Okay, you’ve sold me on it. I really wanted to like Inglourious Basterds, but it ended up being the closest I’ve ever come to walking out on a film. I’ve been hearing generally great things about this one, but couldn’t help but be a little wary.
I saw Inglorious Basterds, but I don’t remember the ending. What was so bad about it?
I personally did not like Inglourious, but really enjoyed Django. For whatever reason, the revenge fantasy worked better for me in this one.
If Soshanas’ screen had burst open and QT himself poked out of the hole and started explaining the importance of film in his movies until Hitler’s face melted it wouldn’t have even registered on the pretention scale (needle was buried much earlier). He still manages to appear in the propaganda film the Nazis are transfixed upon, though :(
It was still fun, mostly entertaining and - I guess technically you could argue - thought-provoking, but there is so much to eyeroll.
Django was probably too long and/or not edited tightly enough, but you’re never going to get that type of movie from QT again unless he collaberates, and even then you’re rolling the dice. The movie he did deliver was an aboslute crowd-pleaser, warts and all. I saw it in a capacity crowd and everyone was howling, even the old white people.
I liked it a lot. Not quite up there with Tarantino’s best, but still a great movie. Definitely could have been a little tighter. It will be interesting to see what kind of deleted scenes come out, because supposedly Quentin actually did make a lot of cuts.
Two slight problems I had with it:
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Django gets too good at killing too quickly. There wasn’t much of a transformation from cotton picking slave to badass killer. He nails his first couple shots, (Brittle Brothers, Don Johnson, Snowman). I would have rather seen more of an arc. Maybe some of this was on the cutting room floor.
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The plan to pretend to be looking for Mandingo fighters was pointless. Candy himself asks why they would go through all the trouble for a slave who wasn’t worth $300; Broomhilda was not valuable to him. If Schultz had just approached Candy, told him he wanted to buy his slave who spoke German, Candy would have sold her.
I liked Pulp Fiction, havent liked any of his films since then. I liked this movie (liked Jack Reacher more though, if only by a little). Sam Jackson was great, stood out among a bunch of other good performances.
I agree that Django was way too good at shooting right off but hey its a movie. Most people watching have never fired a gun, what do they know? Guns are simple and easy, point and kill people!
Also, #2, yeah. I mean it was a decent plan I guess but then the way it was used to steer the film…the whole way the movie went after the scene with Sam Jackson and Leo in the library was kind of shitty IMO. Shitty as in, I liked the movie less after that point than the movie up until that point.
So, I liked 1/3 of this movie, loved 1/3, and absolutely hated 1/3. Still, better than Inglourious Basterds.
Wow. I haven’t been this disappointed in a movie in a long time. Where were all the reviews saying it was a hollow revenge fantasy with no deeper meaning than an artfully crafted spatter of blood? Why were people comparing this to Pulp Fiction when, to my mind, it was the spiritual successor to Reservoir Dogs?
What a terrible waste of talent when it’s all said and done. And it held such promise. The frequent references to Dumas suggested to me that QT knew what the heck he was doing. Of course, it put me in mind of the premiere revenge narrative in literature, The Count of Monte Cristo. I thought for sure Django was going to work some kind of just deserts retribution, hoisting his enemies on their own petards, as 'twere. And that ultimately Django was going to have SOME character development. But no.
giving away the ending
He just rides back to the plantation and guns everyone down with no more ceremony or intrigue that it takes to write the sentence: He gunned them all down.
Vapid, dreary, historically irrelevant.
Think I’ll have to rewatch Ride with the Devil now to cleanse my palate.
What you should be nervous about is being a white guy laughing at horrible shit happening to black guys and gals.
I call it the Django moment: When the theater full of white folks instantly and collectively go silent when they realize they’ve been laughing a little too loud at an n-word joke.
Speaking of uncomfortable…
Django Unchained, unsurprisingly, has already been the subject of a series of heated blog posts on white nationalist sites. “Django Unchained; Incitement to racially motivated murder,” goes one headline; another calls it an “anti-White racial snuff film.” NRO and Breitbart won’t write that out, specifically. But they know they don’t have to: they’re sharing an audience with the white nationalist sites — an audience that thinks that President Obama has been a racially “divisive” president, an audience that believes a race war is on the horizon, an audience that sympathizes with George Zimmerman. An audience that thinks an SNL monologue qualifies as incitement to violence.
“Anti-white bigotry has become embedded in our postmodern culture. Take Django Unchained. The movie boils down to one central theme: the white man as devil—a moral scourge who must be eradicated like a lethal virus. For decades, Hollywood, U.S. textbooks and higher education have stressed that America was founded upon slavery, sexism and genocide. In other words, white European civilization is the root of evil and imperial subjugation around the world.”
While it’s easy to laugh at Kuhner’s hyperbolic piece, it wasn’t too long ago that writers for more respectable (and less rabidly rightwing) publications were getting worked up about the possibility of cinematically inspired black violence. Back in 1989, in New York Magazine, both David Denby and Joe Klein suggested that the the polarizing climax of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing—in which racial tension erupts into a violent outburst after a black youth is killed by the police—might prompt violence against whites. “If some audiences go wild, [Lee’s] partly responsible,” Denby wrote. Klein echoed the sentiment, saying that while the “subtleties” of the movie would leave “white (especially white liberal) audiences debating the meaning of Spike Lee’s message,” black teenagers would regard the message more simply: “The police are your enemy…White people are your enemy.” Klein found a “dangerous stupidity” in this supposed message.
Of course, black audiences didn’t riot after seeing the film, because they are not so simple-minded as Denby and Klein implied they were.
And just to see some of the outrage firsthand: Christmas Box Office: Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Parental Guidance
“Django Unchained“: This movie is a three-hour-long anti-White racism-fest. Yes, slavery happened in America, and the slaves were Blacks who were enslaved by Whites (and some other Blacks). But there were also some good White people, abolitionists who worked for the freedom of slaves. And, yet, not a single White American in this movie is a good person. All of them, with the exception of a German immigrant dentist/bounty hunter, are evil (and stupid). And you know why director Quentin Tarantino made the one good guy a German, don’t you? Because four score (the movie takes place in 1858) years later, the Germans were the Nazis we fought, the Nazis who enslaved the Jews. You’ve probably heard about Jamie Foxx bragging on “Saturday Night Live” that he gets to kill White people in this movie and gets paid for it. But that’s not news, since he utters the same line in the movie and that line is in many of the trailers promoting it.
Right, Django is wrong for punishing white slavers (a terrible part of history which actually happened), but when people on Twitter were screaming for blood after watching the fictional North Korean invasion of America in Red Dawn, no one bats an eye.
Though I found the movie morally unambitious, it sure as hell ain’t a White People are Evil story, anymore than Thelma and Louise was a Men are Evil movie. The actual moral center of the movie isn’t Django at all but Dr. King Schultz, um, er…a white guy. Oh well, move along, folks, nothing to see here.
Speaking of which, Waltz is magnificent. I find him such a delight to watch; he delivers lines in a unique way that most actors wouldn’t.
I’m saw it in Atlanta in a theater full of black folks, and everyone was cracking up. No riots occurred and the showing was sold out.
Yeah, I too saw it in a mixed audience and everyone was laughing. But I’d say, if I had to generalize, the black audience seemed to be laughing harder and less self-consciously. But I find that to be the case regardless of the movie. It’s a cultural difference, different social norms.
I’d heard so much about the disturbingly extensive use of the n-word, but when I saw the movie, it really didn’t strike me as that remarkable. It did seem a bit overdone from an historical standpoint, though. I could have used a bit more of the hypocritical gentility of the Antebellum South and less of this down & dirty Deadwoodification of history.
So. Watching this reminded me of a few things from blazing saddles.
The over use of the n-word
His fine threads (blue outfit)
The fact that his wife speaks German
Or am I just seeing something that isn’t there?
I liked it right up until Dr. King “could not resist”… Loved the appearance of my favorite Jim Croce song (though it is, incidentally, one of the few he did not write).
Is this the right line for the outcry about the lack of a Djangopsis in this week’s podcast? Or does that belong in the 3x3 podcast thread?
Really liked the movie. Love most of Tarantino’s work. Excellent work by everyone on the cast: Foxx, Di Caprio, Samuel Jackson, Kerry Washington, Walton Goggins & especially Waltz. This was very similar in a lot of ways to Kill Bill more so than any other of Tarantino’s films IMO. The final “skull” speech wasn’t as classic as the “Superman” speech but everything else was great IMO.
Was anyone else a little disappointed that the last portion didn’t turn out to be a Brazil-like fantasy?