Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

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mfunk9786
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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#526 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Apr 18, 2013 3:12 pm

matrixschmatrix wrote:I actually liked Foxx more than I expected to- he's not an actor I usually like, and I think he was a detriment in the otherwise excellent Collateral, but his sense of irrepressible, cocky self confidence seemed to be exactly what Tarantino was going for here. Complaining that you don't like the character being performed isn't really the same thing as thinking the role was miscast, in any case.
I'm with you on that. He's often playing grittier roles than he probably should be - he's got an air of pizzazz to his delivery and the way he carries himself, and that star quality really paid off here. Outside of the fact that he's a Texan who has a ranch there - he was a much better fit for the role than Denzel Washington, the example that chatterjees gave, or Will Smith, who was who Tarantino originally pictured.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#527 Post by John Cope » Thu Apr 18, 2013 4:25 pm

I still haven't seen Django but I most definitely take issue with this:
chatterjees wrote:I love Clint Eastwood, but I understand the fact he is going for a World record as a direct to make the collection of the most worst films made in a decade!!!

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#528 Post by Murdoch » Thu Apr 18, 2013 4:30 pm

I thought it would have been interesting to see Smith in this type of role given his usual casting as an invincible action hero. Still, I think Foxx was better casting if only because Smith would have pushed to be further in the center of the film and then have his son replace Waltz (I kid... sort of).

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#529 Post by scotty2 » Sun Apr 21, 2013 2:28 pm

I wrote this a while back right after seeing the film. I still see it as a kind of guilty pleasure I like more than I should.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#530 Post by feihong » Mon Apr 22, 2013 4:10 am

I saw the film again tonight on a larger screen, and the experience changed my mind about the movie. It comes off much better than I felt it did initially. Reading the images in a larger context meant I could read little details heretofore denied me by the picture, like the way in the first scene Django transforms immediately into a free man, and the way Django's identity as an "epic hero" dawns on us as it dawns on Schultz.

Initially I was, like a lot of people, put off by the way Schultz gets written out 3/4s of the way through the picture. But seeing it this time around, it seemed as if Schultz's character journey had reached its proper conclusion, and the last quarter of the movie was about Django demonstrating all he's learned; the skills he's acquired as a gunfighter, a strategist, a bargainer, a bounty hunter...his cunning, his dead-on accuracy, his flair and style come alive in that last portion of the film, as if he was waiting for his mentor to exit the stage before revealing himself. Probably my initial disappointment in this aspect of the film was the imbalance I perceived between Schultz's and Django's character arcs. But as my father pointed out (he watched with me this time--I think it made a difference that there was a larger audience this time around) Schultz's journey necessarily had to be longer than Django's, and shaped differently. Schultz comes from being uninitiated to feeling the kind of rage that Django knows full well by the beginning of the movie. Django has felt this rage, perhaps all his life. Schultz is learning it for the first time. So Schultz's character arc is more round, perhaps. Whereas Django's arc is like a ramp that ascends steadily in a straight line. What I didn't see or feel the first time I saw the picture was that Django was testing his freedom in every scene, steadily enlarging his daring and courage with each further success. The film is very quiet about that evolution. And you have to read it from large images, where you can see the subtle shifts in facial expressions which accompany Django's realizations and understandings.

Seeing it this time, the ending act did not seem out of place. For one thing, the mythological position Django occupied was so much more clearly drawn for me. Besides the textual references, besides Django's anachronistic presence (complete with a German-speaking wife out of mythology), the plot tests Django's heroic qualities in gradually increasing measure as the movie advances. Django sees visions of his wife. Django experiences vivid flashbacks. It was interesting to me that Schultz also experiences those vivid flashbacks, in shorter form, as he nears the end of his character arc; as he reaches a place in which he truly understands Django's rage. So Schultz is approaching the place where the horrors of slavery are haunting his waking dreams. Django begins the film that way, and while Schultz's character arc moves from innocence to anger, Django's arc begins with anger, which is changed by his being freed and which gradually transforms into transcendence. His victory is doubled, in that he gets exactly what he wants in the end, but he also gains a kind of mythological ascendancy; which is why he seems relaxed and free to be a silly show-off at the end after he blows Candyland sky high.

Anyway, it was very interesting. I still think the editing is very poor (obviously rushed, but also maybe just carried out without so much imaginative intellect and vigor), but now I feel as if the acting--especially the very good acting by Jamie Foxx--is entirely appropriate and important to the movie. And reading about Will Smith wanting to have Django kill Candie just makes me pretty certain now that Smith would have ruined it.

I was thinking I wouldn't own this movie, but now I think I might want to.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#531 Post by sighkingu » Fri May 03, 2013 4:11 pm

From the latest Film Comment, Kent Jones' take on Tarantino's dissing of John Ford.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#532 Post by kingofthejungle » Fri May 03, 2013 6:59 pm

As a fan of westerns, that Kent Jones piece feels like a liberation. Thanks for the link.

BTW, does anyone get Tarantino's William Witney fetish? I've been studying B-westerns lately, which can be quite a chore, and Witney hasn't struck me as someone who transcends his peers. He seems like a poor man's George Sherman to me (and that requires a pretty poor man, indeed).


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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#534 Post by knives » Fri May 03, 2013 7:51 pm

I do resent Harlan being called a cheap propagandist though. Much as Ford who he is defending Harlan's career is more complicated than the bad image of some of his films give.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#535 Post by stroszeck » Sun May 05, 2013 11:57 pm

Interesting interview. I heard about A Stranger At My Door a few years back and would love to track down a copy but alas I don't believe its available (like most of Whitney's movies)

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#536 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Aug 24, 2013 11:30 am

Hmmm..I'm ambivalent about this film. On the one hand Foxx and the rest of the cast are excellent in their roles (apart from Tarantino himself as usual, playing an...Australian?!?) but on the other this just as ugly in tone as Inglourious Basterds was. I did feel incredibly disappointed that the film degenerates into futile violence after hoping that the characters would find a less apocalyptically violent way out of their troubles, but I guess this is necessary because of the subject matter of both this and the previous film. You've got to have the catharsis of killing everyone who wronged you and that is what the fictional treatment of slavery provides, much as the fictional treatment of World War Two gave the opportunity to blast Hitler apart. (It is telling though that after all of the fictionalised factual characters in Inglourious Basterds, from Churchill to Hitler, there is no central factual slaver figurehead that can be produced for this film, with DiCaprio instead having to portray a purely fictional creation of 'ultimate evil' that even more sympathetic plantation owners can get contrasted against)

That's fine but as with Inglourious Basterds it turns the heroes into cruelly revenging bastards themselves, no matter how justified they are. This is something that has been ongoing since the group of girls in Death Proof, and I'm still longing for the time when characters used their wits rather than pure violence to put one over on their oppressors (Jackie Brown and some of the characters in Pulp Fiction for example). Even Kill Bill might have been a violent revenge tale but there was that sense of thinking up ways to beat opponents rather than just blasting them willy nilly.

Django does have that initial revenge on the three brothers section and training with a mentor montage section reminiscent of Kill Bill, but then feels as if it turns into a similarly structured film to Inglourious Basterds. The same run through minor confrontations in smaller settings before the major setpiece location (and the use of a big entrance hall with a staircase to provide different levels of action); veiled identities, including a similar interrogation of a recently tortured female character for information (Bridget von Hammersmark/Broomhilda von Shaft); and the secondary bad guy character who figures out the scheme and trips up the heroes.

And especially the theme of the pretentious intellectual (Archie in Inglourious, Schultz here) who confidently gets themselves into a tricky situation by overestimating themselves before fucking everything up for the real hero. I was especially disappointed by this turn as about halfway through the long dinner scene in Django I remember thinking to myself "it is very impressive that Tarantino has managed not to push the reset button on the scene as he had done with the café scene in Inglourious! Perhaps it'll turn into something much more threatening and disturbing in its implications such as the opening scene with Landa at the beginning of Inglourious instead", only to have the reset button inevitably get pushed later on!

It is especially apparent here as I get the impression that if Schultz had been able to hold back (and been able to accept his own very minor form of 'slavery' that Candie puts him into by having found out his alterior motives), everyone could have walked out. So really our heroes are the ones who mess their plans up, although by messing up they allow themselves the luxury of having the ultraviolent "kill 'em all" ending that finally solves slavery/Nazism forever! So everyone wins! :roll:

There's a moral dubiousness here to the idea of meeting violence with equal violence (can a corrupt ideology ever be totally destroyed by violence?) that I don't really feel from even something as bleakly nihilistic as Django, Kill! Sure it is cathartic and entertainingly bloody, but it is also a hollow approach to tackling the world's problems.

I guess I would have much preferred a Nat Turner biopic, but then that would have run up against a Spartacus/Braveheart-style ending of the rebellion being crushed rather than the happy ending we get here.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#537 Post by domino harvey » Sat Aug 24, 2013 11:42 am

colinr0380 wrote:It is especially apparent here as I get the impression that if Schultz had been able to hold back (and been able to accept his own very minor form of 'slavery' that Candie puts him into by having found out his alterior motives), everyone could have walked out. So really our heroes are the ones who mess their plans up, although by messing up they allow themselves the luxury of having the ultraviolent "kill 'em all" ending that finally solves slavery/Nazism forever! So everyone wins! :roll:
This sequence is really offensive to me as well because it's so clearly intended to be audience-pleasing but Waltz's behavior is so wrong-headed that I could never totally rejoin the film afterwards. They could've all walked out of there and instead a suicidal act is supposed to be like totally badass. DiCaprio's villain is painted with more complexity than just being abjectly evil but his capitalism is still equated with larger horrors by the film. That he doesn't immediately kill everyone when the deception is uncovered but simply raises the price, that makes a cruel kind of sense-- but it's not evil. But to the film this arrogance is tantamount to apologia for slavery and so he has to die. But the heroes are more arrogant still and we're stuck with one of them for the rest of the film, which just goes on and on after this natural finale until it degenerates into a western-locale-set FPS

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#538 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Aug 24, 2013 11:52 am

Exactly. There is some great foreshadowing of Schultz's final screw up through most of the earlier sections - from as soon as they reach Mississippi and Schultz describes his plan he has lost his status as mentor to Django and is being pushed to the margins of the picture as the irrelevance everyone knows he is, despite having to put up a show. This is the best section of the film as his increasing nervousness, and messing up, is contrasting with Django's increasing confidence and capability in handling his situation.

And then at the very last moment, and after no longer even needing to put up an act, Schultz messes everything up in a move that feels less justified for his character and more to allow for the inevitable bloodbath that the film up to that point has been brilliantly threatening but avoiding, after everything had seemed to be on course to lead to a much more ambivalent and complicated ending.

The film makes an audacious move (not as audacious as not painting the walls with blood would have been though!), but not one that works to inspire any sympathy for any of our remaining characters. It feels as if in these last two films Tarantino has gotten closer than anyone to turning the Simpsons episode which remakes the ending of Mr Smith Goes To Washington as an action film into reality. Just with the irony replaced with film references, which isn't exactly the same thing.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#539 Post by stroszeck » Sat Aug 24, 2013 4:42 pm

I read somewhere, and it might've been in an interview with Tarantino himself, where basically Candie was too unpredictable a person and may have just waited
SpoilerShow
to shake Schultzs hand to get that final satisfaction of humiliating defeat before he ended up basically offing everyone anyway. That makes a bit of sense but again I always felt the best plan they could've taken was to simply have Schultz use the excuse of broomhilda being able to speak German to barter with Candie a bit
.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#540 Post by Cold Bishop » Sat Aug 24, 2013 8:24 pm

But none of that's in the film. If Tarantino had included the aborted Scotty chapter, then maybe we could buy Candie as being that dangerous and malicious. But, as Domino points out, the character we get is much "softer", to use a lack of a better term.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#541 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Aug 24, 2013 9:04 pm

stroszeck wrote:I read somewhere, and it might've been in an interview with Tarantino himself, where basically Candie was too unpredictable a person and may have just waited
SpoilerShow
to shake Schultzs hand to get that final satisfaction of humiliating defeat before he ended up basically offing everyone anyway. That makes a bit of sense but again I always felt the best plan they could've taken was to simply have Schultz use the excuse of broomhilda being able to speak German to barter with Candie a bit
I agree that there is that sense of danger there in the enforced handshake. But then Schultz has played his own part in pushing to that brink of violence himself by antagonising Candie, when he really should just have had the sense to keep his mouth shut in order to get out of there, as Django and Broomhilda are doing.

And any moral superiority that Schultz has over Candie in that scene is immediately nullified by getting the first shot in (without the paperwork being in order either! Very much a 'Greedo shoots first' situation!), whereas if Schultz had allowed himself to be shot first, if indeed that was what was going to happen, at least our heroes would have been fully justified in fighting their way out of whatever shootout was to follow.

I guess this could be seen as interestingly complicating the line between heroic characters committing callous acts out of a sense of righteous vengeance set against representatives of a horrific ideology suddenly becoming kind of sympathetic as they are bloodily shot to pieces for the greater good. But then that problematic idea was already covered pretty thoroughly in Inglourious Basterds. All this means that the film might work as a fun revenge fantasy but the 'either/or' approach is precluding the films from getting towards more complicated, and truly worthwhile (and potentially truly justifiable as being classed as 'inflammatory'), insights into their subject matter.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#542 Post by knives » Sat Aug 24, 2013 9:15 pm

colinr0380 wrote: And any moral superiority that Schultz has over Candie in that scene is immediately nullified by getting the first shot in (without the paperwork being in order either! Very much a 'Greedo shoots first' situation!), whereas if Schultz had allowed himself to be shot first, if indeed that was what was going to happen, at least our heroes would have been fully justified in fighting their way out of whatever shootout was to follow.
With this business I think the point is that the law is wrong to allow someone like Candie live. Schultz was knowingly going in on a suicide mission there and seemed perfectly comfortable dying if the end result was Candie dying too. There's certainly a questionable morality to the scene, but what occurs fits with the morality the film had been trying to define up until that point. Namely that any tolerance of criminal institutions such as slavery is morally unjustified and as wrong as committing and being a part of that institution. No 'good Germans'.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#543 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Aug 25, 2013 5:24 am

But that itself cuts against the earlier Don Johnson scene as the relatively 'good slaver' (in a slightly more enlightened part of the South, which seems to be meant to contrast with the descent into the hell of Mississippi) who Schultz is able to tolerate.

Schultz might have felt the pain of slavery for the first time at Candieland but even that makes him a flawed character in the sense that he had previously tolerated a whole lot of the same before it was so in his face as a runaway slave being ripped apart by dogs. Was he just naïve about slavery all that time until having his Candieland epiphany (which makes his character seem stupid in the earlier sections of the film)? If so his final act ironically is a totally selfish one in taking out the easiest to kill bad guy of his career, without any thought to what situation Django and Broomhilda will be left in afterwards.

(Although we could perhaps see it in mythic terms in that he is setting up the 'dragon' for his Seigfried to slay and rescue his princess from! Perhaps the film is a comment on the selfishness of people trying to live a 'mythic' lifestyle and needing the conflict to struggle against in order to facilitate that!)

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#544 Post by knives » Sun Aug 25, 2013 1:34 pm

I disagree with your assessment of Johnson or are you forgetting about the KKK scene immediately after that?

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#545 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Aug 25, 2013 2:07 pm

I apologise - yes, I did forget that! But then Schultz and Django do set up a situation where they let their wagon get surrounded and attacked before legitimately massacring the KKK. That was a smart move, but that makes Shultz's stupidity later on even worse. If Schultz had shot Johnson through the head after they'd killed the brothers rather than given him the Dead or Alive warrant, he would have been just as stupidly impetuous as he was at Candieland. But somehow he is able to hold back, and set up that trap for if/when they do get pursued.

EDIT: I also think that an even bigger issue with the film is not just Schultz but also the structure. Compared to the quite elegant way that the two separate plotlines following Shosanna and the Basterds were kept as almost entirely separate cells in Inglourious Basterds, it is much more problematic to have Django embody both the legitimate figure of vengeance and the overkilling ultraviolent figure.

I guess this is the major difference between Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds, and probably the reason for revisiting such a similarly structured film, but I think that separation into separate bands helped that film to be both gloriously over the top gore fests (with people who do not really understand the 'wider picture') and a much more narrowly focused Kill Bill-style purposeful revenge with Shosanna.

Django Unchained muddies those same kinds of character motivations together into the one central figure (can you be vengeful on both a specific and wider level simultaneously, or does one cancel the other out?), and while it might grow on me with further viewings I don't feel as comfortable in saying that it succeeds in its purpose, unlike Inglourious Basterds.

(Did anyone else get the sense that once Broomhilda makes her flesh-and-blood appearance in the film that she really should have been a more active character in the film to put her in the mould of Tarantino's other feisty heroines? Here we get told of her constant attempts to escape, and she has the moment of trying to lie to Stephen, but she remains a rather passive figure otherwise)
Last edited by colinr0380 on Tue Aug 27, 2013 4:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#546 Post by knives » Sun Aug 25, 2013 2:15 pm

That's just part of Schultz's character evolvement to me. He starts off willing to work within a corrupt system (he talks about this when he first 'buys' Django)and only slowing by getting to see the horrors of slavery first hand does he begin to change his stance until any toleration with a slaver seems wrong. The murder of that one run away by dog strikes me as his major turning point. It also strikes as important that he is German rather than say Waltz's own Austrian given the rebellion that probably forced Schultz to come to America in the first place.

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#547 Post by domino harvey » Wed Mar 30, 2016 6:08 pm

Reddit of all places has produced a compelling defense of Waltz' actions in this film

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Re: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

#548 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Mar 31, 2016 6:52 am

I like it but I think it overemphasizes KIng's arrogance considering the opening of that scene is a shot of King brooding in a chair, remembering the slave being torn apart by dogs. That's a bit more than nursing a personal defeat. There is also righteous disgust and a sense that King is associating his own defeat here with the larger and more disgusting social and cultural defeat that Candy now represents to him.

Anyway, I always took King's decision (one Candy essentially goads him into with his insistence on humiliating him) to be a variation on a theme that Tarantino used back in Reservoir Dogs when Tim Roth makes his final decision: the thing you don't want to do but have to do, a choice you are compelled towards over self-preservation and better reason. Hence King's apology: "Sorry, but I had to."

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Re: Rules Don't Apply (Warren Beatty, 2016)

#549 Post by Cremildo » Thu Sep 29, 2016 4:28 pm

bearcuborg wrote:
bainbridgezu wrote:
domino harvey wrote:It's too bad Tarantino wasn't able to convince him to take the titular role in Kill Bill, but at the very least thank God Town & Country won't go down as Beatty's last film!
Agreed on both counts. The story behind his refusal of Kill Bill remains one of my favorite filmmaking anecdotes. For anyone who doesn't know: Tarantino finally convinced Beatty to take the part, only to have him balk upon learning that he was expected to attend early-morning martial arts lessons with the rest of the cast.
I also like the story of Will Smith refusing to do Django over the ending. Will wanting love to be the answer, not violence. Too bad Quentin didn't listen, it might have taken that movie into more a mature Jackie Brown ending, rather than his juvenile revenge fantasies of the past decade.
Sure. Let's have our finest filmmakers compromise their own material and just listen to vainglorious stars spouting their "love conquers all" BS.

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Re: Rules Don't Apply (Warren Beatty, 2016)

#550 Post by Randall Maysin » Thu Sep 29, 2016 4:54 pm

Well, maybe Will Smith isn't the person to do it, but Tarantino and a few other major filmmakers could do with a little....straightening out, let's say. Talent doesn't make one infallible, oh ho, it sure doesn't.

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