Quentin Tarantino's Western movie "Django Unchained"

cartoonish comeuppance delivered in full

inglourious basterds in a nutshell

man who knew I would be channeling soderbergh

[REGARDING FILM CRAFT] No. I think her reading of that stuff was pretty superficial as well. She had a great gift for setting movies in cultural context, but what set her apart from most critics—and especially a lot of critics today—was that she was at her absolute best when she loved something. And that was exciting to read. Nowadays, I find critics to be very facile when they don’t like a film, but when they do like something they get tongue-tied.

^ re: pauline kael

from that hulksmashculturalcrit blog thingy

I think the prob I had with that blog post is like, its own position from which it was criticizing the movie. like, I 'got' it immediately - the dude was going for a full-on, this movie fails at verisimilitude. here's how the film fails at depitching the actual experience of what it must have happened during the time of slavery. and it's like, yeah dude, I get it, but to think that the movie was setting out to give the audience a completely 100% realistic portrayal of what slavery was like, that it was trying to be the next amistad, well dude I'm just gonna get off here because I'm never ever going to be watching the movie from your mindset. peace!

cartoonish comeuppance delivered in full

inglourious basterds in a nutshell

Sure, but how violence is depicted in films, as well as film as escapism vs. reality, are theme. Watching the Nazis get their own cartoonish comeuppance in a movie theater where the Nazis are also watching a cartoonishly violent film celebrating themselves, projected by the woman who has orchestrated their doom, is not the same as "wronged slave wants to kill those who wronged him and does so."

Also, in "Django" the squibs are splashy and def. OTT. Been a while, but don't recall Tarantino doing that in "Basterds."

I liked the combination of standard QT 2/3/4-character scenes with these operatic scenes with 50 townspeople/slaves/Klansmen/etc. Other than the Crazy 88s fight in Kill Bill, it seems like this is something new.

has anyone done a formalist comparison of the film to RW's Siegfried?

Also, in "Django" the squibs are splashy and def. OTT. Been a while, but don't recall Tarantino doing that in "Basterds."

everything in the first 2 hrs looked digital to me - first time I thought "squib" was in the Candie house shootout

i usually hate cgi squibs but almost all of them looked real to me.

^^^

they looked pretty real to me also.

No one else noticed people exploding like huge, wet pumpkins stuffed with dynamite?

Nah that's why they stood out to me, so huge and goopy

No one else noticed people exploding like huge, wet pumpkins stuffed with dynamite?

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, February 23, 2013 7:52 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark

literally everyone noticed it

hard to miss

adolph reed goes ham

http://nonsite.org/editorial/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why

cant say i really agree with him about the movie. mordy you might like his critique of "cultural politics"

Moreover, nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain that view seriously only by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of mass culture is thoroughly embedded in capitalist material and ideological imperatives.

dropping the adorno bomb

I don't agree with that entirely ("mass culture" has its own prerogatives that can't be TOTALLY reduced to capitalist ideological imperatives) but its hard for me to find that Django really offers enough dissonance between those fields to be interesting.

primarily, and this should set off alarms for the marxists i guess, is that it's not sufficiently interesting aesthetically.

i can think of a certain blogger that i bet would like that link

In part, the inclination may stem from a corrosive legacy of Malcolm X. Malcolm was an important cultural figure for most of the 1960s, before and perhaps even more so after his death. He was not, however, an historian, and few formulations have done more to misinform, distort and preempt popular understanding of American slavery than his rhetorically very effective but historically facile “house Negro/field Negro” parable. It doesn’t map onto how even plantation slavery—which accounted for only about half of slaves by 1850—operated. Not only was working in the house no major plum; it hardly fit with the Uncle Tom stereotype, such as Tarantino’s self-hating caricature, Stephen. The well-known slave rebels Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Robert Smalls all gainsay that image. Anyway, the Uncle Tom notion is not a useful category for political analysis. It is only a denunciation; no one ever identifies under that label. Yet its emptiness may be the source of its attractiveness. In disconnecting critique from any discrete social practice and locating it instead in imputed pathological psychology—“Why, that house Negro loved the master more than the master loved himself,” pace Malcolm—the notion individualizes political criticism on the (non-existent) racially self-hating caricature, and, of course, anyone a demagogue chooses to denounce. Because it centers on motives rather than concrete actions and stances, it leaves infinite room both for making and deflecting ad hominem charges and, of course, inscribes racial authenticity as the key category of political judgment.

lol

iirc freddie or one of his sycophants has brought up adolph reed in the comments

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.

during the mandingo scene as i dug my fingers into the arm rest i remember thinking 'this is not michael madsen with a knife and a radio'

A guy in my grad program who is a very outspoken Tarantino fan says he's seen it three times already. Now, I liked the movie a lot and will certainly buy it when it comes out on Blu-Ray, but I cannot imagine rewatching it very frequently for the aforementioned reason alone.

Watched it last friday. It is great. But am I the only one who got the feeling, that we are not supposed to just aplaud everything the heroes in the film do? I mean, it's awesome when they kill slaveowners, but in the final scene Django has put Candies clothes on and pretends to be him. And Schultz ends up causing more suffering for Django and Broomhilda because he refuses to shake hands. Like, I've read several critiques saying: 'In the real world slavery was done away with by collective action and not just one persons capacity for violence', but that is sorta the point, right?

I don't know that we are meant to applaud everything that any of Tarantino's heroes do.

Yeah, I think conflicting feelings are the goal of a lot of his button-pushing.

You are supposed to applaud the fuck out of Robert Forster one-upping everyone in Jackie Brown.

Yeah, it's a recurring thing. Still, with every new Tarantino, the same stupid attacks on him glorifying violence. Or the new versions of this, with him glorifying suicide bombers, or now glorifying a lone punisher-type. It's been the point for twenty years...

I found his support for roving jewish deathsquads appalling

in the last three films there's definitely a sense of moral reflectiveness about revenge (this was actually better done in kill bill than in the latter two, imo) but it almost seems more a compulsion of the revenge genre than something QT is really engaging in any deep way. that stuff is certainly there (in a very minimal way) but i dont think we're supposed to walk out of the last three films feeling circumspect about morally comprised protagonists.

compromised

i mean QT even says so somewhere that we're to being "cheering" django, and i think that applies equally to kill bill and basterds.

anyway this ties into some "thoughts" ive been having about his crime films vs his history films, and why the former seem so much stronger and more complex (to me). something about the agreed upon stakes and means of engagement between those in the criminal underworld makes all these nuances work a little better, whereas the realm of historical atrocities doesn't seem to map on to it as well.

yeah, I think the lack of agreed upon stakes is one of the things that make his last movies so much better than his earlier stuff... like, they are much messier, with much more at stake. they work way too viscerally to be discussed as 'deep' or anything, but I definitely think we are supposed to cheer and realize it's wrong at the same time.

Don't go to the movies with Rick Hertzberg.

I definitely think we are supposed to cheer and realize it's wrong at the same time.

^^^^

why is this so hard for people to grasp.

so, should I go see this tonight, or go to yoga...

I liked it, but it was almost exactly the same as a yoga class, so it's a tough call.

lol

thought this was okay - which is a bit of a disappointment. some serious structural and pacing problems, nonsensical plot machinations/character motivations. the racial politics of it didn't bother me.

I was surprised at how relatively inert and devoid of tension it was. Even with the foregone conclusion that Django's gonna kill everyone and get his wife back at the end, there were long stretches in the last hour or so where it just felt like nothing was at stake and there were no surprises. what did surprise me is how sloppily constructed the movie gets once Django+Schultz hatch their nonsensical plan to get Hildy out of Candieland. What is the point of Schultz' proposed subterfuge? If they have $12K to spend on a "mandingo" that they don't really want anyway, why don't they just offer Candie that $12K for Hildy outright? That's a shitload of money - why would Candie refuse, or even care why they want her? Similarly, after he figures it out, why does Steven care why they want to buy Hildy, what difference does it make? Why does Candie fly into an apopleptic/near murderous rage when their subterfuge is uncovered? He's a businessman, who gives a shit why these guys want to give him $12k? Up to that point Django hasn't done anything to deliberately antagonize either Steven or Candie (well, I guess Django's very existence is an irritant to Steven), the rage seems to come totally out of nowhere. And then Candie pulls out a skull he's had forever and decides to saw it apart for... what, exactly? Don't get me wrong I like jokes about phrenology as much as the next guy but all of this stuff just felt forced and unearned, what was supposed to be tension-building seemed completely contrived and then okay sure a shootout followed by an EXTRA shootout eh whatever.

There are innumerable ways this movie could have been made better, which still I suppose makes it better than the average unsalvageable flick. But that's no excuse.

There's a more convincing emotional core to Kill Bill, especially seeing the films separately, as they were released, when certain revelations in 2 nestled nicely with stuff introduced in part 1. And I still think Basterds' reflexive juxtaposition of our desire for revenge and revenge as as entertainment and how it's conveyed in propaganda and cinema/fiction, set in the context of a real historical atrocity, was sophisticated and shrewd. I wish he pulled off something that subversive and smart with Django, which is just narratively lazy and stupid and completely unconcerned with much more than style. Though who knows, maybe all the character development was left on the cutting room floor when it should have been there in place of the second shootout or the silly Klan rally and basically the whole final 20 minutes or so.

agreed on all points. I think this was also the first film he's made that was so straightforward and linear and, as a result, kind of boring. there were no cutaways or flashbacks or delayed reveals that added anything at all to the story.

I felt like the scenes that worked best and were the most effective were the scene introducing Candie and the runaway slave scene, and most of what came after (which was a lot!) felt rote.

maybe we can put all this down to the death of Sally Menke

Uh, they were never going to give him $12k iirc correctly, they were going to fake him with the big money and then buy Hildy for a lot less as a passing whim, then the letter from their lawyer would never appear.

That's right, iirc correctly. Correctness is a very important concept to me. Obviously.

none of that is stated. and they clearly had the money on them (and plenty more besides) so why not just pay up

that whole deal implies that Schultz would have to tell Django that a) his wife isn't worth that much money and b) let's try this harebrained, much riskier scheme instead, in the interest of saving a few thousand dollars