Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (a Spaghetti Western) scheduled for release Christmas 2012

[powerballin]

misread the bully comment.

 

[deleted]

Over the last week I have heard Django Unchained pronounced: "Diego Unchained" and "DeAngelo Unchained." ahaha

Those sound like the SyFy channel versions.

 

[rusty shackelford]

Over the last week I have heard Django Unchained pronounced: "Diego Unchained" and "DeAngelo Unchained." ahaha

Those sound like the SyFy channel versions.

"Dinosaur Forrest, Simeon Wars"

 

[antidope]

Just got done watching this movie. All I will say is that I'm glad I was born in the time period that I was born in. It's not perfect but it's better than what could have been

 

[tokes99]

Tarantino Bloodies the Truth: A History Teacher’s Lament – Zinn Education Project http://zinnedproject.org/posts/19171#.URMzJYKerBM.twitter

[h1]Tarantino Bloodies the Truth: A History Teacher’s Lament[/h1]
Article. By Larry Miller. January, 2013.
A review of the film Django Unchained.

By Larry Miller

As a U.S. history teacher, I taught high school students that resistance to slavery was pervasive. Whether it was the open rebellion of Nat Turner, the Denmark Vesey conspiracy, the battle of the Negro Fort, the publication of Walker’s Appeal, the Underground Railroad or the daily acts of resistance that included work stoppages, slowdowns, and slow poisoning of plantation owners’ families, people living in slavery repeatedly demonstrated opposition to the slave system, sometimes at great cost. None of this is evident in Quentin Tarantino’s movie, Django Unchained. Instead, the movie reinforces just about every stereotype I tried to challenge in my history classes.

Raid on Harper's Ferry, by Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1859.

Django begins in 1858 and flows into 1859 and possibly beyond. 1859 happens to be the year of the John Brown-led attack on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, an action that was intended by this section of the abolitionist movement to launch an uprising that would lead to the end of slavery. The rebellion did not take place in isolation but was nurtured by a growing anti-slavery movement throughout the United States and its territories.

Tarantino’s depiction of these years shows no resistance to slavery. Enslaved people in Django are compliant, the abolition movement utterly invisible. Instead, the “resistance” presented in the film is generated either by the white bounty hunter, Schultz, or by the formerly enslaved Django once he gains a sense of power in the shadow of Schultz. The movie brings Django and Schultz together with the goal of capturing three slave overseers from Django’s past who are also wanted for murdering whites. Django agrees to help Schultz collect the bounty on these three, and Schultz will then help Django free his wife, who is being held on a Mississippi plantation called Candieland.

I did not have high expectations before seeing Django. I’ve been dismayed by Tarantino’s fetish with violent special effects, and especially by his blatant racism, for example, depictions of Mexicans as lizard-like vampires in From Dusk till Dawn. But Django was even worse than I expected. I have heard defenses of Tarantino that include, “…he can’t be racist, he had a black stepfather. He had black girlfriends.” Whatever his experience or intentions, the movie was ahistorical and racist.

Tarantino attempts to disarm the viewer with cartoonish street humor that reminded me of Blazing Saddles. For example, when Django is told by Schultz he can pick the clothes he wishes to wear, he chooses a powder blue satin Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, a pimp-like outfit that could have been worn in the court of Marie Antoinette.

The 109 uses of the N-word is supposed to invest this depiction of the antebellum South with reality. It doesn’t. In big and little ways, Django mangles the history. The movie opens by telling viewers that it takes place in 1858, two years before the Civil War. Of course, the Civil War began in 1861, not 1860, but it doesn’t really matter, because the film contains nothing that makes the date even slightly meaningful. In one scene, vigilantes wear Ku Klux Klan-like hoods. However, there was no need for anyone to wear a hood at a time when rape, murder, brutality, and capturing runaway slaves were all perfectly legal, and anti-slave militias were institutionalized. In fact, there was no KKK until after the Civil War.


John Mercer Langston, abolitionist.

Another hallmark of Tarantino’s movie is the fear in the lowered eyes of African Americans, refusing to make eye contact with whites. They fail to resist even when Django kills the overseers from a mining company and leaves open the door of the slave transport cage. The men sit motionless watching Django ride into the horizon back to the Mississippi plantation, not to lead a slave rebellion, but to free his wife and take revenge on that single plantation.

No doubt, Tarantino depicts brutality toward African Americans on the screen. But in an attempt to portray the psychology of the slave owner and slave society, Tarantino bores the viewer with empty dialogue that dominates long sections of the movie. Tarantino has nothing intelligent to say about the psychological underpinnings of white supremacy.

Tarantino does not spare the gore. He seems to have a fetish with presenting blood and flesh. Evidently, he is attempting some symbolism with the splattering of red blood on the white cotton growing in the field, on the white mane of a horse, and on the white walls of a plantation parlor. Yeah, we get it. But the result is to draw attention to itself rather than to connect the viewer with the institution of slavery. It’s a diversion. Tarantino cares lots more about special effects than he does the human resistance to suffering and oppression.

Don’t get me wrong. The slave owners, the slave profiteers, and the slave system merited fierce reprisals. But the goal of the slaves and the abolition movement was not revenge, but to end the slave system and all that it represented. In Django, violence is an end in itself, not a means to an end.

There is one person the viewer comes to hate more than anyone, even more than Candie, the sadistic slave master. This is Stephen, the slave master’s always-fawning head house slave, played by Samuel L. Jackson. This guy is truly subservient. But here, too, Tarantino relies on—and deepens—the stereotype of the slave who lives to serve his master. In my history classes, I wanted my students to understand that there was a duality to the role of house slaves. In fact, there are many instances recorded of plantation owners’ sense of betrayal when their supposedly loyal house servants fled to Union lines and freedom at the first possible opportunity during the Civil War. In the real world, so-called house slaves could be both obedient and long for liberty. But in Django Unchained, the Samuel L. Jackson character shows no such duality. He is simply a despicable, malicious person, loving his master’s very existence.

Enslaved African American women in the film play largely to two stereotypes: the mammy and the sexual temptress. One exception might be Kerry Washington’s character, Brunhilde, as Django’s wife, who was tortured for attempting to escape. But even she can be rescued only by the singularly rebellious Django.

Black women on the plantation are simply subservient—as food servers, cooks, cotton-pickers, or whipping victims. Black women in the brothels, like Candie’s apparent mistress Sheba, seem to love their oppressor. The same is true of Coco, wearing a French maid’s mini-dress, high heels and a large white bow in the front of her hair, answering to the Southern aristocrats’ every whim. Tarantino fails to present any strong black woman.

Spoiler alert. At the end of the movie, after Django kills the remaining slave-owning family members and overseers, he and his wife ride into the moonlight from deep within Mississippi. This is at a time when the slavocracy was at the height of being alarmed and armed, the year that fear of slave rebellion was rampant among plantation owners throughout the South. This meant that in every Southern state, expansion of militias and arming of white communities was pervasive. Any black woman or black man openly traveling the roads in Mississippi, Texas, or the Border States at that time would have been arrested or killed.

Only the underground systems, created from plantation to plantation by slaves and free blacks, and supported by black and white abolitionists in the North, would have allowed Django and his wife to escape. Tarantino relies on the individual hero to replace a movement of resistance.

My fear is that Tarantino’s fetishes, stereotypes, and contempt for actual history will become nestled in the popular culture as a legitimate depiction of the Black Holocaust. We need representations not to be cartoonish, but complex and accurate.

Today’s young people need sophisticated analysis of slavery—and how its legacy is experienced in contemporary America, where more black men are behind bars or under the watch of the criminal justice system than were enslaved in 1850, and more African American men are disenfranchised because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870.

In a time where activism and resistance to oppression is as essential as it was in 1859, the demand for justice and equality must find expression in schools. The work of social movements and the demands of the many must be heard. They were not in Django Unchained. In the course of creating a free and just world, historical truth must be woven into popular culture, into the school curriculum, and into the consciousness of young people.

Larry Miller is an editor of Rethinking Schools Magazine and an elected member of the school board in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is a former high school social studies teacher. Miller co-edited Rethinking Our Classrooms, Vol. 2 and wrote “Lessons in Solidarity: Grady Hospital Workers United.”

Now I'm not one of the people who think this film is terrible, but I think he did a good job of making his point. The parts in yellow are where I really disagreed.

I thought Django's choice of the blue suit was to signify, that Django, having come from nothing with no one to look onto for precedence or guidance was bound to overcompensate right off the bat, in a way of rubbing it in everyone's faces that now he had something. Which is what's happened to so many athletes and rappers right after they get money, and I thought the movie got that point across really well.

And I'm not gonna quote everything I had to say on Candie and the idea of white supremacy in this film, but yeah this dude made a good argument.

are they good arguments against this film though? as criticism of (pop)culture in general, maybe...i don't believe in any of the interviews where tarantino speaks on the film, does he state he set out to mak an 'historically accurate depiction" of slavery. maybe he has, and i just haven't seen it? at most he seemed to be speaking to the way violence is portrayed & to some of the more gruesome shows of acts/language of that era in the film, to which is response was to say that the things that were happening at that time were probably much more gruesome than what he put to film and that we wanted that to be shown for what it was (given his preoccupation with over the top violence that should not surprise).

the movie uses antebellum times as a backdrop, historical reference & historical accuracy are entirely different things. the criticism that the characters aren't fully realized & wholly accurate to the times i think is a bit of an unrealistic expectation given that it is a true to the genre spagetti western. even as long as the movie is, could it really express ALL the complexities of slavery in that era, depict the nuance that would be necessary to be accurate and still entertain? was anyone's expectation going in that they would be educated? in theory, and maybe even in principle, i mostly agree that popular culture should strive to do both, this isn't a movie about slavery, or even about that era historically, as much as it is a movie that features that era & slavery...i just isn't that deep

sam jackson's portrayal of stephen was actual pretty slick, and his character throws a bit of a twist to the story; i liked that it was left sort of ambiguous as to who was really in control of candieland; i thought that was smart. it's a good watch, with som great performances, the human tendency to place meaning to things that may not have any, and/or decipher the 'true meaning. of things may be giving tarantino more credit that he deserves...

 

[mastamind033]

Some solid points in that article but definitely some reaches too. I've never heard anybody accuse QT of blantant racism in From Dusk till Dawn. Everybody who turned into vampire turned into a lizard like vampire and QT didn't even direct it, it was a Robert Rodriguez film

 

[gil23]

I just watched this last night night with the miss at the drive in theater and he laughs were had. So many great moments and I think tarantino did a good job..candyland? Lol and Samuel l Jackson was a fool

The miss calls me big daddy now.. I told her not to say it with the accent tho

 

[flipnlu]

This is from someone who lived that life. Whoever wrote that boring one sided argument is narrow minded. Funny just found out a huge home in TX that owns the women prison right next door was a plantation. Society as a whole has failed.

 

[38816]

sick of these fake intellectuals saying the movie sucks because it didn't show every single aspect of slavery that ever occured over the 600+ years of slavery.


stick that that corny history teacher in texas back then and lets see how many outspoken defiant slaves he will see.....alive......


jamie foxx has a tattooed hairline...stop complaining about his edge up.


did you even consider, for even a second, since he's a black "superhero" maybe, JUST MAYBE, he can have a fresh clark kent hairline?

did clark kent ever shave? where are the cornball nerd professors pointing that out?

has wolverine ever brushed his teeth bro? what a joke.

be mad a white boy made the greatest american epic in film history....nothing is more american than slavery. be mad.


people just want attention at this point.... dusk till dawn is racist? LMAOOOOOOOOO



and at the end of the day, tyler perry is still making movies. LMAO

 

[38816]

"Another hallmark of Tarantino’s movie is the fear in the lowered eyes of African Americans, refusing to make eye contact with whites. They fail to resist even when Django kills the overseers from a mining company and leaves open the door of the slave transport cage. The men sit motionless watching Django ride into the horizon back to the Mississippi plantation, not to lead a slave rebellion, but to free his wife and take revenge on that single plantation."


maybe because jamie foxx told them he was worse than any white they ever met then participated in feeding a slave to dogs................maybe?

maybe because its the second time in two days they've seen not only a free black man, but also see him kill numerous white people.

maybe because if you were black and got out of the cage, you would be charged with conspiracy and lynched on the spot....maybe....

maybe that's why....i mean, you would need like a degree and an ability to articulate yourself....maybe like some sort of teacher of american history or something.


how dare slaves in django look fearful....not like they were being fed to dogs, raped and beaten.........why would they be scared? in 500 years their great great great great grandchildren will be free......

because there WERE slave revolts, ALL SLAVES EVERYWHERE REVOLTED AT ALL TIMES....

any other depiction of people actually being used as slaves is racist.

rxtcyvubinm,'o;likjtzxgfcgvhbjnlkm;l,;


"NOT TO LEAD A SLAVE REBELLION"

LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

its not a movie about slave rebellions. when the history teacher gets a budget and writes a screen play it can be about slave revolts.

until then, keep teaching those proficiency test questions, guy.

 

[shogun]

Did anyone else think that the woman that was part of that gang with the bandana covering her face was going to be revealed as a cool cameo? I was waiting for it but it didn't happen.

 

[big j 33]

It's been discussed, that was Zoe Bell. She was in Death Proof.
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Zoe-Bell-Reveals-Her-Django-Unchained-Secret-35592.html

 

[iamjusayn]

A loooooooot of truth in here. I don't agree with his critic of Malcolm X having a zoot suit and red hair in Spike's movie cause well at one time that's what he looked like but everything else tho is on point

Good post

 

[MetalMario]

haven't looked into this thread often so idk if this question has been asked or answered so here its goes:

Since its set in the mid 1800's they said "n----a" and "n---er" was that even realistically termed at the time? n----a? it threw me off cuz back of my mind I was like nah man they didn't say that but I'm no expert on history of curse words.

---

classic tarantino film and one of his trademarks is cameos which was obvious but another is his obsession with feet or foot fetish, was with his past movies like pulp but I can't remember any distinct foot scenes

 

[kangaroobombs]

So, when does the Blu Ray come out?

 

[38816]

haven't looked into this thread often so idk if this question has been asked or answered so here its goes:

Since its set in the mid 1800's they said "n----a" and "n---er" was that even realistically termed at the time? n----a? it threw me off cuz back of my mind I was like nah man they didn't say that but I'm no expert on history of curse words.

technical:
i can see it being a feature of african american vernacular to turn the -er into an a naturally....think of it like an accent.

probable:
QT created a black cowboy superhero......he invented "n----a" AND edge ups...and listened to rick ross in the 1800s.

 

[mronegative]

When you put it like that...

[h1]Chinese Theaters Halt & Pull DJANGO UNCHAINED From Screens
[/h1]
At least they got to see the opening credits.

Twitch Film recently reported that the Chinese version of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained would feature a more "muted" version of the film's very awesome blood work.


Now they report (sourced to FilmBiz Asia) that the film has been pulled from Chinese screens altogether the very day of its opening. Literally the film ran for a few minutes, then suddenly stopped.


Chinese cinema chains blame some sort of technical difficulty for the film's post-sudden withdrawal from theaters, but moviegoers are alive with speculation. Most think it has to do with Jamie Foxx's exposed junk. Insert a million Asian penis envy jokes here.


That Django Unchained would be too dirty for China, where every breath of air is basically a pack of Newports, makes sense since every film they show needs to be suitable for children (even 3D erotic epics, I guess?).


What's weird is the film's very late exit, as though Chinese film officials failed to watch the film before giving it the okay. The idea is that Foxx-junk cuts were demanded but never executed.


We may never have a proper explanation for this international tragedy. In the meantime, try imagining what it would be like to go see the new Quentin Tarantino film only to have it pulled mere minutes after it begins. Unfathomable.

 

[pharelfor3]

Bluray out next Tuesday

Cant Wait

 

[6 Rings G.O.A.T.]

Bluray out next Tuesday

Cant Wait

Bestbuy on Tuesday>

 

[hymen man]

Bluray out next Tuesday

Cant Wait

Bestbuy on Tuesday>

definitely there.

 

[jrp44]

Getting the Steelbook from Target

 

[jking0821]

Watched it on Blu-Ray last night. Second time seeing it. Was def just as enjoyable the second time. It was cool to pick up on the little things this time around that i missed on the first viewing.

 

[thestranger]

 

[jking0821]

Watched it on Blu-Ray last night. Second time seeing it. Was def just as enjoyable the second time. It was cool to pick up on the little things this time around that i missed on the first viewing.

You could say the same thing regarding just about every other movie known to man. Great insight. 

No you can't.....actually most movies have nothing to offer on a second viewing. Once you can comprehend the plot most movies these days are straight forward.

Tarantino is very intricate with his cinematography. He has tons of different "fetishes" that he puts in all his movies and they can slip by in the first viewing.

 

[DCAllAfrican]

Tarantino is very intricate with his cinematography. He has tons of different "fetishes" that he puts in all his movies and they can slip by in the first viewing.

http://macklessonsradio.com/index/episode-386-tariq-nasheed-s-review-of-django-unchained-