Quentin Tarantino's Western movie "Django Unchained"

he needs to be in a Cohen western

Tom Wopat has a flourishing cabaret singing career, plays pricey rooms in NYC all the time. And it's Coen.

http://www.channel4.com/news/quentin-tarantino-im-shutting-your-butt-down

haha

http://blogs.channel4.com/gurublog/quentin-and-me/3100#more-3100

xpost sorry morbs

omg the comments on that channel4 blog post are extremely :rmde: Smug ninnies wailing about the culture of violence engulfing America... as if the violent crime rate in the UK is something to be proud of.

Of course, some admit to enjoying Jackie Brown and lament he hasn't made a movie worth anything since. (hmm kinda like some of the posts in this thread...)

Then again, that was a pretty ridic display by QT.

Knifecrime Island doesn't have much gun violence, though.

Thank god none of these violent movies or videogames get exported overseas.

still disappointed goregrind music hasn't been given more fingerpointing, we're lonely over here guys

Watching the credits afterwards, I realized I must have missed Russ and Amber Tamblyn. Which scene(s) were they in?

I think they were the first town Django and King show up to. If I remember right, they didn't get any lines

you see Amber watching them from her window. Probably another cut plotline

Just had a discussion about him with my wife. I think his films are terrible and he has a drug problem and she thinks he has aspergers and should be cut some slack.

Elvis Mitchel talks with Tarantino about...food in his movies.

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tt/tt130109quentin_tarantino_dj

*Mitchell

Longer version:
https://soundcloud.com/kcrw/uncut-version-quentin

http://www.opendemocracy.net/matthew-cole/django-in-chains-american-racism-and-bootstrapping-myth

"The ideology of Tarantino’s new film resists the necessary dismantling of white supremacy"

Exciting start.

i didn't hate this but i do think it's tarantino's worst movie. the slavery aspect was going to be a touchy one obv and i think he tried to split the difference between treating it seriously and just using it as a plot device/motivation for the chaos, and i think it would have been better if he had just gone in all the way in one direction or the other. foxx wasn't very good but that might have been because django was not a very fleshed-out character. waltz was great and jackson was impressive.

easily QT's worst film imo (though have only seen parts of 'death proof'). couldn't stop thinking of paul krugman every time i looked at the bearded waltz, i can't be the first to point this out

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

― attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or (thomp), Thursday, January 3, 2013 11:31 AM (1 week ago)

wow really nicely put

anyone read the Don Johnson profile in RS? Entertaining. Nice to know the stories of his assholism are true.

link

firewalled

;_;

http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2013/01/spike_lee_is_no_quentin_tarant.php

uncle luke gets real

digesting this. first impression is that's it feels a little deflated.

a little uncomfortable (and not sure i have the right to be) with the "exceptionalizing" of Django (the "1 in 10,000" stuff and hero mythology) if only because it almost seems to unquestioningly re-inscribe something that's right out of dominant white culture in the first place.

but it's entirely possible this is done in a more interesting way that that I missed.

also i saw this with my 65 year old mother and 90 year old grandfather and they both loved it unreservedly.

I don't think that Candie's "1 in 10,000" spiel should be granted any more validity than his interest in mandingo fighting.

that's a good point. i had forgotten the "1 in 10,000" thing came from Candie in the first place.

wish tarantino changed foxx's line at the end to "I AM THE KWISATZ HADERACH" and shot lightning bolts from his eyes and fingers.

a little uncomfortable (and not sure i have the right to be) with the "exceptionalizing" of Django (the "1 in 10,000" stuff and hero mythology) if only because it almost seems to unquestioningly re-inscribe something that's right out of dominant white culture in the first place.

but it's entirely possible this is done in a more interesting way that that I missed.

yes very hard to tell whether this aspect of the film is in quotation marks or not, so to speak. always a prob. w/ tarantino.

i enjoyed this a whole lot and right around the montage scored to jim croce i may have leaned over to my partner and whispered "this is great." but by the last reel and in thinking about it after the fact, i guess i'd have to say this is something of a disappointment. a lot of folks have pointed to structural problems and i think they're right; it felt a little... lumpy in a way that even the "each-scene-is-20-minutes-long" inglourious basterds did not. but tarantino is working at such a generally high level that i don't want to make too much of this.

idk if 'exceptionalism' is strictly a white culture thing tho

like a hero myth is pretty universal?

it might be due to scenes being deleted, but there isn't a lot of setup to show that django is exceptional outside of waltz's tutelage.
i dunno if i want to see kid django stealing his dad's horse and riding it over a ravine to a beastie boys soundtrack then being caught by a robot traffic cop though.

dude has no character or history at all

like he's such a blank slate really

xpost

but the "one nigger in 10,000" theme in the film is, when voiced by e.g. dicaprio's character, explicitly racist (it presumes that the vast majority of black folk are inherently servile and passive)--but then the film's narrative goes on to basically illustrate that idea. it's not clear how we're meant to take this. is it simply an illustration of the (real or imagined/real and imagined) nightmare of an anetbellum white southerner? is it an homage to similar themes in some of the "exploitation" films tarantino admires? etc.

btw everyone on this thread needs to see "mandingo" stat. one of the best films of the 1970s and far more brave and bracing and shocking than DU.

I only mean that the "exceptional black hero" is in fact a common trope in less than progressive fare, particularly when the only other black character given more than a few speaking lines is the "uncle tom."

http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue13/mandingo.html

disagree about the movie corroborating "everyone else is servile and passive" there's clear foreshadowing that the other slaves will similarly go django.

I can see that ryan

idk this kinda gets at something else that's been bugging me about this movie - like for the first time in a decade a big budget hollywood movie that depicted slavery and is about a black protagonist got bankrolled and made - a rare event - and that seems to have made everybody want the movie to depict their own personal vision of how slavery was - and obviously the movie can't be all things to all people!

like it's take on race and racism is probably not that smart (it's tarantino!) but maybe it's enough that it does tell a story of black revenge in the antebellum south and makes the audience feel good about doing so? like, clearly it's just a fantastical mythic story - does it have to be More and Say Something about slavery? idk

xpost

yes in agreement -- it's a racist trope. so what do we make of the fact that the character django basically takes shape along those lines?

can't decide whether the fact that django doesn't become a liberator is:

- an effectively non-PC gesture; "realistic" insofar (as thomp noted) as it doesn't assume django would somehow sprout a full consciousness of himself as a political actor

- but wait, isn't this a fantasy? what duty does tarantino have to present an "accurate" or in any event plausible account

- and actually, is it really so hard to imagine that many slaves did have a strong consciousness of their identity as an oppressed group? i mean, the history of the american south is littered with slave rebellions, not that you hear much about them in high school or whatever

- in fact, if it is a counter-historical fantasy, why not make django a spartacus figure, and depict a successful slave revolution? that would make it the real equivalent of inglourious basterds. but maybe it's even harder to imagine.

disagree about the movie corroborating "everyone else is servile and passive" there's clear foreshadowing that the other slaves will similarly go django.

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 5:32 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's some ambiguity on this score i guess but even when he kills the slave traders at the end, he doesn't make any gesture of solidarity with the other slaves he leaves behind and as he rides off we get a shot of him gaping, slack-jawed. not sure what this is meant to signify but i read it as django being such an impossible figure in that context that they literally did not know what to make of him. there's def. no "i am spartacus!" coming-into-consciousness moment at the end.

there is however such a moment in mandingo but the film leaves us to ponder what will become of it.

xpost: I honestly found that aspect kind of thrilling. and additionally the portrayal of the antebellum south as an ugly and evil place was welcome.

"get a shot of THEM (other slaves) gaping, slack-jawed..."

sorry for confusing typo

yeah, that's what jelanie cobb was getting at in his nyer piece - by depicting only django as exceptional, it takes away the agency of the other slaves in the movie, and is not a reflection of the actual widespread sabotage and revolt that happened during slavery

xpost: I honestly found that aspect kind of thrilling. and additionally the portrayal of the antebellum south as an ugly and evil place was welcome.

― ryan, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 5:42 PM (26 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hoo-boy, you will love the shit out of mandingo then. if anything it depicts a plantation culture that's even more depraved.

you've sold me! Gonna check it out

also i think pontecorvo's "burn" would make an interesting counterpoint to DJANGO. very interesting. the brando/evaristo marquez relationship in that film is an interesting contrast with the waltz/jamie foxx relationship in DJANGO.

xpost

it's on blu-ray.

it is really in your face and i wouldn't be surprised if you love it or you found it hateful; caveat emptor and shit.