With Django Unchained, Is QT Devolving Into the Weird Al Yankovic of Cinema?
Despite asinine comments by Quentin Tarantino, who has called our present criminal-justice arrangements “slavery through and through,” and Jamie Foxx, who has boasted that “I kill all the white people” in the Tarantino-directed Django Unchained, the movie isn’t especially inflammatory about race.
The title character, an ex-slave, doesn’t kill all the white people. In fact, his best friend and co-hero is a white, European dentist turned bounty hunter played by Christoph Waltz, who won an Oscar as the dapper but terrifying Nazi colonel in Inglourious Basterds. Moreover, one of the chief villains of Django is played, in a surprise, by Samuel L. Jackson as a house slave who despises Django with a fury that makes him a perfect match for the wicked plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio) for whom he works.
Mostly, the movie is an incredibly violent, incredibly long, and often very funny popcorn picture with its roots in both spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and blaxploitation movies of the 1970s. The quintessentially Tarantino moment comes when racist whites seeking to kill Django and his dentist friend form a posse of rough riders with bags over their heads (presaging the Ku Klux Klan) in 1858. The vigilante group (including former Miami Vice star Don Johnson as an easily outsmarted plantation boss and Jonah Hill in a cameo) falls into squabbling over a dispute about the craftsmanship of the bags. It’s a hilarious disquisition reminiscent of the argument about Madonna in Reservoir Dogs or the details of dining at a French McDonald’s in Pulp Fiction.
Other scenes in the movie may remind you of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Searchers, but the closest resemblance is to…. Blazing Saddles. Just as Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little joined forces as equals and shocked racists in Mel Brooks’ 1972 comedy (which was co-written by Richard Pryor), Waltz and Foxx make for a fine pair of gunslingers who don’t care what haters think of their friendship. They wander the South getting in and out of trouble as they search for Django’s wife (Kerry Washington), who is being tortured at the evil plantation run by Calvin Candie (DiCaprio). Django, a former slave, has received his freedom and a new job as bounty hunter courtesy of King Schultz (Waltz), who needs Django’s help in recognizing three men whom Schultz will receive a hefty fee for killing.
To the extent the movie invites controversy, it will do so for its wall-to-wall use of the N-word, and perhaps some will say it trivializes slavery by turning it into the backdrop for ridiculously bloody killing sprees and explosions. Slavery is still a sensitive subject that very few Hollywood filmmakers dare to explore; even Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln largely leaves out the details of the horror. But Tarantino’s purpose is to shame slavery by bringing it out into the light to mock it and show its practitioners meeting a cruel end. He has a lot of fun with his subject along the way, and most audience members probably will too.
But still, there’s a vague sense that Tarantino is coasting; there’s a been-there, shot-that feel to the whole thing. Once again the movie runs long; again there’s a massively violent climax; again there is a distracting and somewhat unfortunate attempt by the director to show he can act (this time he plays an Australian miner); again there are lots of appearances from forgotten B-movie and TV character actors (in addition to Don Johnson, Bruce Dern, Dennis Christopher, Tom Wopat and Russ Tamblyn show up); again there are visual quotations from classic movies.
We get it: Tarantino has seen a lot of films. Has he ever read a book, though? By the time Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen were Tarantino’s age, they rightly began to suspect they were repeating themselves, and began venturing into new territory. Spielberg filmed Schindler’s List when he was only 46; Tarantino will turn 50 next spring.
Are we expecting too much of Tarantino? Maybe. He does write clever and surprising dialogue, his characters are lively, and he always gets superb performances from his actors. His action scenes are entertainingly over the top. If Tarantino never really outgrew the comic books-and-cowboys stage of adolescence, he certainly fits the profile of millions in his generation. But at some point the sense that Tarantino is wandering through the halls of film history stealing bits and pieces and mashing them together is going to go stale. A couple of more movies like Django Unchained and moviegoers will start to wonder whether Tarantino has any original ideas or whether he’s just a spoof act — the big-screen equivalent of Weird Al Yankovic.
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“But still, there’s a vague sense that Tarantino is coasting; there’s a been-there, shot-that feel to the whole thing.”
You don’t say? “Reservoir Dogs”, “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill Vols 1&2″ proved that the Tarantino formula was getting tiresome. I’m not surprised that “Django Unchained” is another two to three hour romp following the same pattern. That may be why I made “Kill Bill Vol. 2″ the last Tarantino film I would see.
Why doesn’t he just remake (er, “re-imagine”) A Clockwork Orange? You know that’s where he’d like to go.
BS
“But Tarantino’s purpose is to shame slavery by bringing it out into the light to mock it and show its practitioners meeting a cruel end.”
Well, it´s about time someone did something about that damn slavery!
Seriously, it is not a challenging subject. Like the nazi villains of Inglorious Basterds, it is as safe a subject as it gets. But then I do not share the American neurosis about race.
Tarantino has been coasting for a long time. His movies are still entertaining in a way, and that is no small thing. But the last time I cared whether a Tarantino character lived or died was in “Jackie Brown”.
IMHO, Weird Al Yankovic is a far better, more versatile, and more original comic songwriter/musician than Quentin Tarantino is a filmmaker. (Yes, there is a lot more to his catalogue than just the spoofs of hit songs…)
Yes, Weird Al does have original works. And they’re not bad.
Well said, Werewife.
Ditto. Weird Al is very talented. The other guy is just weird.
You write that all as if Spaghetti Westerns, Blaxploitation, and other B Movie genres, not to mention comic books/animation, and even just plain Westerns were not all legitimate art styles in and of themselves.
More, just because you are not particularly enamored of them does not mean they can be sneeringly dismissed as “adolescent”. Indeed one could more easily dismiss something like Spielberg’s “Lincoln” as such, since it is little more than a hyped up hero-essay, absent critical depth.
The thing is, what if we start comparing him to someone like Sergio Leone. He was 37 when he did “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, 39 when he did “Once Upon a Time in the West”, and 55 when he did “Once Upon a Time in America”. Should he have “matured” his style between the first two and the last, and not done a film like that?
What about Sam Peckinpah? While he declined, while he had significant other issues, should he have matured past doing “Cross of Iron”?
Should Ralph Bakshi or Don Bluth give up on animation?
Yeah, Quentin Tarantino works in a fringe genre. He happens to work there rather well, and while he is far from perfect his work is regularly solid. Indeed, given his embrace of a genre better known for erratic quality, his consistency is even more remarkable.
“Should Ralph Bakshi or Don Bluth give up on animation?”
Yes, please.
You are no Sergio Leone, Mr. Tarantino.
Well, there’s story and there’s the way a story is presented. Is a flat “serious” drama better than an expertly told film at the service of material you consider immature?
Watch the scene in Kill Bill 2 where Thurman fights Gordon Lieu and all the guys in masks. Say what you will about how silly the 8 or 10 min. is, the way that scene is put together is major league film and it takes brains to put it together.
So maybe Taratino’s an idiot about the New Jim Crow take on crime; he’s not putting himself out there as a social commentator.
And what’s wrong with comics and cowboys? Have you ever tried drawing a comic or writing one? Are you Stan Lee or Jack Kirby? Have you seen The Searchers or Shane or about a zillion other great films that happened to be westerns?
Good stuff is where you find it, not where you expect it to be.
I’m with Sam and Fail Burton. QT might be repeating himself, but he is one of the few directors who can write lively dialogue and pull superb performances from his actors or put together the Thurman v. Lieu fight. That said, I think that QT is one of our great directors now is a sad commentary on modern moviemaking.
Dittos from another Tarantino fan.
I’d still like to get him and Drudge in a room together and youtube the slap fight.
I just watched that fight scene with Thurman again; that’s some big time editing, and that is its own form of maturity, if that’s what you crave. Let’s not confuse the words “serious” and “sober.”
Lovecraft, Kirby, Frazetta, Bradbury, etc., may have created content that people consider silly, but they were serious artists, every bit as much as John Singer Sargent or Hemmingway.
Silly Mr. Spock would tell you wine isn’t really more sophisticated than soda pop; it’s a cultural conceit, and he’d mention their chemical composition. His conflicted human side would tell him cultural conceits are what makes the world go ’round.
I’m more concerned with anyone hiring a frickin’ racist like Foxx than anything else in this picture.
Yeah, after Fox went the complete moron I’m finding it difficult to motivate myself to pay for this in the theater despite knowing it will be just the kind of movie I expect it to be and want to see.
There should be Kirby, Frazetta, & co. exhibits in all art museums.
I’m not a big QT fan. Something about him annoys me. But he went from working in a video store to film-making superstardom. He reflects this depraved age very well, as does Seth MacFarland (sp?) in animation.
The formula was stale from the start. That Madonna scene in Reservoir Dogs is simply one step removed from a similar scene from the not-very-groundbreaking Cheers, when the gang argues about which is the “muddiest movie ever”. Anyone whose read Douglas Coupland’s early novels, with all their Gen X pop culture references, has already “seen” every QT movie.
I believe it was the “sweatiest movie ever” (with Cool Hand Luke the consensus).
Agree that the QT formula has always been stale. His movies have their moments, but on the whole generally bore me to distraction.
It’s got an 8.8 at IMDB, and it’s getting good reviews from the critics. I’d say that was a winner.
I’ll give it a look. I usually enjoy Tarantino’s movies.
Yo, Quentin… more of your stuff w/ Samuel L. Jackson in it– it’s a great combination. (The cussing does need to enhance some original material, though.)
I think I’ll do something more important than watching a Tarantino movie, like make soup.
This is the further dumbing-down of American movies for yet another generation of Americans who couldn’t spot a decent movie if they tried. Any fool can make a movie with a lot of violence, vulgar language, and little substance. But, hey, that’s what we’ve come to expect from movies today. And if young men see this, especially young men who are mentally unstable to begin with, do you really wonder why we have so many shootings (and mass shootings) in this country? There is a very definite culture of violence in America today and lowlifes like Tarantino just feed into it. Perhaps Tarantino should watch the movies on Turner Classic Movies to get a better idea of what real movies are like. But I know that is way too much to ask. Until the next mass shooting. Then I guess we’ll talk about all the senseless violence in movies today, thanks to jerks like Tarantino.
It’s easier for Hollywood’s folks to turn on gun owners than their own movies which are often a non-stop panorama of gun play and mayhem. Every celebrity who speaks out should be asked about the weapons security and bodyguards use on their behalf.
Their cognitive dissonance really does make my brain hurt. Politicians too. Especially ones that openly decry security guards at school when their children are at private schools that are protected by numerous armed security guards.
I wasn’t aware the South has snow-capped mountain ranges.
He lost me when I saw the trailer for the first time. His major female character is named “Broomhilda”?!? For an attractive black woman in the 1850s?
I don’t care if Tarantino can justify the choice of name in his own mind, considering how today’s audience will hear it, using that name is just imbecilic.
Choosing a “forward reference” can work, but only where the association between the character’s name and his or her role in movie’s story bears a reasonble relation.
But this is beyond stupid, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more commentary. No doubt the QT-is-a-genius clacque is hard at work.
TVDW* pretty much sums up how I feel about Tarantino. I don’t care if he is in the Top 10 Greatest Directors of All Time.
*Too violent, didn’t watch.
I even miss good comic books.
But maybe there’s only so much you can get out of guys in spandex, no matter how good you are.
Still, any comic books are news to a new seven year old, maybe that’s the real purpose of QT, to preserve an old art form. It’s gonna look stale to anyone who’s been around a while, it does so to me.
And here I was hoping someone would make a movie
about Django Reinhardt. Oh well back to the waiting
and I’ll pass on this crap.
Where da white women at?
Good, bad or just plain embarrassing, I won’t watch it because of the racist black man playing the lead. I’ll never watch anything he’s in again. That goes for Samuel Jackson, too.
I’m with you on that Blackgriffin. And I would add Danny Glover and Morgan Freeman to the mix too. Pity, that because I liked many of their films, but I’ll be damned if I will support those or any other racists with my hard earned money.
Woodsman, you wrote above that you “liked many of their films”. Which film including Danny Glover could you possibly have liked?
I liked Predator 2.
ditto. generally enjoy QT’s movies, don’t confuse them with reality myself. But Jamie Foxx insured he would get none of my money with his comments.
Similarly, Zero Dark Thirty gets a political boycott from me.
Hard to understand anybody taking this film as art in any way, it is propaganda. It is hate mongering of the wickedest order. This is training for OB’s million man army of people born with anger and hate. Stock up, get a weapon.
Look folks, everything Hollywood does is agitation-propaganda for the Democrat regime. If the political label “progressive” doesn’t fit you, then you need to know these people are not on your side. Why support them by seeing their movies?
This is a big reason (one of several) why I have stopped going to movies.
Tarantino is a guttersnipe. And I don’t want to encourage him. His fans are doubtless numerous enough to keep him comfortable for as long as he makes movies. But I’m not among them, and never will be.
Tarantino has seen too many films? I leave deconstruction to progressives and either like or dislike a movie based on, you know, the movie I’ve seen. Pastiche? Seems to me I’ve heard similar criticisms in other reviews. Hmmm. Well, amateurs borrow while professionals steal, after all.
A little Tarantino goes a long way. I found the same to be true of David Lynch, Tim Burton, John Hughes, and a number of others. They tend to be highly stylized and obsessive about particular subjects. As their careers go on, I feel like they’re making the same movie over and over again – and the movie’s about THEM. Of course, this isn’t always true. Hitchcock made movie after movie using a similar style and with similar themes. However, I never felt Hitch was tap-dancing in the front aisle, trying to get my attention. A good director knows how to get out of the way.
So I’m going to pass on the latest QT tribute to retro-schlock-cinema. I’ve long since grown weary of his postmodern recycling of crap from the 70s. For some reason, he and the critics seem to think that’s the most important aspect of his filmmaking. I’ve always thought it was his gifts for characterization, dialog, and creating intense, jewel-like little dramatic scenes out of mundane situations. If he’d give the retro trash a rest, I’d start watching him again.
Tarantino is a talent, there is no doubt about that. And he brings some originality to his movies, which is not all that common in Hollywood. But the other side of it is that he uses violence and cruelty a lot, and if any thing the cruel part is more important than the violent part. There is something a little sick about the guy. For example…
The most disgusting movie I have ever seen is Natural Born Killers. The thing is, the man-women pair just go around shooting people for the hell of it, and in everyday situations. You know, you want to pop somebody, you do it, and drive off laughing. Anyway, thinking about the Tarantino movies I have seen, it occurred to me that they had some of the features of Natural Born Killers. So out of curiosity I did a little looking around the Internet, and guess what, Tarantino was one of the creative talents in Natural Born Killers.
The guy has got something going on when it comes to sadism and killing. He seems to get off on a kind of everyday cruelty frequently directed not at stereotyped villains, but at more or less ordinary people.