I thought the first half of Hancock- With Smith playing an asshole superhero was pretty entertaining. But then it kinda derails with the whole mythology aspect.
Tonight we watched Let's Be Cops. I thought it was a pretty entertaining movie all around, though it definitely leans on the two main character's chemistry for the most part.
It's hard to watch Let's Be Cops without thinking "wow it's a long form new girl episode".
I was subtly impressed with the "when shit gets real" vibe as the movie went on. I made the mistake of watching it after 22 Jump Street though, which was much funnier in my opinion.
It's hard to watch Let's Be Cops without thinking "wow it's a long form new girl episode".
I was subtly impressed with the "when shit gets real" vibe as the movie went on. I made the mistake of watching it after 22 Jump Street though, which was much funnier in my opinion.
Agree on all points. 22 Jump Street was funnier, but I actually thought Let's Be Cops had a better arc overall. Like you said, the last act raises the stakes higher than I thought a comedy movie like that would have done.
Yeah it is definitely better the second time through. Not feeling like you need to catch every detail and just enjoy the performances is a common thing on subsequent viewings of Tarantino films, at least for me.
I wonder if rewatching Django Unchained work for me, since I wasn't too hot on the movie the first time around. It's clearly a film made by a great filmmaker, but I simply cared about it less than about practically any other Tarantino film I've seen.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I wonder if rewatching Django Unchained work for me, since I wasn't too hot on the movie the first time around. It's clearly a film made by a great filmmaker, but I simply cared about it less than about practically any other Tarantino film I've seen.
I found my experience similar to alot of other Tarantino flicks. I enjoyed the fabulous crafting of individual scenes and set-pieces, but the overall product just didn't really work for me.
In Django Unchained in particular I found Django by far the least compelling character in the movie and so the ending left me very cold.
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ElJeffeRoaming the streets, waving his mod gun around.Moderator, ClubPAMod Emeritus
I wonder if rewatching Django Unchained work for me, since I wasn't too hot on the movie the first time around. It's clearly a film made by a great filmmaker, but I simply cared about it less than about practically any other Tarantino film I've seen.
I found my experience similar to alot of other Tarantino flicks. I enjoyed the fabulous crafting of individual scenes and set-pieces, but the overall product just didn't really work for me.
In Django Unchained in particular I found Django by far the least compelling character in the movie and so the ending left me very cold.
Clearly you are just too racist to appreciate it.
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I wonder if rewatching Django Unchained work for me, since I wasn't too hot on the movie the first time around. It's clearly a film made by a great filmmaker, but I simply cared about it less than about practically any other Tarantino film I've seen.
I found my experience similar to alot of other Tarantino flicks. I enjoyed the fabulous crafting of individual scenes and set-pieces, but the overall product just didn't really work for me.
In Django Unchained in particular I found Django by far the least compelling character in the movie and so the ending left me very cold.
Clearly you are just too racist to appreciate it.
It's not racism to believe that the white man is superior to the black man.
That's the thing, though: in general I am a big fan of his films. I saw both parts of Kill Bill three times at the cinema, which is extremely rare for me. I loved Inglourious Basterds. I even greatly enjoyed Death Proof. Yet Django Unchained didn't really do it for me; as soon as Christoph Waltz had left the film, I was ready to leave too. Based on only having seen the film once, I can't state the following with any certainty, but I felt that his other films have more going on under the surface. Even Kill Bill isn't just a 100% straight revenge flick, and IB most definitely isn't. All of the films have some sort of counter-current, not always to the same extent, but it's always there. Django, though, seemed to boil down to, "Well, these people are doing a terrible thing and they deserve to die for it." Which is something that I just don't find all that interesting. I may be unfair to the film, and I'm aware that I might just have missed a lot of what goes on in the film, but right now I don't feel particularly eager to revisit it just yet.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
That's the thing, though: in general I am a big fan of his films. I saw both parts of Kill Bill three times at the cinema, which is extremely rare for me. I loved Inglourious Basterds. I even greatly enjoyed Death Proof. Yet Django Unchained didn't really do it for me; as soon as Christoph Waltz had left the film, I was ready to leave too. Based on only having seen the film once, I can't state the following with any certainty, but I felt that his other films have more going on under the surface. Even Kill Bill isn't just a 100% straight revenge flick, and IB most definitely isn't. All of the films have some sort of counter-current, not always to the same extent, but it's always there. Django, though, seemed to boil down to, "Well, these people are doing a terrible thing and they deserve to die for it." Which is something that I just don't find all that interesting. I may be unfair to the film, and I'm aware that I might just have missed a lot of what goes on in the film, but right now I don't feel particularly eager to revisit it just yet.
I don't think there is alot more to it. I got the impression it's basically a "Get the baddies" flick that deliberately chooses baddies that the US has gone out of it's way to not demonize, for the purpose of saying "Fuck that revisionist shit".
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ElJeffeRoaming the streets, waving his mod gun around.Moderator, ClubPAMod Emeritus
What shryke said.
Django, by necessity, was a straight forward film about a black dude fucking up a bunch of white dudes who were unambiguously evil and deserved to die. Having much in the way of nuance or thematic complexity would have ruined the point of the movie.
Which might well turn off some people, but there you go.
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Which makes sense in that it places the subtext outside the film. Here, slavery is simply not that much of an issue - considering all the things Switzerland has taken advantage of and made money from, slavery simply isn't one of them (to the best of my knowledge). Intellectually I can see what the film says and how it places itself in a larger discourse, but it feels like a conversation I'm basically not engaged in. Give me Inglourious Basterds instead, where the good guys are monstrous and the bad guys are humanised in interesting ways, without becoming revisionist in the process.
Edit: Also I'm too much of a Gandalf for stories that are basically about unambiguously evil people deserving to die. It's a kind of story that's always rubbed me the wrong way. I love a good ambiguous revenge tale, though.
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Django, by necessity, was a straight forward film about a black dude fucking up a bunch of white dudes who were unambiguously evil and deserved to die. Having much in the way of nuance or thematic complexity would have ruined the point of the movie.
Which might well turn off some people, but there you go.
That's true pre-Candie but not post. There's the scene where Django takes his first bounty:
Wanted, dead or alive. Smitty Bacall and The Smitty Bacall Gang. For murder and stagecoach robbery. Seven thousand dollars for Smitty Bacall. One thousand and five hundred dollars for each of his gang members...
THAT is who Smitty Bacall is. If Smitty Bacall wanted to start a farm at twenty-two, they would never of printed that. But Smitty Bacall wanted to rob stagecoaches, and he didn't mind killing people to do it… His corpse is worth seven thousand dollars. Now quit your pussyfootin and shoot him.
Once Candie dies Django wants to take Brunhilde with him, and he doesn't mind killing people to do it - and from the second Candie hits the floor Django starts killing people who ARE ambiguous. Not just people with bounties on their head, or people whom the audience has seen take delight in the suffering of others, but random farm hands, family members, and officials of the court executing their duty in taking a prisoner who had just killed a dozen people to his place of punishment. We never see Tarantino's whacky false Australian do anything other than release Django from his bonds, and for that Django kills him.
No, once Schultz dies Django becomes the very thing he was taught to dehumanize for the first three quarters of the movie, so you'll forgive me if the denouement doesn't strike a chord with me.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Except every one of those people was directly complicit in the horror of slavery.
"Random farm hands"- please
- "Family members"- I assume you mean Candie's sister, who was well aware of and lived off the spoils of her brother's barbarity
- "Officials of the court". What fucking court. It was Candie's hired thugs.
- Fake Australian. The one who was taking a wagonload of slaves to the mines?
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Except every one of those people was directly complicit in the horror of slavery.
"Random farm hands"- please
- "Family members"- I assume you mean Candie's sister, who was well aware of and lived off the spoils of her brother's barbarity
- "Officials of the court". What fucking court. It was Candie's hired thugs.
- Fake Australian. The one who was taking a wagonload of slaves to the mines?
NONE of these people are shown to be "unambiguously evil", you assume they are not because of their actions but because of their proximity to slavery. You are justifying the murder of every single person who worked in the South (and parts of the North) for being complicit in the horror of slavery.
And yes, the Fake Australian who was taking a wagonload of slaves WHO HAD UNAMBIGUOUSLY COMMITTED MURDERS to the mines.
Except every one of those people was directly complicit in the horror of slavery.
"Random farm hands"- please
- "Family members"- I assume you mean Candie's sister, who was well aware of and lived off the spoils of her brother's barbarity
- "Officials of the court". What fucking court. It was Candie's hired thugs.
- Fake Australian. The one who was taking a wagonload of slaves to the mines?
Seriously, none of the people he kills are ambiguous in any way. The whole point is that the entire institution is evil. He literally blows the whole thing up at the end.
Colour me pedantic, but I think it's important to say that none of the people Django kills are ambiguous in any way in the film. Compare Inglourious Basterds, which humanises a number of the Nazis that are killed (although it doesn't go for a tacky, mushy "Aren't we all human beings in the end?" thing) and aims for a different effect. Tarantino decided to do it one way in one film and another way in another film, but I think it's relevant to make a distinction between what the films do and what we may want the film to do.
As ElJeffe writes,
Django, by necessity, was a straight forward film about a black dude fucking up a bunch of white dudes who were unambiguously evil and deserved to die. Having much in the way of nuance or thematic complexity would have ruined the point of the movie.
Which might well turn off some people, but there you go.
I think that's the important point here.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Except every one of those people was directly complicit in the horror of slavery.
"Random farm hands"- please
- "Family members"- I assume you mean Candie's sister, who was well aware of and lived off the spoils of her brother's barbarity
- "Officials of the court". What fucking court. It was Candie's hired thugs.
- Fake Australian. The one who was taking a wagonload of slaves to the mines?
Seriously, none of the people he kills are ambiguous in any way. The whole point is that the entire institution is evil. He literally blows the whole thing up at the end.
Okay, then please enumerate for me the individual actions of each individual person that Django kills post-Candie that defines them as unambiguously evil. Because if "working on a farm with slaves and running into the house when you hear gunfire" and "taking a wagonload of murderers to the mines" is "unambiguously evil" then holy shit.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
You've called those slaves in the wagon "murderers" a few times now. Who are they supposed to have murdered? Oh yeah, the two slaver brothers at the beginning of the film who had marched them in chains across half of Texas. Boo fucking hoo.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
The subtlety and nuance in Django isn't in the main conflict, it's in the behavior. The film examines the institution of slavery as both fundamentally horrifying and ridiculous, and asks how everyone works to accommodate that reality into their daily lives. As with just about any Tarantino movie, the easiest thematic reading is identity. What is it made of? How do people want to be seen? How do you try and express that to others? On the one hand, even more here than in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino is fascinated by the contrast between overwrought gentility and shocking moral and physical violence. But the gentility here isn't accidental--European good manners thoughtlessly carried over from peacetime--but meant specifically to paper over both the horrors and the absurdities of slavery. Candie, for instance, and his phrenology:
Of course Tarantino knew that the evil slaveowner's question has a hidden, repressed dark side: DiCaprio is a third generation slave owner, he doesn't own slaves because he hates blacks, he owns them because that's the system; so powerful is that system that he spends his free time not on coke or hookers but on researching scientific justifications for the slavery-- trying to rationalize what he is doing. That is not the behavior of a man at peace with himself, regardless of how much he thinks he likes white cake, it is the behavior of a man in conflict, who suspects he is not free; who realizes, somehow, that the fact that his job happens to coincide with the trappings of power is 100% an accident... do you see? "Why don't they just rise up?" is revealed to be a symptom of the question that has been repressed: "why do the whites own slaves? Why don't they just... stop?"
So we see here and elsewhere throughout the film that people are using these elaborate methods and techniques and accoutrement to try and hide who they really are, even though they don't work (literalized in the scene where the klanners complain about not being able to see out of their masks). Candie's dandy clothes and ornate cigarette holder and poseur Francophilia are the 19th century equivalent of Stuntman Mike's car, The Bride's Hanzo sword, and K-Billy's Super Sounds of the 70s. QT's movies have always been on one level about who's cool and who's just pretending to be, and the antebellum South was chock full of white people pretending to be cool when they were actually a bunch of assholes.
So who's actually cool? Django, but he has to earn it. The key crime of slavery in this film--outside of the violence, of course--is the theft of identity. Django is "one in ten thousand" but as a garden variety slave he becomes interchangeable. Schultz frees him not just physically but spiritually by giving him back his name, something he will take pride in over the course of the movie ("The 'd' is silent"). From there Django starts crafting an image for himself, trying on different identities for the sake of Schultz's schemes (a valet, a "one-eyed Charlie") but finding the parts of them he liked and wanted to keep (the valet's fancy dress, the black slaver's ability to speak his mind with white men or even criticize them) and the parts he didn't like ("a black slaver's lower than a head house n---"), gradually defining who he wants to be as a free man. When Schultz implodes*, events force Django into a more extreme identity--the rough-riding, fast-shooting, determined "knight," an iconic hero fighting against the system to save his lady fair. Note that when they capture him, the bad guys decide that cutting his nuts off would be too kind, that it would be a far crueler punishment to sell him off as a slave to people who would give him a number instead of a name. And remember, too, that he is later able to convince others of his identity as a bounty hunter simply by having the right piece of paper in his pocket--a subtle but poignant metaphor for the free black men of the time, who were slaves at any moment until proven free by their paperwork. The rest, though, is attitude ("Do I sound like a fucking slave?"). Django Unchained is the story of a man whose identity is stolen from him, who is given a chance to make a new one. Is it any surprise, given his environment, that he chooses to make one in violent opposition to the system that robbed him in the first place?
*Schultz is there thematically to contrast the Southerners, and a white man from another country is the only possible choice. He's a schemer, but rarely duplicitous by choice, usually content to cheerfully announce his manipulations, or to let people come to their own conclusions. With Django he wears his heart on his sleeve. It's the pressure of trying to hide his true feelings about the slave trade and about Candie that finally becomes too much for him.
Once Candie dies Django wants to take Brunhilde with him, and he doesn't mind killing people to do it - and from the second Candie hits the floor Django starts killing people who ARE ambiguous. Not just people with bounties on their head, or people whom the audience has seen take delight in the suffering of others, but random farm hands, family members, and officials of the court executing their duty in taking a prisoner who had just killed a dozen people to his place of punishment. We never see Tarantino's whacky false Australian do anything other than release Django from his bonds, and for that Django kills him.
Small correction--those weren't officers of the court taking Django to jail. They were employees of the nearby mining company, taking Django to a lifetime of back-breaking labor. As he was a free man, they were essentially kidnapping him.
I guess that's the funny thing: conventionally, Nazis are the bad guys that can be killed in films without a second thought. Someone is in a German WW2 uniform? Shoot their asses. It doesn't matter if Nazi henchman 23 in Raiders of the Lost Ark was a good dad and secretly felt sorry for the Jews. Along comes Inglourious Basterds and the apparent good guys are quite monstrous and the Nazis are humans. Django pretty much does what we're used to with action films where Nazis are the bad guys, only the bad guys here are white Southerners complicit to some extent in slavery.
I guess the discussion above between knitdan, Archangle and shryke has made shryke's point clearer to me: how Django Unchained is a response to "that revisionist shit", and how its lack of ambiguity or complexity with respect to this specific topic is quite radical in its own way.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
You've called those slaves in the wagon "murderers" a few times now. Who are they supposed to have murdered? Oh yeah, the two slaver brothers at the beginning of the film who had marched them in chains across half of Texas. Boo fucking hoo.
Which is the exact same argument for why I don't care about Django's rampage at the end. He's a guy who murdered every random stranger who got in his path, and earlier prevented Schultz from saving a slave about to be torn apart by dogs. He literally becomes what he hunted for the first 3/4 of the movie - a murderer with a bounty on his head, who is complicit in the torture and dehumanization of his fellow human beings.
Django wanted to be reunited with his wife and he didn't mind killing people to do it… His corpse is worth several thousand dollars. Now quit your pussyfootin and shoot him.
Small correction--those weren't officers of the court taking Django to jail. They were employees of the nearby mining company, taking Django to a lifetime of back-breaking labor. As he was a free man, they were essentially kidnapping him.
I stand corrected - checking the script hey WERE employees of the mining company, but as of that point Django was NOT a free man. He was a captured criminal who was an accomplice in the cold-blooded murder of Calvin Candie, and who further killed around a dozen other free citizens of the United States during the attempt to restrain him.
Penal labor was common amongst most countries at that time, and I have no difficulty believing that his forced indenture was legal punishment for his killings - whether we witnessed the court order (which I have no doubt would have been justified) or not.
As with just about any Tarantino movie, the easiest thematic reading is identity.
If you've got a spare hour or five, I think I wouldn't mind you elaborating on this, especially with respect to Inglourious Basterds and possibly Death Proof, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. Happy to spring for a beer or whatever your drink is per film.
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Django, by necessity, was a straight forward film about a white dude fucking up a bunch of other white dudes who were unambiguously evil and deserved to die, and a black dude fucking up a bunch of black and white dudes who get in his way. And in doing so gives the film nuance or thematic complexity which accentuates the point of the movie - that horrific crimes can become acceptable if they subordinate the rights of some people to satisfy the wants and desires of others.
Which might well turn off some people, but there you go.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
As with just about any Tarantino movie, the easiest thematic reading is identity.
If you've got a spare hour or five, I think I wouldn't mind you elaborating on this, especially with respect to Inglourious Basterds and possibly Death Proof, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. Happy to spring for a beer or whatever your drink is per film.
"Will Film Crit For Money"
Super briefly, though:
-Reservoir Dogs:
This starts with a bunch of guys trying to show each other what tough badass robbers they are, including the guy only pretending to be a tough badass robber. Who's a professional and who folds (or goes nuts) under pressure? Arguably there's only one of them there, and he's the one who walks away.
-Pulp Fiction:
I had to have this explained to me; for the longest time I thought there was nothing here. But you can read the movie as a kind of decentralized Reservoir Dogs; where that one took supposedly hard-bitten guys and put them into a situation they weren't able to deal with, Pulp Fiction takes a bunch of different people and rotates them through multiple situations or contexts in order to show how nobody is the same person all the time to everyone, and we're especially not necessarily truthfully that person we desperately want to be. Compare Vincent at work, on a date, at breakfast; or Butch a killer in the ring, a tough sonofabitch on the phone, a softy with his girlfriend, and then on his way out of the pawn shop we find out who he really is. The only person who is exactly as cool as he seems to be is The Wolf, which is why everybody else is in awe of him.
-Jackie Brown:
A little more restrained because of the subject matter, but identity is still the key point in the drama. Here we see Quentin starting to really get metafictional, casting Pam Greer in order to shift the story towards the question of just how much of a blaxsplotation heroine she really is (how cool she is, in other words). Here QT focuses on just one main character who has to put on many different faces in order to survive and succeed at encountering many different men--pretending to be innocent to the cops, an accomplice to Ordell, soft and sweet to Max Cherry, etc. The tragedy of the ending is that Max finally sees her for who she really is--the tough girl, not the soft one--and can't handle it.
-Kill Bill:
There's a wealth of material here; the whole movie is about constructed identities warring externally (the Bride, the codenames, etc) and internally (is she Arlene, or Beatrix, or...?). It's a story told in chapters, but each one is about how Bill shaped her identity, how she tried to break away, how he fought back. I've linked before the theory about this movie as a Buddhist parable, but you can also look at Bill as the ego, which always fights against change of the self. Moreover, this one is all about stories building people up, and modes of storytelling (anime, action film, western, etc), and introduces one of my favorite QT lines, later recycled in Django--"And that would be the story of you."
-Death Proof:
Quentin goes metafictional again. This one's mostly about gender identity as it applies to horror and exploitation movies, with the film contrasting two sets of women. One set is defined as typical horror movie victims--trusting, weak types who engage thoughtlessly in sex and drugs and end up splattered all over the road--and the others as exploitation heroines, strong, confident women who refuse to be victims. In the middle is Stuntman Mike's poison, macho nostalgia, a bit of self-lampooning from QT, King of the Film Geeks.
-Inglourious Basterds:
This one's similar to Pulp Fiction in some ways (even structurally, minus the chronological shenanigans). The war is waged with PR--the legends of Stiglitz and the Bear Jew, for instance, and on the other side Hitler posing for a portrait. The notion and uses of cinema as propaganda is interrogated. Crucially, QT contrasts characters who are apparently evil but nonetheless human (many brave or hapless Nazis) with Landa, who is apparently genteel and disassociates himself from the Nazi party but truthfully represents their racist, violent, egotistical core. Hence Raine's obsession with branding the Nazis he captures with a forehead swastika--identity, QT argues, doesn't come from a uniform (or a movie, or a cover story) but is intrinsic to your actions, particularly in a moral sense.
And I already did Django, so there you go. The Cliffs notes are free.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Small correction--those weren't officers of the court taking Django to jail. They were employees of the nearby mining company, taking Django to a lifetime of back-breaking labor. As he was a free man, they were essentially kidnapping him.
I stand corrected - checking the script hey WERE employees of the mining company, but as of that point Django was NOT a free man. He was a captured criminal who was an accomplice in the cold-blooded murder of Calvin Candie, and who further killed around a dozen other free citizens of the United States during the attempt to restrain him.
Penal labor was common amongst most countries at that time, and I have no difficulty believing that his forced indenture was legal punishment for his killings - whether we witnessed the court order (which I have no doubt would have been justified) or not.
Once Django was captured, they were legally obligated to turn him over to the authorities for a trial, not just sell him to somebody who would work him hard.
But then, did free black men have the right to a trial back then? Maybe not. Maybe they lived under a tyrannical, predatory system which fundamentally lacked legitimacy, and which it was every man's duty or at least prerogative to resist, violently if necessary.
Cool, Astaereth, thanks. I would come at some of those films from a different angle - identity as *the* governing theme in most of these films is something I might take issue with, although I'd have to rewatch, think and put pen to paper first to say this with any confidence - but they're definitely useful approaches from what you've written.
@Archangle: I share some of your discomfort at what the film does, but I do think it's worth looking at what you're saying from a different perspective: do you ask the same questions about culpability, complicity and justified violence when you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark or similar films? Is every killing of a German soldier in those films justified in terms that go beyond, "Well, he's a Nazi soldier"?
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Cool, Astaereth, thanks. I would come at some of those films from a different angle - identity as *the* governing theme in most of these films is something I might take issue with, although I'd have to rewatch, think and put pen to paper first to say this with any confidence - but they're definitely useful approaches from what you've written.
Oh, definitely--I wouldn't say identity is the main theme in all of them, just that it's something you can find in all of his films in one way or another.
Small correction--those weren't officers of the court taking Django to jail. They were employees of the nearby mining company, taking Django to a lifetime of back-breaking labor. As he was a free man, they were essentially kidnapping him.
I stand corrected - checking the script hey WERE employees of the mining company, but as of that point Django was NOT a free man. He was a captured criminal who was an accomplice in the cold-blooded murder of Calvin Candie, and who further killed around a dozen other free citizens of the United States during the attempt to restrain him.
Penal labor was common amongst most countries at that time, and I have no difficulty believing that his forced indenture was legal punishment for his killings - whether we witnessed the court order (which I have no doubt would have been justified) or not.
Once Django was captured, they were legally obligated to turn him over to the authorities for a trial, not just sell him to somebody who would work him hard.
But then, did free black men have the right to a trial back then? Maybe not. Maybe they lived under a tyrannical, predatory system which fundamentally lacked legitimacy, and which it was every man's duty or at least prerogative to resist, violently if necessary.
But Django is not fighting to resist or fighting against evil. Schultz is. Schultz is the moral compass of the film - he is extremely particular that every individual he kills is justified legally, if not morally. But he is the one who breaks for moral reasons - not Django.
Schultz first tries to prevent Django from treating others in a dehumanizing manner, but Django rebuffs him saying that he HAS to behave in this manner for their plan to purchase Broomhilda to work. Mere minutes later, Schultz tries to save D'Artagnan from being torn apart by dogs, but is explicitly stopped by Django because again that would compromise Django's own desires. For all the indignities that are inflicted on Django, and those that are inflicted on others around them, he allows them because like Schultz's retelling of Siegfried he believes that reuniting with Broomhilda is worth it.
Which gives contrast that Schultz finally acts against Candie - not because he is legally able to do so, but because he is morally obligated to do so. Django's rampage from there on is not driven by injustice, resistance against slavery, or the moral fight against evil - it's because these people, like the slaves he allowed to be killed in front of him, are subordinate to his own desires. He is complicit to the dehumanization of those around him, justifying the murder of others - and exhorts the audience to join him.
Archangle: I share some of your discomfort at what the film does, but I do think it's worth looking at what you're saying from a different perspective: do you ask the same questions about culpability, complicity and justified violence when you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark or similar films? Is every killing of a German soldier in those films justified in terms that go beyond, "Well, he's a Nazi soldier"?
To be clear, I'm not saying that every badguy in film needs to be unambiguously evil to justify violence - I think people should remember that "just because you're a badguy doesn't mean you're a bad guy". I'm fine with unnamed mooks and redshirts being confined to cannonfodder, I'm less fine with designating them as "unambiguously evil" or some kind of "they deserved it" as a figleaf for delighting in the deaths of nameless individuals who were on the wrong side. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQdDRrcAOjA
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Brainiac 8Don't call me Shirley...Registered Userregular
I took the family to see Big Hero 6 over the weekend and we loved it. The story was fun, the characters were endearing, and Baymax is truly one of my favorite characters ever created. Such a well done movie.
I watched All Is Lost over the weekend and greatly enjoyed how much it was reduced to the absolute essentials, something I don't very often see when it comes to films. I also like a good generous, overflowing film, but it's the haiku of a movie that is very, very rare. I sort of wish I'd seen it closer to Gravity to have a better comparison between the two; with the former more fresh in my mind, I prefer its sparseness, but if I'd seen both of them in close proximity I could probably be more fair to the latter. Even then, though, I think I'd respond more strongly to how internalised All Is Lost is and how it doesn't feel the need to spell things out (especially emotionally) to the same extent as Gravity.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Small correction--those weren't officers of the court taking Django to jail. They were employees of the nearby mining company, taking Django to a lifetime of back-breaking labor. As he was a free man, they were essentially kidnapping him.
I stand corrected - checking the script hey WERE employees of the mining company, but as of that point Django was NOT a free man. He was a captured criminal who was an accomplice in the cold-blooded murder of Calvin Candie, and who further killed around a dozen other free citizens of the United States during the attempt to restrain him.
Penal labor was common amongst most countries at that time, and I have no difficulty believing that his forced indenture was legal punishment for his killings - whether we witnessed the court order (which I have no doubt would have been justified) or not.
Once Django was captured, they were legally obligated to turn him over to the authorities for a trial, not just sell him to somebody who would work him hard.
But then, did free black men have the right to a trial back then? Maybe not. Maybe they lived under a tyrannical, predatory system which fundamentally lacked legitimacy, and which it was every man's duty or at least prerogative to resist, violently if necessary.
But Django is not fighting to resist or fighting against evil. Schultz is. Schultz is the moral compass of the film - he is extremely particular that every individual he kills is justified legally, if not morally. But he is the one who breaks for moral reasons - not Django.
Schultz first tries to prevent Django from treating others in a dehumanizing manner, but Django rebuffs him saying that he HAS to behave in this manner for their plan to purchase Broomhilda to work. Mere minutes later, Schultz tries to save D'Artagnan from being torn apart by dogs, but is explicitly stopped by Django because again that would compromise Django's own desires. For all the indignities that are inflicted on Django, and those that are inflicted on others around them, he allows them because like Schultz's retelling of Siegfried he believes that reuniting with Broomhilda is worth it.
Which gives contrast that Schultz finally acts against Candie - not because he is legally able to do so, but because he is morally obligated to do so. Django's rampage from there on is not driven by injustice, resistance against slavery, or the moral fight against evil - it's because these people, like the slaves he allowed to be killed in front of him, are subordinate to his own desires. He is complicit to the dehumanization of those around him, justifying the murder of others - and exhorts the audience to join him.
If anything, Schultz is the morally questionable one. It's clear that he could have simply purchased Broomhilda if he wanted to. If he had gone up to Candie and said, "I hear you have a slave who speaks German. I am an eccentric, wealthy German man and I wish to pay the ridiculous price of $12,000 for her," Candie would have sold her and the subsequent bloodbaths never would have happened. He could clearly afford it, but he went with a deception essentially to put one over on the bad slaver. Without the need to uphold that deception, Schultz could have saved D'Artagnan.
Or if he had shook Candie's hand, none of it would have happened. He, personally, could not resist taking a foolish, dangerous action for his own moral satisfaction--not because Candie deserved to die but because Schultz could not bring himself to even pretend to respect Candie. There's a reason he apologizes to Django: it's only by chance that his actions don't condemn Django and Hilde to torture, enslavement, and/or death.
But all that's bullshit. Neither Schultz nor Django are responsible for D'Artagnan's death. Candie is. Nor is Django responsible for killing Candie's men. Those men were trying to kill him and/or enslave him. They were not just symbolic representatives of an immoral system but actual, active representatives of it. Django was acting in self-defense--of him, of his wife, and of his people.
I guess that's the funny thing: conventionally, Nazis are the bad guys that can be killed in films without a second thought. Someone is in a German WW2 uniform? Shoot their asses. It doesn't matter if Nazi henchman 23 in Raiders of the Lost Ark was a good dad and secretly felt sorry for the Jews. Along comes Inglourious Basterds and the apparent good guys are quite monstrous and the Nazis are humans. Django pretty much does what we're used to with action films where Nazis are the bad guys, only the bad guys here are white Southerners complicit to some extent in slavery.
I guess the discussion above between knitdan, Archangle and shryke has made shryke's point clearer to me: how Django Unchained is a response to "that revisionist shit", and how its lack of ambiguity or complexity with respect to this specific topic is quite radical in its own way.
Actually it was Tarantino who proved to me that there is a limit to what you can do to nazis before I am offended, and Inglorious Basterds passed that point by several degrees.
There were some other things about the film I didn't care for, but the whole baseball scene was just downright sick.
And Tarantino was obviously trying to do that in Django. Waltz's character was the only white guy who was not portrayed as a basically an extra from Hee-Haw.
And Tarantino was obviously trying to do that in Django. Waltz's character was the only white guy who was not portrayed as a basically an extra from Hee-Haw.
Is that not a realistic depiction of the south? (this is a joke before someone pops a top)
I loved Django, the end bit was great. And yeah the fake australian miners were all shitty people, hell Sam Jackson's character remarked what they would do to him would be worse than what Candie's people wanted to do to him.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
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Or it could have been zero movies.
I mean, looking at a script and saying "Wow, this is boring and kind of stupid maybe we will pass on this one" is an option.
Tonight we watched Let's Be Cops. I thought it was a pretty entertaining movie all around, though it definitely leans on the two main character's chemistry for the most part.
I was subtly impressed with the "when shit gets real" vibe as the movie went on. I made the mistake of watching it after 22 Jump Street though, which was much funnier in my opinion.
Agree on all points. 22 Jump Street was funnier, but I actually thought Let's Be Cops had a better arc overall. Like you said, the last act raises the stakes higher than I thought a comedy movie like that would have done.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I found my experience similar to alot of other Tarantino flicks. I enjoyed the fabulous crafting of individual scenes and set-pieces, but the overall product just didn't really work for me.
In Django Unchained in particular I found Django by far the least compelling character in the movie and so the ending left me very cold.
Clearly you are just too racist to appreciate it.
It's not racism to believe that the white man is superior to the black man.
When that white man is Christoph Waltz.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I don't think there is alot more to it. I got the impression it's basically a "Get the baddies" flick that deliberately chooses baddies that the US has gone out of it's way to not demonize, for the purpose of saying "Fuck that revisionist shit".
Django, by necessity, was a straight forward film about a black dude fucking up a bunch of white dudes who were unambiguously evil and deserved to die. Having much in the way of nuance or thematic complexity would have ruined the point of the movie.
Which might well turn off some people, but there you go.
Edit: Also I'm too much of a Gandalf for stories that are basically about unambiguously evil people deserving to die. It's a kind of story that's always rubbed me the wrong way. I love a good ambiguous revenge tale, though.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Once Candie dies Django wants to take Brunhilde with him, and he doesn't mind killing people to do it - and from the second Candie hits the floor Django starts killing people who ARE ambiguous. Not just people with bounties on their head, or people whom the audience has seen take delight in the suffering of others, but random farm hands, family members, and officials of the court executing their duty in taking a prisoner who had just killed a dozen people to his place of punishment. We never see Tarantino's whacky false Australian do anything other than release Django from his bonds, and for that Django kills him.
No, once Schultz dies Django becomes the very thing he was taught to dehumanize for the first three quarters of the movie, so you'll forgive me if the denouement doesn't strike a chord with me.
"Random farm hands"- please
- "Family members"- I assume you mean Candie's sister, who was well aware of and lived off the spoils of her brother's barbarity
- "Officials of the court". What fucking court. It was Candie's hired thugs.
- Fake Australian. The one who was taking a wagonload of slaves to the mines?
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
And yes, the Fake Australian who was taking a wagonload of slaves WHO HAD UNAMBIGUOUSLY COMMITTED MURDERS to the mines.
Seriously, none of the people he kills are ambiguous in any way. The whole point is that the entire institution is evil. He literally blows the whole thing up at the end.
As ElJeffe writes, I think that's the important point here.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
So we see here and elsewhere throughout the film that people are using these elaborate methods and techniques and accoutrement to try and hide who they really are, even though they don't work (literalized in the scene where the klanners complain about not being able to see out of their masks). Candie's dandy clothes and ornate cigarette holder and poseur Francophilia are the 19th century equivalent of Stuntman Mike's car, The Bride's Hanzo sword, and K-Billy's Super Sounds of the 70s. QT's movies have always been on one level about who's cool and who's just pretending to be, and the antebellum South was chock full of white people pretending to be cool when they were actually a bunch of assholes.
So who's actually cool? Django, but he has to earn it. The key crime of slavery in this film--outside of the violence, of course--is the theft of identity. Django is "one in ten thousand" but as a garden variety slave he becomes interchangeable. Schultz frees him not just physically but spiritually by giving him back his name, something he will take pride in over the course of the movie ("The 'd' is silent"). From there Django starts crafting an image for himself, trying on different identities for the sake of Schultz's schemes (a valet, a "one-eyed Charlie") but finding the parts of them he liked and wanted to keep (the valet's fancy dress, the black slaver's ability to speak his mind with white men or even criticize them) and the parts he didn't like ("a black slaver's lower than a head house n---"), gradually defining who he wants to be as a free man. When Schultz implodes*, events force Django into a more extreme identity--the rough-riding, fast-shooting, determined "knight," an iconic hero fighting against the system to save his lady fair. Note that when they capture him, the bad guys decide that cutting his nuts off would be too kind, that it would be a far crueler punishment to sell him off as a slave to people who would give him a number instead of a name. And remember, too, that he is later able to convince others of his identity as a bounty hunter simply by having the right piece of paper in his pocket--a subtle but poignant metaphor for the free black men of the time, who were slaves at any moment until proven free by their paperwork. The rest, though, is attitude ("Do I sound like a fucking slave?"). Django Unchained is the story of a man whose identity is stolen from him, who is given a chance to make a new one. Is it any surprise, given his environment, that he chooses to make one in violent opposition to the system that robbed him in the first place?
*Schultz is there thematically to contrast the Southerners, and a white man from another country is the only possible choice. He's a schemer, but rarely duplicitous by choice, usually content to cheerfully announce his manipulations, or to let people come to their own conclusions. With Django he wears his heart on his sleeve. It's the pressure of trying to hide his true feelings about the slave trade and about Candie that finally becomes too much for him.
--
Small correction--those weren't officers of the court taking Django to jail. They were employees of the nearby mining company, taking Django to a lifetime of back-breaking labor. As he was a free man, they were essentially kidnapping him.
I guess the discussion above between knitdan, Archangle and shryke has made shryke's point clearer to me: how Django Unchained is a response to "that revisionist shit", and how its lack of ambiguity or complexity with respect to this specific topic is quite radical in its own way.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Django wanted to be reunited with his wife and he didn't mind killing people to do it… His corpse is worth several thousand dollars. Now quit your pussyfootin and shoot him. I stand corrected - checking the script hey WERE employees of the mining company, but as of that point Django was NOT a free man. He was a captured criminal who was an accomplice in the cold-blooded murder of Calvin Candie, and who further killed around a dozen other free citizens of the United States during the attempt to restrain him.
Penal labor was common amongst most countries at that time, and I have no difficulty believing that his forced indenture was legal punishment for his killings - whether we witnessed the court order (which I have no doubt would have been justified) or not.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
"Will Film Crit For Money"
Super briefly, though:
-Reservoir Dogs:
-Pulp Fiction:
-Jackie Brown:
-Kill Bill:
-Death Proof:
-Inglourious Basterds:
And I already did Django, so there you go. The Cliffs notes are free.
Once Django was captured, they were legally obligated to turn him over to the authorities for a trial, not just sell him to somebody who would work him hard.
But then, did free black men have the right to a trial back then? Maybe not. Maybe they lived under a tyrannical, predatory system which fundamentally lacked legitimacy, and which it was every man's duty or at least prerogative to resist, violently if necessary.
Not money, alcohol. There's a difference.
@Archangle: I share some of your discomfort at what the film does, but I do think it's worth looking at what you're saying from a different perspective: do you ask the same questions about culpability, complicity and justified violence when you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark or similar films? Is every killing of a German soldier in those films justified in terms that go beyond, "Well, he's a Nazi soldier"?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Oh, definitely--I wouldn't say identity is the main theme in all of them, just that it's something you can find in all of his films in one way or another.
I don't drink, though.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Schultz first tries to prevent Django from treating others in a dehumanizing manner, but Django rebuffs him saying that he HAS to behave in this manner for their plan to purchase Broomhilda to work. Mere minutes later, Schultz tries to save D'Artagnan from being torn apart by dogs, but is explicitly stopped by Django because again that would compromise Django's own desires. For all the indignities that are inflicted on Django, and those that are inflicted on others around them, he allows them because like Schultz's retelling of Siegfried he believes that reuniting with Broomhilda is worth it.
Which gives contrast that Schultz finally acts against Candie - not because he is legally able to do so, but because he is morally obligated to do so. Django's rampage from there on is not driven by injustice, resistance against slavery, or the moral fight against evil - it's because these people, like the slaves he allowed to be killed in front of him, are subordinate to his own desires. He is complicit to the dehumanization of those around him, justifying the murder of others - and exhorts the audience to join him. To be clear, I'm not saying that every badguy in film needs to be unambiguously evil to justify violence - I think people should remember that "just because you're a badguy doesn't mean you're a bad guy". I'm fine with unnamed mooks and redshirts being confined to cannonfodder, I'm less fine with designating them as "unambiguously evil" or some kind of "they deserved it" as a figleaf for delighting in the deaths of nameless individuals who were on the wrong side.
Also the short before was so totally adorable.
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"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
If anything, Schultz is the morally questionable one. It's clear that he could have simply purchased Broomhilda if he wanted to. If he had gone up to Candie and said, "I hear you have a slave who speaks German. I am an eccentric, wealthy German man and I wish to pay the ridiculous price of $12,000 for her," Candie would have sold her and the subsequent bloodbaths never would have happened. He could clearly afford it, but he went with a deception essentially to put one over on the bad slaver. Without the need to uphold that deception, Schultz could have saved D'Artagnan.
Or if he had shook Candie's hand, none of it would have happened. He, personally, could not resist taking a foolish, dangerous action for his own moral satisfaction--not because Candie deserved to die but because Schultz could not bring himself to even pretend to respect Candie. There's a reason he apologizes to Django: it's only by chance that his actions don't condemn Django and Hilde to torture, enslavement, and/or death.
But all that's bullshit. Neither Schultz nor Django are responsible for D'Artagnan's death. Candie is. Nor is Django responsible for killing Candie's men. Those men were trying to kill him and/or enslave him. They were not just symbolic representatives of an immoral system but actual, active representatives of it. Django was acting in self-defense--of him, of his wife, and of his people.
Actually it was Tarantino who proved to me that there is a limit to what you can do to nazis before I am offended, and Inglorious Basterds passed that point by several degrees.
There were some other things about the film I didn't care for, but the whole baseball scene was just downright sick.
Is that not a realistic depiction of the south? (this is a joke before someone pops a top)
I loved Django, the end bit was great. And yeah the fake australian miners were all shitty people, hell Sam Jackson's character remarked what they would do to him would be worse than what Candie's people wanted to do to him.
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