THE WORLD’S FIRST western blaxploitation revenge buddy comedy, Django Unchained is one of Quentin Tarantino’s best movies—a brutal, hilarious, thrilling, messy bastard of a thing. It’s the result of Tarantino gleefully making a balls-out western after years of almost doing so, and it’s excellent that he did: The genre hasn’t been served this well since Deadwood, No Country for Old Men, and Red Dead Redemption.
“Western” might be the wrong word, actually: Much of Django Unchained riffs on the likes of Sergio Leone, but it’s set in the South, just before the Civil War. There, dapper German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, flaunting what’s probably the year’s best performance, and unquestionably the year’s best beard) rattles about in a creaky dentist’s wagon that has a giant, wobbling, spring-mounted tooth bolted to its roof. “I kill people and sell their corpses for cash,” Schultz explains, pragmatically and charmingly. And so—pragmatically and, somehow, charmingly—Schultz buys Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave who can help him ID his current bounties, the Brittle Brothers. (“For the time being,” Schultz tells Django, shortly after pouring him his first beer, “I’m going to make this slavery malarkey work to my benefit.”) While Schultz plans on setting Django free once the Brittles are dead, he soon finds himself devoted to Django’s own quest: to rescue his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from Candyland, a notorious plantation owned by the rot-toothed Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and run by Candie’s devoted slave, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson). And so: a film that Tarantino boasts is “the most violent western since The Wild Bunch,” even if, by the time Tupac shows up on the soundtrack, Django has become significantly bloodier. (And, as evidenced by Jim Croce’s sitcom-y “I Got a Name” playing over a montage of Django and Schultz pallin’ around on their horses, significantly funnier.)
Like Inglourious Basterds—another film where Tarantino reduced history to pulp, both factually and viscerally—there’s a lot to unpack in Django, be it the boiling-down of America’s fucked-up past into melodrama, or Tarantino’s continued indulgence of his second-favorite fetish, after Uma Thurman’s feet. (Here, at least, there’s more context for the N-word than in Pulp Fiction.) That’s for later viewings, though: On first watch, Django Unchained is simply a hell of a lot of fun—visceral and clever and operatic, with Foxx’s deadpan humor barely hiding his righteous fury as DiCaprio’s babyface smiles and smiles and smiles until it splits apart in rage. And that’s not even getting into Samuel L. Jackson, or the big gunfight, or what is—I’m fairly certain—the only and best scene ever filmed that features the KKK, Don Johnson, and Jonah Hill.
Told you it was a messy bastard of a thing. And it’s bloody, and it’s mean, and it’s great. Good luck finding any other movie this Xmas that’s even half as much fun.
More empty crap. Tarantino is certainly emblematic of our times: slick and stylish, but totally devoid of substance. At best you could call it a “celebration” of cool, but at the end of the day it has no heart, soul or brain. It’s just a hip skin on an empty shell.
As I said, emblematic of our times.
Ah man, Tarantino directed this? NOPE!
Jambox, bullshit.
So he’s not Ozu, Herzog, Fassbinder or Welles — he is still a great filmmaker.
I look forword to seeing his new work this weekend.
well, opinions, opinions; but i agree that Tarantino is still plenty worthy. plenty relevant. plenty brilliant.
Tarantino’s worst stuff is still better than most’s best these days — ‘Jackie Brown’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’ (and ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Inglorious Basterds’, for that matter) are far from “devoid of substance”.
save for P.T. Anderson, Woody Allen, Herzog, Wes Anderson, Scorsese, Gaspar Noé, and a few others i’m sure i’m forgetting, Tarantino is at the top of the heap.
i do, however, agree with your take on our times, jamdox — i just don’t think Tarantino’s work is emblematic of them.
this movie looks slick and stylish, and a complete celebration of cool!
Russ Tamblyn is in this? I really *am* gonna have to see it!
Also, (and you knew this was coming), http://www.flickr.com/photos/toddmecklem/8…
Todd, you lucky bitch you….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger#Etymol…
The variants neger and negar, derive from the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black), and from the now-pejorative French nègre (nigger). Etymologically, negro, noir, nègre, and nigger ultimately derive from nigrum, the stem of the Latin niger (black) (pronounced [ˈniɡer] which, in every other grammatical case, grammatical gender, and grammatical number besides nominative masculine singular, is nigr-, the r is trilled).
In the Colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony.[2] Later American English spellings, neger and neggar, prevailed in a northern colony, New York under the Dutch, and in metropolitan Philadelphia’s Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities; the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name “Begraafplaats van de Neger” (Cemetery of the Negro); an early US occurrence of neger in Rhode Island, dates from 1625.[3] An alternative word for African Americans was the English word, “Black”, used by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Among Anglophones, the word nigger was not always considered derogatory, because it then denoted “black-skinned”, a common Anglophone usage.[4] Nineteenth-century English (language) literature features usages of nigger without racist connotation, e.g. the Joseph Conrad novella The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). Moreover, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain created characters who used the word as contemporary usage. Twain, in the autobiographic book Life on the Mississippi (1883), used the term within quotes, indicating reported usage, but used the term “negro” when speaking in his own narrative persona.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro#In_Engl…
Around 1442 the Portuguese first arrived in sub-Saharan Africa while trying to find a sea route to India. The term negro, literally meaning “black”, was used by the Spanish and Portuguese as a simple description to refer to people. From the 18th century to the late 1960s, “negro” (later capitalized) was considered to be the proper English-language term for certain people of sub-Saharan African origin.
Tarantino directed, maybe, 3 good films in his entire sham of a career. Anyone who wastes their money on this is a fucking rube!
Was ANYTHING not sold out hours in advanced this Christmas evening?!
Honestly, as an Inner Portland dweller, I’d like to know what the suburb back-up theater of choice is in this town.
DamosA,
If you haven’t seen it then you can’t very well review it now, can you? On the other hand, if you have seen it then I guess that makes you what?
Spike Lee tweeted on Christmas Eve that he wasn’t going to go see it out of respect for his ancestors. Again, prejudging not only the film, but the director. Spike Lee is a top notch film maker, the perfect example of a self made man who has achieved the American dream. So how come Spike Lee talks like such a looser? Why doesn’t Spike Lee make a movie where the protaganist actually takes some sort of effective action in overcoming obstacles against all odds, inspiring the audience to excell at someting in their own lives, as Spike Lee has done in his own, but witout the constand belly aching?
Not the worst review ever. My bias is not confirmed.
@PeretDesnos: Regal City Center 12, just over the bridge in Vancouver. Keep it secret. Keep it safe.
Westgate, perhaps.
Single Bullet – I too am a fan of several of Spike Lees films, but also recall when he was bitching about Clint Eastwood not using enough black men in ‘Flags of our Fathers’? I believe Eastwood responded, angrily, saying that there were very few black men involved with that battle, and he had numbers to back it up I believe. Sometimes I have a hard time telling if Lee is really pissed off for a good cause, or if he just wants attention somehow.
Also, DumbosA is just trolling. How many film-makers would be happy with having a single film be deemed great, or really good even, in the film-makers lifetime? Even by DumbosA standards Tarantino is batting about .500, a very notable accomplishment.
Single Bullet —
I do not have to actually SEE a film to know that it is a piece-of-shit. Many times, i can simply go by a director’s track record.