Django Unchained (2012)

Python wrote:

How was the movie racist?

It stereotypes Southerners. Quentin Tarantino and Jamie Foxx are both racists. Their statements are racist. Hence the movie is racist.

Good comment on a Guardian blog page about Tarantino.

Quote :

His reaction was petulant, silly, and brattish and betrayed Tarantino's lack of character. Sam Peckinpah was subjected to the same kind of fairly gentle interrogation throughout his career, particularly when he was interviewed in the UK, and he (mostly) responded with dignity and restraint whenever he was scrutinised about violence, despite his ocasionally evident frustration (watch his interview with Barry Norman from 1976 if you can).

Sam learned about violence the hard way, having served in the Marines and witnessed numerous atrocities, whereas Quentin learned about violence from working in a video shop.

This is probably why Sam's at their best remaining sad, affecting and deeply moral, whereas Tarantino's are shown up to be nothing but fireworks and in-jokes after repeated viewing.

I think it was really fucking stupid to pull the toys. If the toys are racist, why is the movie not being pulled too?

I was also fucking stupid not to see this coming because the toys that survived the recall are now being sold on eBay for big money and I did not get any.

By the way, these dolls remind me of this...

Mrs Aural Sects wrote:

I think it was really fucking stupid to pull the toys. If the toys are racist, why is the movie not being pulled too?

I was also fucking stupid not to see this coming because the toys that survived the recall are now being sold on eBay for big money and I did not get any.

By the way, these dolls remind me of this...

Agree completely. How is the movie any less racist than the toys that were produced from it? Are the movie posters racist? Is the soundtrack racist?

http://www.deadline.com/2013/01/django-unchained-action-figures-pulled-controversy/

Action figures created for Quentin Tarantino’s slave pic Django Unchained are going for $300 apiece and up right now on sites like eBay after distributor The Weinstein Company announced today it was pulling they toys off the shelves. The dolls based on the Best Picture Oscar nominee prompted pundits and civil rights groups including Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network to call for a boycott. The NECA-issued toys had been selling for $39.99 on Amazon and had been created “as a matter of course” for fans 17 years and older, according to the studio, which released a statement today announcing the move. “In light of the reaction to the Django Unchained action figures we are removing them from distribution. We have tremendous respect for the audience and it was never our intent to offend anyone. Action figures have been created for all of Quentin’s films including Inglourious Basterds, and as a matter of course produced them for Django Unchained as well. “They were meant to be collectibles for people 17 years and older, which is the audience for the film.” Right now, a complete set of the toys is bidding up past $1000 and counting on eBay.

Question: what specifically was Al "Tawana Brawley" Sharpton suggesting be boycotted if the dolls weren't pulled from shelves? The 1,000 limited edition dolls? And isn't it a bit late to threaten to boycott a movie that has been out nearly a month? How do you boycott a movie that has already made $130 million dollars?

And why are the toys made for people only 17 and up? Are the dolls anatomically correct? Do the dolls speak racist comments? Does it wet the bed?

Claims that the movie was racist are misguided and stupid. I can see why the toys got pulled. The images in the movie are within a specific context and point of view-- the toys are more ambiguous and can be used in ways distant from how they were in the film. I can see why they would make some people uncomfortable.

FieldsMan wrote:

Largo's Shark wrote:

FieldsMan wrote:

Eh, imagine someone coming up to you and saying your work is the cause of all violence in the world. He isn't the first director to have violence in films. What about Scorsese? Kubrick? The list is endless.

Where did the interviewer say that QT is the "cause of all violence in the world?" That said, with the size of Tarantino's ego, I'm wouldn't be surprised if that's how he interpreted the whole interview, feeding his own bizzare persecution complex.

It's hyperbole.

They only ripped on slave owners.

Python wrote:

FieldsMan wrote:

Largo's Shark wrote:

FieldsMan wrote:

Eh, imagine someone coming up to you and saying your work is the cause of all violence in the world. He isn't the first director to have violence in films. What about Scorsese? Kubrick? The list is endless.

Where did the interviewer say that QT is the "cause of all violence in the world?" That said, with the size of Tarantino's ego, I'm wouldn't be surprised if that's how he interpreted the whole interview, feeding his own bizzare persecution complex.

It's hyperbole.

They only ripped on slave owners.

Who?

Anyone that treated black people as subhuman, and frankly they deserve the mockery. Even Sam Jackson's character.

"An eye for an eye" etc. It's a pretty adolescent and simple-minded view of slavery. His "black people needed a Western/comic book hero" is almost identical to one of George Lucas's lines when out publicising RED TAILS.

QT should go read some James Baldwin, or re-watch Trumbo/Kubrick's SPARTACUS for a far more adult approach to the subject.

An eye for an eye would be abducting all the white people from their homes, putting them in chains, separating the families, shipping them across the Atlantic and whipping them up to work on the cotton fields, torturing them if they don't satisfy the owners. Then it would be eye for an eye, but Tarantino is merely aiming for a revenge fantasy.

DJANGO UNCHAINED has its flaws (chiefly overlength and the sort of directorial self-indulgence apparent in Tarantino's work since KILL BILL), but I don't know how anyone can fail to see that it was made with a sense of serious social purpose. It's not just an excuse for grossout gore and for characters to say the "n" word two thousand times. Tarantino definitely succeeds in his stated aim of making the viewer truly feel the horror of slavery.

Loomis wrote:

DJANGO UNCHAINED has its flaws (chiefly overlength and the sort of directorial self-indulgence apparent in Tarantino's work since KILL BILL), but I don't know how anyone can fail to see that it was made with a sense of serious social purpose. It's not just an excuse for grossout gore and for characters to say the "n" word two thousand times. Tarantino definitely succeeds in his stated aim of making the viewer truly feel the horror of slavery.

The brilliance of that film for me lie in Tarantino's success at displaying the horrors and insanity of slavery, while at the same time keeping the tone sufficiently light and funny so we're affected by the horror, but not traumatized by it.

Indeed. Spike Lee has opined: "American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. It was a holocaust."

Well, it seems to me that Tarantino doesn't think it was a Sergio Leone spaghetti western either. He also views it as a holocaust. He's using the form of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western to depict this holocaust. Lee seems to be confusing Tarantino's medium with Tarantino's message. Obviously Tarantino doesn't believe that American slavery was just some kind of DOLLARS TRILOGY-style escapist romp - he believes that it was an evil, dark chapter in the history of his country. Using the escapist style of directors like Leone is a means to an end, the end being - duh! - to highlight the abomination that was slavery. The filmmaking style that Tarantino has chosen does not trivialise slavery - far from it.

Loomis wrote:

Indeed. Spike Lee has opined: "American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. It was a holocaust."

Well, it seems to me that Tarantino doesn't think it was a Sergio Leone spaghetti western either. He also views it as a holocaust. He's using the form of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western to depict this holocaust. Lee seems to be confusing Tarantino's medium with Tarantino's message. Obviously Tarantino doesn't believe that American slavery was just some kind of DOLLARS TRILOGY-style escapist romp - he believes that it was an evil, dark chapter in the history of his country. Using the escapist style of directors like Leone is a means to an end, the end being - duh! - to highlight the abomination that was slavery. The filmmaking style that Tarantino has chosen does not trivialise slavery - far from it.

Do we really need to be reminded of the 'horrors of slavery'? When will we have had enough reminders?

Obviously idiots who still hold onto Confederate flags with some warped sense of pride need reminding.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

Do we really need to be reminded of the 'horrors of slavery'? When will we have had enough reminders?

You could say that about any subject matter, though. Do we really need any more films about World War II? Any more boxing movies? Any more flicks about investigative journalism? Any more cop thrillers? And so on.

Personally, I think DJANGO UNCHAINED is the first film I've ever seen about slavery, and I've seen a lot of films. I don't think Brits such as myself are quite as well-informed on American slavery as people on your side of the pond are. It isn't taught in schools much, or at least it wasn't when I was at school. I never had any classes on the subject, so in many ways DJANGO UNCHAINED was an eye-opener for me. Obviously, I already knew slavery to be an evil thing, a dark chapter in American history, etc., but these were things that I only knew on an intellectual and rather abstract level - I'd never before seen a film that made me feel the evil of slavery in a visceral way, which is exactly the reaction that Tarantino meant to provoke in audiences.

Did I need this three-hour spot of education, though? Am I better person than I was this morning as a result of having now seen DJANGO UNCHAINED? I dunno. Still, I can't see how this film has done me any harm. Anyway, I'm mainly here to defend the notion that Tarantino did indeed make this film with a sense of social purpose, which is a different matter to the question of whether the world needs more films about slavery.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

Do we really need to be reminded of the 'horrors of slavery'?

Absolutely.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

When will we have had enough reminders?

When the myths of American exceptionalism and the "Genteel American South" have been thoroughly demolished.

Harmsway wrote:

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

Do we really need to be reminded of the 'horrors of slavery'?

Absolutely.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

When will we have had enough reminders?

When the myths of American exceptionalism and the "Genteel American South" have been thoroughly demolished.

Well, that's never going to happen. American exceptionalism is a fact, and "Southern Hospitality" isn't an invented phrase; it exists.

Funny how some people want to move "forward" except when they think there is some currency to be gained by looking backwards at an ugly period in history. And other than reminding people that slavery was awful, what exactly has Tarantino, or anyone else, gained by putting Django Unchained out into the atmosphere?

Loomis wrote:

Personally, I think DJANGO UNCHAINED is the first film I've ever seen about slavery, and I've seen a lot of films.

Now I know why DJANGO UNCHAINED is (possibly) the first film I've ever seen about slavery - it's because there haven't been very many films about slavery. As Scott Foundas points out in The Village Voice:

Although not technically a Basterds prequel, Django stems from a similar impulse—to reframe and rewrite American history in boldly absurd strokes and, by doing so, to make us confront the distortions and omissions of so much "fact-based" cinema. In Basterds, however, Tarantino was engaged with an exhaustive canon of World War II movies, from Casablanca to Schindler's List, while the subject of Django Unchained—slavery in the American South—is one that has been conspicuously absent in Hollywood films in the century since D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.

Of course, it's a coincidence that Django Unchained arrives in the same season as Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, the second of two Spielberg films about slavery (after 1997's Amistad) that never expose audiences to the harsh realities of plantation life? Of course, Spielberg is working in a time-honored tradition: After The Birth of a Nation, with its risible scenes of freed slaves raping and pillaging white Southerners, movies have treated this "peculiar" institution mostly at arm's length, from the happy slaves of Gone With the Wind and Song of the South to the simian allegories of King Kong and Planet of the Apes. On network TV, special events like Roots and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman attempted a more honest approach, albeit within the censor-imposed limits of prime time good taste. But only one major-studio film of the modern era, Richard Fleischer's notorious 1975 Mandingo, dared to meet slavery on its own terms—a grind house bacchanal of sadism, incest, and miscegenation, capped by an unforgettable finale in which the eponymous bare-knuckle fighter is boiled alive by his master in a cauldron. (Critically reviled but a popular success, it is a film Tarantino has spoken of admiringly.)

So the boisterous, outlandish, fiercely intelligent Django Unchained is at once an act of provocation and reparation—not just for slavery, but for Hollywood's decades of saintly Negroes and sass-talking sidekicks and its relentless whitewashing of history, from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner to The Help.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-12-19/film/django-unchained-upends-the-western/full/

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

And other than reminding people that slavery was awful, what exactly has Tarantino, or anyone else, gained by putting Django Unchained out into the atmosphere?

Well, Tarantino has gained a huge hit. DJANGO UNCHAINED's haul of some $139 million at the U.S. box office is large by his standards, and I gather that this is his biggest grosser to date - his SKYFALL, if you will. Somewhat surprising - given the subject matter, I'd have assumed DJANGO UNCHAINED to be the least commercial of his post-1994 films (or maybe joint least commercial alongside INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS).

As a viewer, I gained a very good time at the movies. As usual with Tarantino, there's acres of witty dialogue, good performances (my favourite being that of Samuel L. Jackson, but Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz are also very good - I wasn't completely blown away by Leonardo DiCaprio, mind, although he's far from dreadful), some edge-of-seat sequences, amusing discussions, black humour (erm, no pun intended), a great selection of songs on the soundtrack, fine cinematography (I'd love Robert Richardson to shoot BOND 24), and so on. Tarantino always gives excellent value for money, and especially now that he seems to deal exclusively in epics. There's always plenty to enjoy in his films.

Loomis wrote:

DJANGO UNCHAINED has its flaws (chiefly overlength and the sort of directorial self-indulgence apparent in Tarantino's work since KILL BILL), but I don't know how anyone can fail to see that it was made with a sense of serious social purpose.

"Social purpose" perhaps. "Serious" is another issue, especially when it's coming form such a stunted mind as Tarantino's. Any iota of conviction from the man is compromised and bastardised by his own blood lust and black humour, and DJANGO is no exception.

Just saw this today. Great, but Basterds and Pulp Fiction are better.

Largo's Shark wrote:

"Social purpose" perhaps. "Serious" is another issue, especially when it's coming form such a stunted mind as Tarantino's. Any iota of conviction from the man is compromised and bastardised by his own blood lust and black humour, and DJANGO is no exception.

Tarantino is better than every other director on this planet put together.

Loomis wrote:

Largo's Shark wrote:

"Social purpose" perhaps. "Serious" is another issue, especially when it's coming form such a stunted mind as Tarantino's. Any iota of conviction from the man is compromised and bastardised by his own blood lust and black humour, and DJANGO is no exception.

Tarantino is better than every other director on this planet put together.

And if you do not know that QT will tell you that himself. ;)