movie buddy team since ... I don't know, in a long time.

yea, i mean it's def capable & theres nothing really glaring that qt ruins w his dialogue

put foxx/waltz in a lethal weapon reboot and im there

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/moviesnow/la-et-mn-django-unchained-quentin-tarantino-funniest-scene-20121226,0,5034993.story

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-quentin-tarantino-django-unchained-music-soundtrack-streaming-20121224,0,3590448.story

Would have liked this a whole lot more without Samuel L Jackson's character (I don't think he added anything dramatically and was certainly the easiest to see accusations of minstrelry around), also the first time I've really been uncomfortable with Tarantino's obsession with nigger.

OTOH, killing slave-owners/overseers is about as satisfying as killing Nazis and there were elements that brought home the brutality of slavery better than anything I can think of recently. Kept thinking of right-wing "slavery wasn't so bad" bullshit and whining about this being an attack on white people throughout.

This was actually the first time QT's use of nigger didn't bother me, because it seemed honest -- it was a word that lots of people said all the time, every day. And I think Samuel Jackson's character gets the movie away from overly simplified race dynamics. He's a Machiavellian opportunist who has managed to take whatever power is available to him. (The scene in the library with DiCaprio is great.)

you guys who havent seen Basterds need to see it

this is pretty fantastic. i can only think of a few nitpicks - usage of music is poor (maybe the worst in QT's career), certainly could've done without the self-insert.... i wished kerry washington had more to do a la melanie laurent in IB. its a terrific picture though. sam jackson's amazing.

I thought the music was good, only obtrusive a few times. The deployment of hip-hop was especially otm.

But true that Kerry Washington needed at least one showcase scene.

the horrible mutant 2pac/james brown thing blaring over the candieland shootout was such a poor choice. after the relative musical restraint of Inglourious Basterds (i only recall one pop song being used, and it's all the more memorable for it), this felt overstuffed to me. like i said though, it's a nitpick.

james remar playing 2 characters in this threw me for a loop

gah I have to wait at least 2 more days to see this
I wanna see it NOW

the horrible mutant 2pac/james brown thing blaring over the candieland shootout was such a poor choice

Huh. That was probably my favorite music moment in the whole thing.