Editorials

Django Unchained – A Movie Review

“I didn’t go to film school. I went to films.”

– Quentin Tarantino

 

There will never be a director like Quentin Tarantino simply because he’s not just a director. He’s almost like a DJ, sampling  and pilfering through tasty movie genres and infusing the whole re-remix together with his own unique and incomparable writing mojo. Life is just too short to squander on bad movies. Life is even shorter to miss gems like Django Unchained.

In this cookie-cutter and oft times, spirit-crushing age that is today’s world of bland Hollywood movie-making, Tarantino effortlessly maintains his dominion as the untouchable man on the hill. Waiting for a Tarantino movie to come out is like waiting for a new Tool album or the latest entry into your favorite, critically-acclaimed video game franchise. You’ll wait for it and you’ll wait for it happily.

Q.T directs with all the confidence and cool of an outlaw cowboy shooting straight from the hip and he hits the mark every time. And his latest film, a bloody revenge tale, Django Unchained goes to every entertaining and horrific length to make YOU and your tender sensibilities its primary target.

Set two years prior to the American Civil War, Django Unchained roars from the starting line when dentist-turned-bounty hunter, Dr. King Schlutz (played to elegant perfection by Christoph Waltz) meets recently sold slave, Django (a steely-eyed Jamie Foxx) and through mutual agendas, they form a partnership based on collecting corpses for cash. This partnership elevates into touching camaraderie when Schlutz discovers that Django’s wife, a German-raised African slave, Broomhilda has been sold to a heartless, silver spoon-born plantation owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo Dicaprio turning up his best spoiled brat bravura.)


Django Unchained is a stylish and violent and provocative mish-mash of two genres: spaghetti western and southern pulp. But that’s just a bare outline that doesn’t make mention of the film’s sympathetic vigilante heart.

The film itself is a staggering epic full of trademark Tarantino black humor, stinging driving dialogue and the most beautiful southern frontier camerawork cherry-picked right out of a Sergio Leone flick. As he did in Inglourious Basterds with the Holocaust, Tarantino sets Django behind another awful historic backdrop – slavery.

Ignore the nitpickers like knee-jerk directors-who-haven’t-made-shit-in-years like Spike Lee who have criticized the film for its overuse of the word “nigger.” That’s like someone walking into the Louvre and just criticizing a Michelangelo just because there’s a painted nude woman in it.

Instead, accept the fact that this particular brand of rampant racism existed and thrived and that many of the brutalities visited upon the slaves in the film actually stemmed from real historical accounts, so defends auteur, Quentin. It’s just as true and raw as the Holocaust, give or take. And Quentin pulls zero punches when depicting slavery’s vicious inhumanity. Your thoughts will bounce back to this paragraph when you’re flinching at a horrific scene featuring runaway slave, D’artagnan being torn apart limb from limb by a pack of dogs. But like every gleeful exploitation film, everyone gets what’s coming to them in the worst way possible.

At its core, Django is a revenge film. And the word massacre doesn’t even begin to describe the full-blown carnage and every bit of it is enjoyable precisely because the jury in our minds demand for overkill.

 

Music also plays a crucial role, especially during the flashback sequences with Anthony Hamilton’s “Freedom” sadly chronicling Broomhilda and Django’s initial and doomed escape from their white captors. Stand out performances include Samuel L. Jackson as a self-hating Uncle Tom-type, Leonardo DiCaprio as a southern antebellum plantation prince, Christoph Waltz as Django’s emphatic mentor and Kerry Washington as Broomhilda – the only reason and driving engine for Django’s single-minded mission of awe-inspiring vengeance. You can tell all of the actors are having a blast on set, especially Don Johnson’s “Big Daddy.”

But trying to review this movie is futile. If you spent the rest of your life trying to explain what sex feels like to a virgin, you’d both die out of frustration. And if someone tried explaining to you what it felt like to be a slave, to be without one’s own humanity, to be someone’s property, you wouldn’t have the slightest idea of what it meant. Django Unchained, however exaggerated it may be, is that impossible portal. And it’s fun as hell.

 

 

 

 

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