“Django Unchained”
Is Tarantino’s Southern
Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades
Quentin Tarantino worked
in a video store before he made it as a film director. There he was exposed to
all kinds of movies genres – from comedies to science fiction to horror films.
So it’s not surprising that he chooses to combine genres in his latest
grindhouse outing, “Django Unchained.”
A fan of “The Good, the
Bad, and the Ugly” and “Mandingo,” Tarantino blends them. A western in which slavery
and cotton replace Injuns and gold.
Film and literary critics
call this a “mash-up.” Tarantino prefers to call this spaghetti western set in
the Deep South a “southern.”
The director talked with Will
Smith and other black movie stars about the role of Django (“The D is silent”)
but settled on Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx who grew up in Texas and knows how to
ride a horse.
The plot is simple: A
gunslinging dandy named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) rescues Django
(Foxx) from slavery to get him to identify a couple of bad guys with a bounty
on their heads. In return, he will help Django rescue his wife (Kerry
Washington) who was kidnapped to be a pony at an anything-goes plantation owned
by dastardly Calvin Candie (Leonardo diCaprio with a Southern drawl).
So Django straps on a
six-shooter and rides out with his benefactor to right wrongs. As Django says
about his new bounty-hunting profession, “Kill white people and
get paid for it? What's not to like?”
As usual, Tarantino features
a blast-from-the-past array of his favorite actors. In “Django Unchained” you
will glimpse Don Johnson, Bruce Dern, Robert Carradine, Dennis Christopher,
Michael Parks, James Remar, Tom Wopat, and Franco Nero. As well as appearances
by Samuel L. Jackson, Jonah Hill, and a cameo by himself.
Franco Nero starred in
Sergio Caorbucci’s 1966 spaghetti western “Django,” an inspiration for
Tanatino’s film. In the original version, the hero is caught in a shootout
between Mexican bandits and the KKK. But the new film deals with slavery head-on.
Tarantino said he wanted “to do
movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do
them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like
they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt
with because it's ashamed of it.”
Tarantino enjoys
rewriting history in films like “Inglorious Basterds” and “Django Unchained.”
As he puts it, “You know how things are going to go in
most films. Every once in a while films don’t play by the rules. It’s
liberating when you don’t know what’s happening next … I thought, What about
telling these kinds of stories my way — rough and tough but gratifying at the
end?”
You can find “Django Unchained” shootin’ it up this week at the Tropic
Cinema.
As plantation owner Calvin
Candie says, “Gentlemen, you had my curiosity. But now, you have my
attention.”
Yes, with “Django Unchained,” Quinton Tarantino has our attention.
srhoades@aol.com
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