My Writings
Review -Django Unchained (2013)
Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained proves that reputations still count for everything in mainstream cinema, despite Ben Affleck's recent Best Picture win at the Golden Globes for Argo. Django has been nominated for 9 awards, and has already won Best Screenplay and Best Director at The Golden Globes. His previous movie, Inglorious Basterds was also nominated for 9 awards, winning the Critics choice for best original screenplay. Presumably none of these associations, including the Academy Awards judges, have seen Seven Psychopaths, a film by the relatively unknown Martin McDonagh, which strikingly reminds us of Tarantino at his best, as represented by Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill One and Two.
In deciding that Django Unchained deserves to win a best writing award, it would be an oversight not to come to the conclusion that both main plot structures make little sense. The Schultz character (overacted nicely by Christoph Waltz) is a supremely gifted and successful bounty hunter who is seeking the nasty Brittle brothers. The three brothers have changed their names and Waltz cannot find them. But he can find someone who can tell him of someone who knows what these three look like. This is the Django character (Jamie Foxx).So Waltz goes to great lengths to free Django from the hands of some nasty looking slave traders, and enters into an agreement with his to get Django to help him. Afterwards he finds out, more by luck than judgement that Django has a natural gift for rifle shooting - Django is as surprised as he is.
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Eventually the two enter into an agreement to save Django's wife (Kerry Washington) from Leonardo di Caprio's slave baron (Calvin Candie). Waltz seems to have struck on this extremely risky idea because Django's slave wife is known as Broomhilda, a German name given to her by her owners for some spurious reason. Shultz is also German. Hey us Germans' and us pretend-Germans, we gotta stick together, right? Its probably gonna get me killed, but hey, lets do it anyway.
This is stretching credibility and not for the first time. And its not as if the rest of the film had any interesting plot devices either, just a straightforward denouement, and a question of who lives and who dies in the inevitable shootout.
On the plus side of the movie we had cameo appearances popping up all over, and I really enjoyed spotting Don Stroud, Bruce Dern and James Russo, as well as an appearance by the original Django, Franco Nero. The original Django movie was of course, utterly ridiculous, but also effortlessly cool. It took the heart of Sergio Leone's marvellous spaghetti westerns and took the action to a different level, exaggerating the set plays and the invincibility of the main character, who spent most of the movie dragging a coffin around with him.
Of course Tarantino is the super-nerd whose ache to be cool drives his film-making. It occasionally helps him create genius work, evidenced by his greatest movie, Jackie Brown. Jackie Brown was criticised in some quarters due to its use of the n-word expletive. Spike Lee was one critic, unhappy that the characters in Jackie Brown used the n word to refer to each other.
I disagreed with Lee then, and Tarantino was quite correct to explain that it was very realistic, this is how these types of characters refer to themselves in real life. But there is a difference. In Jackie Brown, the characters were sassy, clever, and cool. They used the n-word to refer to themselves, or their counterparts as a sly in-joke. No white person had better call them it, but in the meantime, they don't mind ribbing each other with it, or at their own expense.