I did a review of the Quentin Tarantino film Inglorious Basterds quite a while back but after switching to the new URL here I never reposted it for a couple reasons. Nothing special, just had yet to put it back up. I will be reposting that piece along with my take on the new Tarantino movie Django (or Django Unchained). The films here at The Uranium Café are typically obscure films of the midnight movie or creature feature variety. Most of my reviews are impartial and typically I would not pan a movie here too harshly and save that sort of review for my sister blog Necrotic Cinema, where my opinions of newer horror films are a bit more ruthless than my views on stuff from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. So why include Django or Inglorious Basterds as reviews here when I tend to shy away from reviewing newer films? Because Tarantino uses as fodder for all his films those very same old, forgotten low budget b-movies of the 60’s and 70’s, and in particular those of the exploitation variety. He mimics the camera work of the period (with sudden fade ins and outs and loss of focus at times, for example), pays homage to the title sequences of the time and soundtracks of the time and creates characters with names that are drawn from old films. Even the character Django, as most everybody reading this sort of blog would have known even before seeing or even hearing of Tarantino’s new film, is taken from a 1966 Western film with Franco Nero. All of what I am saying now is really nothing new and several films back it was established that this is what Tarantino is all about. And for someone like me wouldn’t that be a good thing? Wouldn’t I salivate in geek-abandon at trying to be able to catch all the little in jokes and references? Actually, I stopped liking Tarantino’s films after Jackie Brown and I was hoping I would find some sort of redemption in his work in Django after the boring mess that was Inglorioius Basterds, but it is not to be so. I just don’t like the guy’s work anymore and Django has only distanced me more from appreciating what I personally enjoyed about his earlier films (although I never liked the talky Reservoir Dogs all that much).
So what is wrong with the film from my perspective? There are more than enough raves online about how great it is and that it is his best work to date (I read the same thing about Inglorious Basterds, so to some folks he just seems to topping himself now, surpassing his last opus with something even grander). There are negative reviews as well, but the majority are all more than favorable. My issue is not so much with the race/slavery issue as it is presented in the film, with hammer over the head references to civil rights struggles in the 60’s and 70’s (get it, things haven't really changed at that much yet and we need rich white guy Quentin to remind us of that). I don’t really want to explore those issues here, like most online reviews do, either pro or con, though it may hard to avoid the issues since the film is built around throwing it all in your face over and over. I don’t know if America needs somebody like Tarantino to serve as the voice to breathe life into the slavery/America’s tainted past dialog, but there it is. He is suddenly the new voice of abolition and the plight of the racially downtrodden. I, as a movie watcher and not a social reformist, am more concerned with less ethical and topical issues. Like for example, the simple fact that movies taking place in the 1850’s on plantations in Mississippi are not really “westerns”. Even Civil War films are not really westerns, though they can be categorized under that label for the sake of being able to place a film somewhere on a DVD shelf in a store and make money off its sale or rental. The name of the film is Django and it is an obvious reference to the Sergio Corbuccii film featuring Franco Nero’s darkly iconic coffin dragging gun fighting drifter character. Okay, so what does that mean in the big picture of things? Does that really mean that Tarantino has to make a virtual remake of the Corbuccii film? Of course not. I wouldn’t expect it. But I am, to be honest, expecting some sort of homage to Italian Westerns of the 60’s and early 70’s, or Spaghetti Westerns as they have come to be labeled. Oh, okay there are those clever (and getting less clever film by film) Tarantino gags and references, and even the use of cool Spaghetti Western film scores (some by Ennio Morricone himself) over some scenes, and then having the core senselessly morph into some sort of rap or 70’s pop music. I don’t know what was going on with the music here. Was Tarantino just trying to think ahead to boosting sales of the inevitable soundtrack by peppering it up with things for the kids?
Yes, bottom line is once the film was to placed in the pre-Civil War south and not in some tumbleweed littered town of dried up adobe house with sandal wearing Mexicans and cigarette rolling white guys (some played by Italians maybe!) I just lost 80% of my drive for the film. For God’s sake it is called Django! Its like making a film called Mandingo then filming it all in Monument Valley and not featuring one big black buck in the film. And I like Jamie Foxx for the most part -not a big fan- but I just did not buy him in the role at all. I had to watch this for almost three hours too. The team of the freed slave and his German bounty hunter mentor King Schultz (the Nazi Christoph Waltz from Inglorious Basterds) traveling the south and getting to kill 1) white men (Foxx) and 2) Americans (Waltz) and making stale race jokes that seem like they belong in a movie from the 70’s (and some things should have stayed in the 70’s) is just not convincing. Tarantino must have hit his editing strides in Kill Bill! and Pulp Fiction and now people have to sit through long, drawn out drivel like the retelling of the German folk story of Siegfried and Broomhilda over a campfire. Or a scene where Django is to shoot down a wanted man plowing in his field and when having doubts King Schultz has him lay down his rifle and then extols on and on why shooting this bad man is not only okay but rather profitable. I just found myself getting bored over and over, the way I did in Inglorious Basterds where the “clever” Tarantino dialogs were all done in friggin’ German! Another scene where Schultz kills a wanted man who has been elected as a town sheriff is drug out to excruciating lengths. Leone could have had his Man With No Name come into town and end the whole affair using less than six words of dialog and move on and have killed four or five other guys in the same amount of time and had it all seem more interesting. And I did not like Watlz in this. Did he and Tarantino become pals in Inglorious Basterds and Tarantino just feel like he owed the guy the part? And so what if he won an Oscar? So damned what! Do I run blogs that look like the Oscars mean anything to me? I didn’t like his performance here or his character. Okay, on one level I get it, I guess. To see the truly vile nature of American society we have to see it through the eyes of a refined European gentleman, like the cold blooded bounty hunter King Shultz who has no qualms about gunning down men in front of their children. Or we have to see how evil Americans can be through the eyes of freed slave Django, who at one point allows a frightened fellow negro slave to be torn to pieces by dogs rather than have Schultz pay $500 to free him (he had to stay in character you see). I didn’t like the two heroes in any sense. They had no mystique the way a good western hero should have, being sort of cowboy "ronins" really, despite Tarantino’s rants to the opposite about having created a new black hero figure for black men in American to look up to (excluding Spike Lee it seems who had his malarkey detector turned on) in Django.
Leonardo DiCaprio is rather good fun as the bad guy Calvin Candie (evil plantation owner of course) as is Samual L. Jackson as “house n****r” (I ain’t saying it) Stephen. The gun fights are bloody -very, very bloody and even horses get shot in the head here- but really not believable or entertaining, trying to mix up humor alongside over the top violence in a way that the 1st Kill Bill! did successfully, but that falls flat here and reeks of simple bad taste. Sure, I rewound them and checked out the spatter effects being a fan of that sick stuff but I was also just happy to have something finally happen after an hour of bland banter. The ending is so utterly absurd as to make me wonder what the hell was Tarantino thinking. Did he say to himself “what ending could I come up with that would be stupider than the one I tacked on at the end of Inglorious Basterds?” To be honest Django’s ending is not that stupid or bad, but it is close. Basically he winds up dressing like Will Smith in The Wild, Wild West on a horse doing cute little horsy tricks for Broomhilda and riding off into…what? He and Broomhilda ride off into the Mississippi night –where blacks cannot even ride horses- and then on to what? Stop in at a plush hotel in town in the morning and she shows the clerk her little paper of emancipation and all is cool?The ending is full of holes and lacks basic consistencies.
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