Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

[Jeff]

The Weinsteins and Sony have kicked off their marketing campaign.

[feihong]

It's really a nice drawing of a chain. Very retro.

Though the photo of the guys and the grass doesn't work as well for me.

[Dylan]

Great poster! It reminds me of the Saul Bass design for The Human Factor

[kidc85]

Although I find Tarantino hit-and-miss as a director his status as highly influential arbiter of taste makes him, for me, an invaluable figure in modern cinema. I know people who would never otherwise dream of watching a film that hasn't been released in the past two years go out and watch Castellari, Shaw Bros and Sonny Chiba, and so the idea that DU might inspire people to watch a spaghetti western that isn't called GBU is possibly more exciting than the film itself.

[Jeff]

A couple of set pics courtesy of Entertainment Weekly:

[mfunk9786]

Look at that coat!

[FerdinandGriffon]

Which one? I lean toward's Foxx's and DiCaprio's myself.

[mfunk9786]

Do you really have to ask which one?

[Robin Davies]

DiCaprio's seems to be a smoking jacket...

[Jeff]

DiCaprio's seems to be a smoking jacket...

<rimshot!>

[flyonthewall2983]

The way Foxx describes the story and the relationship between the two characters, it sounds like it's going to be a bit more somber in tone than expected.

[joshua]

Robin Davies wrote:
DiCaprio's seems to be a smoking jacket...

<rimshot!>

Nice one. It took me a minute to catch the obvious.

As a side note, it look like Tarantino might be jumping on the hammer-violence train. The hammer sure has become the weapon of choice lately.

[Zot!]

Robin Davies wrote:
DiCaprio's seems to be a smoking jacket...

<rimshot!>

Nice one. It took me a minute to catch the obvious.

As a side note, it look like Tarantino might be jumping on the hammer-violence train. The hammer sure has become the weapon of choice lately.

Ah yes, the hammer-violence sub genre.

[knives]

If nothing else this promises to be a very pretty film.

[tarpilot]

[Ah yes, the hammer-violence sub genre.

Imagine my delight when I discovered what is perhaps the genre's genesis in Griffith's The Girl and Her Trust, in which the protagonist uses a hammer to smash a bullet through a keyhole to scare off some robbers!

[whaleallright]

This film is bound to launch a thousand scholarly papers and online think pieces about the representation of American slavery (especially in terms of racialized sexuality), the way Mandingo should have done. I'm both looking forward to it and a little squeamish.

[feihong]

You are undoubtedly going to be proven right. It's kind of a shame, since I don't think Tarantino's films are generally about what most people think they're about anyway. A lot of the outrageousness of them usually seems to be window-dressing, disguising some more interesting use of cinema.

[Cold Bishop]

I, for one, think this has the potential to be his best film. He may finally be forced away from the (admittedly entertaining) navel-gazing that mark his usual films, which are mostly about his own love of movies.

[Andre Jurieu]

He may finally be forced away from the (admittedly entertaining) navel-gazing that mark his usual films, which are mostly about his own love of movies.

I'm going to predict that you will be disappointed because he can't avoid that no matter how much he tries (and I don't really think we would put effort into avoiding that tendency).

I also predict this film will regrettably spawn a lot of tiresomely repetitive discussion on whether or not Tarantino is allowed to use certain words and offer any perspective regarding the subject matter since he's an annoying, white, former video-store, film geek who has a limited scope of enthusiasm. That's not really much of a bold prediction considering that track has been on repeat for the last 15 years, or at least since Jackie Brown.

Finally, I predict I'll probably watch this on the opening day.

[mfunk9786]

I just like the guy's movies, it must be exhausting to put so much thought into their influences that you can't even enjoy them for what they are.

[matrixschmatrix]

Haha, what they are is as often as not a dense collage of images and characters he's repurposed, though

[mfunk9786]

In a sharp, smart, entertaining way? Or just like a YouTube collage of old movie clips?

[Andre Jurieu]

...it must be exhausting to put so much thought into their influences that you can't even enjoy them for what they are.

I'm in agreement for the most-part. I do enjoy either noticing or being informed of some of his influences, but it's certainly not where I would focus my efforts when watching his work.

Haha, what they are is as often as not a dense collage of images and characters he's repurposed, though

I'm not sure if that's a problem.

[knives]

The problem though is how he utilizes those images without applying any purpose to them. We get that American Boy quote in Pulp Fiction because he like Scorsese and likes the image from that film, but it accomplishes nothing outside of what the original did without the emotional backing of the context. His films are simply mixtapes and are no different from those youtube clips in what they accomplish. At least with someone like Godard he's utilizing those quotations to make some sort of point, but Tarantino is free of ideas.

[Mr Sausage]

But Tarantino isn't just passively displaying influence. He's making highly self-conscious allusions to other films. For a viewer not to follow up on that is, to me, like a reader not bothering to follow up on the allusions in Paradise Lost or a Nabokov novel or some other highly and deliberately allusive piece of work. The allusions are such an essential part of the texture of the thing, and each one is an invitation to follow up on what is being referred to.

Part of Tarantino's whole project lately is to show how essential and fundamental certain narratives and themes are to film by filming them with radically different modes of discourse that he's constantly shuffling through. At any one moment a single story can be told as a war film, a spaghetti western, a kung fu film, a samurai film, a neo-noir, an anime, ect. Amidst that jumble of different genre discourses we see what stays constant in the narrative and the thematic apparatus, and those constants end up grounding the network of allusion, quotation, and mimicry to the point where all the different genre styles from different countries and eras come to seem very much equivalent. As discourses, they all encompass each other and accomplish the same ends. This is what allows Tarantino to slip in his own originality, too, since the parts that remain constant amidst the jumble of styles get isolated, allowing Tarantino to alter them in knowing ways (knowing in the sense that, being in on the allusions, and being fed enough of them throughout the movie to be reminded of all the familiar tropes, we are made aware of when Tarantino suddenly goes against the grain in some blatant way and can appreciate that deliberate addition to the list of conceits).

This kind of filmmaking depends on the viewer being able to follow the texture of allusion. Obviously, some allusions are more on the surface than others (names of characters reflecting certain directors or other film characters), but even these allusions serve to indicate in some small way the kind of films and the kind of discourses necessary to understand the movie. Granted, there may be a certain amount of superfluous allusion, as Tarantino does not always exercise rigorous control in this and other areas. But the point remains.

To say that to expend effort in tracking down the allusions in a work built entirely around them is to miss the point of the movie is blatantly wrong. Whatever Tarantino's movies are, you are not going to find out by ignoring what they are so insistently bringing to your attention.