BEFORE: Perhaps you were expecting "The Wolf of Wall Street" next? That would have made sense, what with the DiCaprio connection, and the bond trading & shady deals that were alluded to in "The Great Gatsby" - but I'm afraid the premium channels haven't aired that film yet, and I'm certainly not going to pay $4.99 on top of what I already pay a certain cable company each month. I'm moving on, I'll have to do a follow-up with that film later on. I've come to the end of the DiCaprio chain (for now) and the films for the rest of the year are already programmed. Thematically, I realize I risk being all over the place, but my options are becoming more and more limited as the list grows smaller - the list seems to be stuck at 155 for now, it's been that way for over a week.
AFTER: This is a LONG film, about 2 hours and 45 minutes, and you know my first thought was, "Does it really need to BE this long?" Any longer and Tarantino probably would have had to cut it into two films, like he did with "Kill Bill". But the film's not really presented in two halves - it's sort of in two parts, but one's just an hour long and the other's an hour and 45 min. Hardly ideal for splitting - plus, then you'd have one film that was all exposition and build-up, and a second film that was all conflict and resolution. Nope, one long film it is, and needs to be.
But if I can pontificate about Tarantino's films for just a second, I have to wonder, "Where did they start to run off the rails?" If I look at his early films like "True Romance" (written by QT) and "Reservoir Dogs", they had this thing called a story arc - meaning that there was action, sure, but he built up TO it. Even if you take what I think was his best film, "Pulp Fiction", there's a lot of exposition in that film. People TALK to each other, people discuss things - sure, often everyone has a gun in their hand during those discussions, but everything is not just a simple shootout. Tarantino became famous for using the "Mexican Standoff" - three people with guns all pointed at each other - and that's a tense situation, something that needs to be worked out, and it might end in gunfire (OK, it will probably end in gunfire) but it might not.
By contrast, I'm now presented with "Django Unchained", which seems to be operating under the guidelines of "shoot first, ask questions later". Or, more precisely, it's "shoot first, then produce the paperwork later that proves the person I just shot was a wanted man". How did we get from there to here? How did Tarantino go from "Reservoir Dogs", with like two shootouts (I think, it's been a while) to "Django Unchained", which has about 47 of them? (estimated figure, I lost count)
I think I know, and it's a process that filmmakers really need to be aware of. Think about "Pulp Fiction" - what were the scenes that truly made an impact? OK, the dance scene, but let's table that for a second. Other than the famous "drug overdose" scene, the parts that were truly memorable were when people got shot. The guy in the car getting shot. The guy in the apartment getting shot. The very prominent lead character getting shot (even though he appears OK later in a scene that takes place earlier...). It's probably very tempting for a director to take note of the scenes in his film that got the biggest crowd reaction, and make his next film with that in mind.
Eventually that leads to films like "Kill Bill" (Vol. 1-2) - which features a series of martial arts battles, each of which ends with someone getting killed in a new and interesting fashion. Or the climax scene of "Inglourious Basterds", which may have set a new record for number of Nazis killed on screen in interesting ways. And that's how you get "Django Unchained", which falls into bloodbath territory a number of times, but most prominently for like the last 45 minutes of the film. Don't get too attached to the great characters in this film, because most likely they won't be left standing by the end.
Was the American South a brutal place in the late 1850's? Of course it was. Was slavery an abominable practice, with indignity upon indignity heaped upon Negro slaves in countless ways? Of course. I'm not sure that all of that, however, justifies the amount of violence seen in this film. In its own way it represents wish-fulfillment, just like we WISH that a ragtag bunch of Allied soldiers could have stuck it to the Natzies - we WISH that a free black man like Django could have gone rogue and taken out a bunch of plantation owners. But that, in itself, doesn't make it right.
I'm torn tonight, because I know the first job of a film is to entertain - and being on Django's side, which is the side for righteousness and justice and against slavery and mistreatment means that a lot of people will find this entertaining and possibly even fulfilling. But the other side of me chimes in and says, "Umm, as much as we might hate slavery today, it was technically legal, albeit inhumane, in the South in the year 1858." And that's where I start to have a problem, where what's legal and what's right turn out to be two different things.
I want to equate Django with Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name", who did whatever he felt was right at any time, possessing his own set of morals that generally seemed to center around messing with people who messed with him. (And I'm trying real HARD to be the shepherd...) But I just can't. This film goes way too far with the bloodshed. It didn't have to be this way, every scene didn't have to be a showcase for how many people can be shot, or a new interesting way that someone can get blowed up. What happened to exposition? Character development? Plot points? Redemption?
I just miss the Tarantino who made "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown" - whatever happened to THAT guy? Think about this, Quentin - there were two films recently made about slavery, set in the same time period - "Django Unchained" and "12 Years a Slave". One of them won the Best Picture Oscar, and the other one didn't. Why is that? I get that you're a fan of exploitation movies, so you've done your homages to blaxploitation, Nazi-ploitation, martial arts movies, and grindhouse films. Now, how about just trying to make a great movie?
Also starring Jamie Foxx (last seen in "The Amazing Spider-Man 2"), Christoph Waltz (last seen in "Water for Elephants"), Kerry Washington (last seen in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"), Walton Goggins (last seen in "Lincoln"), Dennis Christopher, James Remar, Laura Cayouette, Don Johnson (last seen in "Tin Cup"), with cameos from Tom Wopat, Russ Tamblyn, Amber Tamblyn, Bruce Dern (last seen in "Family Plot"), M.C. Gainey, Jonah Hill (last seen in "The Watch"), Robert Carradine, Rex Linn (last seen in "Cliffhanger") and Quentin Tarantino himself.
RATING: 5 out of 10 sticks of dynamite
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