Quentin Tarantino's Western movie "Django Unchained"

Because I like the film and because I think at a core level Tarantino knows what he's doing, I'm more sympathetic to and persuaded by Boone and Odie than by Cobb. The idea repeated in several reviews that Django is somehow not attuned to its numerous tripwires seems ridiculous to me. I really can't think of another movie more attuned to racial/historical tripwires. Its awareness is what makes it ballsy. If he didn't know what he was doing, it wouldn't seem so risky. Which does not give anyone involved a free pass, but it does in my mind give all of them the benefit of some doubts.

I don't think concerns or criticisms are misplaced -- I can't imagine a movie like this without them. But for several intents and purposes, "a movie like this" didn't really exist until a month ago.

yeah I was thinking about this - okay maybe the 'background' of how it was made is problematic or w/e, but on its own terms, considered in and of itself, django stands as a pretty great accomplishment, and Im willing to accept its problems for what it achieved

boone's piece for indiewire (linked upthread) is very much worth reading too

yeah that boone convo kinda solidified a lot of what I liked abt it

esp the way QT used that Croce song, which i can't love enough

w/ Taylor Hackford

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/tarantino-talks-django-unchained

Christoph knew I was writing the script, he'd come into town, read what we had so far, then we'd go out to dinner. They were having this big wonderful production of The Ring in LA, he wanted to take me to it, I wasn't able to go the first one. Before we went to the second opera, he took me out to dinner and told me the story of the first opera. I'd seen the Fritz Lang "Die Niebelungen." I was fairly familiar with the legend, but there was nothing like Christoph telling you the story of Siegfried and Brunhilde, he was born to do that, he was terrific, there's no way the opera will be as good. While I was watching the second opera, I realized the stories were parallel. She's already named Broomhilda, a coincidence. As I was watching the story I'm realizing how similar it was actually, when I was breaking it down to the story told in the movie. The daughter of Wotan is the daughter of all the gods, that's Bruce Dern, the mountain is Candyland, Candie is the dragon, the circle of hellfire is around her and Django is Siegfreid. It would be wonderful to see Christoph telling the story. I like bringing a fairytale aspect to the story anyway.

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/01/why-django-cant-revolt/

he kinda lost me with his take on billy crash

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-kerry-washington-django-unchained-20130101,0,7246461.story

yeah the jacobin one is a bit ott but i thought this was an interesting question

Remarkably, a story about slave-on-slaver violence barely makes a nod at slave revolt. Some might say that such a grand gesture isn’t really in Tarantino’s repertoire, but Inglorious Basterds shows this to not be the case at all. In the movie he allows for history to be completely rewritten, as a band of Jewish-American soldiers and a Jewish theater owner murder the entire Nazi leadership in one night. Why then should something as plausible as a slave revolt be considered an absurdity?

"Well, when you make your epic..."

how would you map a slave result onto the topoi of the western

i guess you abandon it at that point in favor of a good ending, idk

iirc he's not just drawing from spaghetti westerns?

QT doesn't shoot battle scenes

one of my big problems with IB.

i love pragmatic answers to abstract critical qns

abstract critical answer: moral vision as experienced by qt characters is always tunnel vision, always a matter of a deeply self-involved and individualistic pursuit even when nominally about some measure of 'justice'; were django to incite a slave rebellion would require him to suddenly develop a broader political consciousness in the last five minutes of the movie -- which would be awkward, mawkish on tarentino's part

bear in mind i haven't seen this movie and i can't spell the guy's name though

what about Samuel L. Jackson's epiphany in Pulp Fiction?

i was going to cite that as an example!

thats a good answer

an epiphany isn't much of a revolt

musing on what a movie doesn't do thematically seems a strange and unnecessarily reflective pursuit imo

QT doesn't do group dynamics

http://25.media.tumblr.com/237bf2de323ecf49492a6359e9e4bd0e/tumblr_mg286k9zKI1qa51svo1_400.gif

This gif is better than every movie Tom Hooper has ever done.

needs a Dutch angle

Have to admit that, though I enjoyed the film, I was troubled by the demonization of Jackson's house slave, Stephen. DiCaprio's Calvin Candie seemed rather inconsequential in contrast. Candie is symbolic, a simple stand-in for the generic evils of slavery as an institution. He's bad and doomed, he deserves it, and there's nothing terribly interesting about either the character or his narrative function. Jackson is both more complex and more sympathetic. That the film treats him as its ultimate "real villain" feels strange, especially in light of Candie's patently racist remarks about blacks' complicity in their own slavery. The grotesquely overstated spectacle of Stephen's toadying self-abasement when the character is first introduced is pretty rough, too. Can see why the film and character bothered Armond White.

(Wrote this yesterday morning, just posting now. Sorry if these points have been covered in the interim.)

Huh, that scene didn't seem like toadying self-abasement to me, exactly. There was a layer of that, but it was so exaggerated it almost seemed perfunctory, and his real tone is self-assertion against the perceived threat of a higher-status black man.

Stephen reminded me a bit of Zatoichi.

Loved it for the most part, but yeah, gonna need some time to work out how I feel abt the SLJ character.

i enjoyed this overall but not without some discomfort. qt saddled himself with a no-win proposition here. nazis work great as movie baddies because everyone understand why they are bad guys without having to dwell on it - basterds made no more attempt to show the atrocities of the third reich than raiders of the lost ark did, nazism is just a flavour, a reason for villainy, a reason for revenge. and it is simple to achieve this because you can easily take nazi characters out of the immediate context of those atrocities - no concentration camp scenes in those movies. but it's a lot harder to reasonably take slavers away from slavery, so your movie really has to go toe-to-toe with the human tragedy. not qt's strong suit here. i think this is why this is the only of his movies, as far as i can recall, where some horrible shit goes down and he doesn't add a wink to it - the viewer isn't dared to enjoy it, it's just straight up horrible. so i don't know if he recognized that he had to at least pay lip service to treating with slavery, or whether he sincerely thinks he tried to, but this is the stumbling block for the movie. it falls massively short of actually treating with the subject, and instead it just kinda awkwardly gets in the way of the qt-brand good time. in the end this makes the film not just influenced by exploitation movies, but i think genuinely exploitative. so, that was the piss in my jumbo soda, but it still tasted pretty good. several of the best performances in any of his films. and i could watch those first couple scenes, in the woods and in the texas town, over and over.

^^

Most otm thing I've read on the film so far.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2013/01/unchain_my_heart_and_set_me_fr.html

it's a lot harder to reasonably take slavers away from slavery

I think the thing that makes Candie interesting as a villain -- and different from most of Tarantino's bad guys -- is that his villainy is less an expression of individual depravity than a product of an entire system and society. Like, QT could have made Candie a real, conniving, sadist -- but instead his affect is more like bored rich kid, thoughtlessly taking on the mantle of an inherited evil. Before he gets shot, he's willing to just take their money and let them take Broomhilda. I've seen a couple of critics expressing discomfort about the casual dispatch of Candie's sister, but I think the point is that she is really not any different than Candie, they're both part and proprietors of this huge evil system. That's why the entire plantation house ends up soaked in blood. That image alone justifies the movie, for me, because it's a strong, simple metaphor that I've never seen on screen before.

It seemed to me that there were two big scenes that really didn't work, tonally and structurally -- and it turns out that both were huge chunks that had been moved from one place to another in the film. The first is the bag-mask scene, which plays like an outtake from Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" (yes, there has been a western about racism before!). The scene, which QT calls his "fuck you" to the KKK heroics in D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation," also recalls the Robert's Rules of Order adopted by the People's Front of Judea in "Monty Python's Life of Brian." Anyway, it's the funniest scene but it's risky because the jarringly different tone can throw the movie out of whack. And something's off, because the raid starts, we see clearly that it's all been staged (Schultz and Django are supposedly "sleeping" under the wagon, apparently don't hear a thing when surrounded by raiders on horseback). The bag-heads unaccountably retreat nearby for no good reason, have their comedy scene, and then resume their raid, which turns out exactly the way we already knew it would. (Again: Poorly conceived set-up, devoid of suspense -- not Tarantinian by a long shot!)

I agree the scene doesn't work.

Also: Waltz's floridness didn't work this time; like I said upthread he comes off as a bad actor, or at best a limited one.

I appreciated that the bag-head scene was there to emphasize the ridiculousness of the KKK, but it went on too long and wasn't that funny aside from Don Johnson's "I can't see fuckin shit in this thing," which, really, did the job all on its own.

Loved Watlz, though. My fave performance/character in the film.

Also: Waltz's floridness didn't work this time; like I said upthread he comes off as a bad actor, or at best a limited one.

Yeah, SLJ is the only actor really doing complicated work here.

Well, and QT himself, given his obv limitations.

Like, I think his floridness establishes him as distinctly European, and educated, in a way in which the other characters are not. Candice's inherited wealth doesn't doesn't make him schultz's equal (one of the films better jokes is that Candie is a Francophile who not only doesn't speak French, but doesnt like others embarrasing him by speaking it around him).

And something's off, because the raid starts, we see clearly that it's all been staged (Schultz and Django are supposedly "sleeping" under the wagon, apparently don't hear a thing when surrounded by raiders on horseback). The bag-heads unaccountably retreat nearby for no good reason, have their comedy scene, and then resume their raid, which turns out exactly the way we already knew it would. (Again: Poorly conceived set-up, devoid of suspense -- not Tarantinian by a long shot!)

i dont think the bag-heads 'retreated' -- i think the comedy scene was a flashback inserted in the middle of the raid

thread title: Isn't this a "Southern"?

xp Yeah, that's a "b-b-but I thought they killed Travolta off!"-level misreading of that scene.

I got that it was a flashback, but I agree that its insertion seemed clumsy, and that the scene's one joke goes on way too long.

I think the thing that makes Candie interesting as a villain -- and different from most of Tarantino's bad guys -- is that his villainy is less an expression of individual depravity than a product of an entire system and society. Like, QT could have made Candie a real, conniving, sadist -- but instead his affect is more like bored rich kid, thoughtlessly taking on the mantle of an inherited evil.

^^^ favorite thing about movie

i (eventually) read the baghead scene as a flashback too.

waltz was much better in the (otherwise mostly worse) IB but my favorite line might have been "i'm sorry; i couldn't resist."

yeah, flashback. they weren't retreating before the flashback, they were circling the wagons and hooting. it's a very funny scene, but as my friend pointed out it's surface-y funny - it actually makes the regulators scarier that they're just a bunch of dumb sweaty hicks

Like, I think his floridness establishes him as distinctly European, and educated, in a way in which the other characters are not. Candice's inherited wealth doesn't doesn't make him schultz's equal (one of the films better jokes is that Candie is a Francophile who not only doesn't speak French, but doesnt like others embarrasing him by speaking it around him).

― Public Brooding Closet (cryptosicko), Friday, January 4, 2013 10:11 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

nero's cameo is great because it deflates the euro=civilized schema the film would've been left with if only schultz was in it

i do agree that waltz was only alright; doubt he'll ever top hans landa, he does some solid work here but doesnt steal the show

ever since spike lee pointed out years ago that black people never get to kiss each other in hollywood movies, its something i always notice when it does and doesn't happen. so it was cool when django and hildy got their reunion kiss, bathed in glowing light. the whole fairy tale angle with hildy as the princess and django as her heroic knight is another thing that you almost never see with black actors in those roles. throughout the candieland scenes there's tension when django keeps reaching for his gun and backing away, but schultz is the one who loses his cool and fucks them over. there's a lot of subtle convention-busting in this movie, its pretty sweet imo

i liked how it was made clear ("he's just never seen a man torn apart by dogs before", the nightmare flashback scene, other stuff) that the reason django "stays in character" and retains his cool while schultz eventually snaps is that django's grown up immersed in all this shit and schultz has memories of a less brutal civilization that make it harder for him to deal w this one

was way bored for a lot of this btw but i don't remember which parts.