Apr 12, 2015
untitled by Hillary V. on Flickr.
seen from China
seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye
seen from Kazakhstan
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Netherlands
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from Australia
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
untitled by Hillary V. on Flickr.
May the odds be ever in your favor
President Snow, Hunger Games
"And in this moment, I swear we are infinite."
The perks of being a wallflower
We're unstoppable. #oldfilm#film2012#filmscan#35mm#blackandwhite#krash
Do you hear the people sing,
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drum
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right
To be free
Do you hear the people sing,
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drum
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes
Will you give all you can give
So that our banner may advance?
Some will fall and some will live
Will you stand up and take your chance?
The blood of the martyrs
Will water the meadows of France!
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start.
When tomorrow comes!
Django Unchained (2012, Quentin Tarantino)
Quentin Tarantino is a man of the genre pastiche, it's why the cinephile world loves him, and the fact that 'Django Unchained' is yet another spaghetti western revenge film (and that the structures of that genre leak into the cinematic form of the film) is not in any way a flaw of the film, to address one charge I've started to see creeping up in the world. I loved 'Inglourious Basterds,' I think it's an incredibly cunning, smart commentary on how visual media thinks of World War II and its people, in addition to being typical amounts of Tarantino fun and nervy ambition (the daring, swipe-the-board-clean scene in the basement pub? Possibly my favorite in his entire filmography).
That film, like 'Django Unchained,' looks to the past and creates a pulpy revenge narrative out of historical events typically reserved for solemn reflection and emotional sincerity, thereby enlivening a sense of anger, power, and rebellion. And there's no reason that I can see why an over-stylized revenge epic of slavery in antebellum America absolutely could not work. Someone like maybe Melvin Van Peebles could have made a great one with the sufficient budget. But Tarantino, a white man with a severely limited racial consciousness, was fundamentally the wrong person to make such a film.
'Django Unchained' may have a titular character in Django (Jamie Foxx), but it actually has two main characters in Django and the man who bought his freedom, a German anti-slavery bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, very good but not too different from his previous Oscar-winning Tarantino performance). The two become a bounty hunting team, and eventually, after their successful pursuit of the Brittle Brothers, Django and Schultz vow to track down Django's wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who is enslaved at the infamous plantation Candieland, run by the devious francophile Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, just as calculated and dull as he's been for the past seven years).
As nearly every critic has mentioned, the film suffers immeasurably from the absence of longtime Tarantino editor Sally Menke, who died at the tragically young age of 56 two years ago. Which is not to say that Fred Raskin is an incompetent editor, Tarantino did I suppose the correct thing in promoted from within his own cinematic family (Raskin was the assistant editor for the Kill Bill films, and if ever there was a marvel of lightning-paced editing it's those). It's just that Menke's contributions are retrospectively even more essential than realized: the film just drags, and indeed, it has the longest running time of any of Tarantino's films thus far. Scenes feel like they go on longer than necessary, there is hesitance to move gracefully from action to action, and most tragically, lengthy dialogue scenes, which have been Tarantino's bread and butter for so long, especially in Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds, now approach something we could call boring.
The fault critics have found with the film's screenplay is not something I think is entirely fair- the film's been accused of having a double climax, ending once and then ending rather clumsily a second time just for the hell of it. I don't agree- particularly if we see the villain of the film as not Calvin Candie but rather the institution of slavery itself- and when I read the script a few months ago I did feel some sense of appreciation for the attention to world-building Tarantino maintains, even in a time period we as viewers are likely to assume a thorough knowledge of. Sadly even this is muted in the film- Candieland, which seemed like such a bizarre absurdist hellscape in the film as written feels rather lifeless in the final project. My point being that the faults of the script are less because of the supposed (and non-existent) messy screenwriting, and more in line with the rest of the film- there is a serious lack of passion. All horror, no "fun," which brings us to the central issue of the film...having "fun" with slavery.
Like I said, I don't think a ridiculous revenge fantasy styling for a slavery story would be entirely inappropriate, but it would have to come from a black filmmaker. Tarantino has had a career of such strong heroes- the Bride in Kill Bill, Shoshana in Inglourious Basterds. So why then is Django Unchained the first film to feature a hero who is essentially subservient to a white man? Christoph Waltz's Dr. King Schultz is the ugliest of white savior archetypes, his role in the film is to make it clear to Django that slavery is wrong, that he should rise up and defeat the oppressors! Tarantino gets a non-white central hero, and this hero suddenly needs a white man to teach him morality and self-defense; Django is a blank cipher that needs to be filled with a white savior's knowledge.
In fact for a film that's supposed to be about slavery, all of the black characters are horribly empty of any interior life (with the exception of one problematic one, more on that later). Broomhilda is one of the most tragic roles Kerry Washington has ever been saddled with, totally undeserving of her brilliance and craft. For it is not a role, merely a plot device, the goal at the end of the journey. The discussion of the film is dominated by white characters- Dr. Schultz and Calvin Candie are by a humongous majority the two most talkative characters in the film. I suppose you could argue this is in the service of historical accuracy- given that most of the film takes place on cotton plantations or in otherwise public, white-controlled spaces, black characters would be compelled not to speak. But what the hell is historical accuracy is doing in a Tarantino film? In a movie that wants to wallow in spaghetti western fantasy, it's clear that Tarantino favors this idea of fantasy for his white characters only. Black characters, he's just less interested in them. In a film about slavery. That is the core of the problem with 'Django Unchained'- Tarantino somehow wants to make a black emancipationist fable, yet he doesn't care about the black characters in his film.
There is one great performance in the film, and it belongs to Samuel L. Jackson as the head house slave of Candieland, Stephen. It really was such a joy to watch Jackson really and truly act for what feels like the first time in years. Stephen is an incredibly bizarre creation: a jovial uncle remus-surface for Candie that hides a pulsing, furious anger that more than anything else wants desperately to maintain his position of power in an evil world. And it's no surprise that of the meandering speeches delivered in extreme close-up, Jackson's were the most effective. With Stephen's far too late introduction in the film I thought we were approaching at least an interesting view of slavery, and there are minor joys to be found in other performances: Don Johnson's fey Southern gentlemen felt both ridiculously over-the-top and eerily plausible, aka the tone every other performance in the film should have been striving for. I wanted to watch an entire film about Sheba, the lounging prized slave girl of Candieland; Nichole Galacia was simply mesmerizing in her very brief role.
But spending too much time in the world of Django Unchained feels like something assaultive, offensive, and vile. Tarantino's white supremacist re-fashioning of the Old South is a perspective totally unconscious of the horrors of slavery beyond a bodily level, and is perfectly content to replicate a hollywood cinema strictly for a white audience.
Grade: 3/10
2012 Annual Report: "At the Movies" (n=54+ [#]; * indicates multiple viewings)
For posterity, a snapshot of my current favorite films of 2012, which felt like more of a "very fond, but not in love" sort of year in that I liked most everything I saw but wouldn't really fight anyone to the death defending their honor. That said, here's my list arranged alphabetically within broad descending groupings as well as the very long list of things that I still want to see:
("something like a top ten") Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Looper*, Magic Mike, Moonrise Kingdom**, Silver Linings Playbook*, The Master*, Zero Dark Thirty*
("admittedly irrational exuberance") Shut Up and Play the Hits, Prometheus, Cloud Atlas (trailer)
("stuff we actually like") The Bourne Ultimatum, Chasing Ice, Chronicle, Haywire, How to Survive A Plague, the Impossible, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Skyfall, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Hunger Games, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Your Sister's Sister
("long plays") Life of Pi, the Hobbit, Les Miserables
("ok, fine") The Avengers, Damsels in Distress, The Dark Knight Rises, The Deep Blue Sea, Lincoln, Pitch Perfect, Safety Not Guaranteed, Sin Bin, To Rome With Love
("in the queue") Amour, Anna Karenina, Arbitrage, Cabin in the Woods, End of Watch, Flight, Holy Motors, How to Survive A Plague, Killing Them Softly, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Oslo August 31st, Promised Land, the Impossible, the Queen of Versailles, Zero Dark Thirty
Hello, I Must Be Going;
“It’s okay, I’m not sad, it’s not, I’m not sad. I just don’t feel like seeing you. Because I feel bad about myself when I’m with you, I feel really bad, and I always have. But I didn't know it, I just, I was just so used to it. And I think, I just thought that that was, being alive? To always feel bad, and wrong , and just, insecure. And invisible. So thank you. Thank you for ending this, I really mean it, thank you because I wasn't happy with you and I would of never of ended it myself, truly.” - Amy Can't believe how much I've just related to Amy saying this, proper sobbing.
