Sounds like you didn't watch it. So you were talking on your phone and paused the movie for a cumulative hour? Like reading The Lord of the Rings while driving your car over the course of 2 years with your wife trying to talk to you the whole time. Sure, you flipped through the pages and may even recall some passages, but you didn't read and absorb the story.
Did you watch the movie?
Good movie it was. Tarantino is simply genius.
I liked it. It's consequent.
Also, never a bad thing for the public to be reminded of how short time ago slavery and apartheid was commonplace in the US.
Great acting - DiCaprio and Foxx never disappoint. Ridiculous story, but since Tarantino haven't shot any remotely realistic movies since Reservoir Dogs - i got what i paid for :) In short, if you like Kill Bill, there is more of that in Django - good old Tarantino dialogues and lots of sudden violent deaths.
Was really pissed (but saw it coming) when Waltz pulled out his derringer. There were at least 3 spots of the movie where I was like "I highly doubt they'd be getting out of that situation".
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... Again, lazy storytelling.:)
Those are two very different things, though. Slavery went out in the eighteen-sixties, apartheid lasted another hundred years.Did I write anything to the contrary? :P
@Commodore_Axephante,
Haven't watched it yet and as such have no opinion on its value as a movie, but I think I can glean the genre from just looking at the cover and reading reviews; this is an intended pulp movie, a simplistic and often lurid tale, with much action and few psychological thrills - never meant to be realistic.
We can agree that old Tarantino movies are better than the newer ones, though.
I've got to say (and I know I'm in the minority, here), I found the film's storytelling to be really lazy. Yes, the acting was terrific (besides Foxx), and there were some stellar moments (thinking of the head-sack scene), but in general there were just too many convenient or ill-explained things for me to feel immersed.
Jamie Foxx felt like a modern man, not a freed slave. He had skills and abilities that no systematically abused and suppressed individual would ever possess. Everyone is amazed to see him riding a horse in the beginning. Well, that begs a good question - how the hell does he know how to ride a horse? Now, could a freed slave gain those skills? Absolutely. But we got no sense of his growth once given his freedom. He just jumped up and kicked everything's ass. No progression whatsoever. I mean, that line from the preview everyone keeps repeating: "Getting paid to kill white people? What's not to love?" Well, at least until he had spent some time in the world, someone who had spent his entire life toiling in a cotton field would have no sense of what "getting paid" even entails. Mercantilism, capitalism, personal possessions, wealth, all of that... their value is in the way they make room for choice - something totally foreign to him, which would be more intimidating than anything else, at least until he learned the ropes.
And the villains... outside of DiCaprio, they were utterly 1-dimentional. No substance there - just monsters to be destroyed. Again, lazy storytelling. At least Kill Bill (which I mention because it was also a revenge yarn) gave its villains real character, with their own motivations and insights.
I think Terantino is losing his edge. His early work was thoughtful, edgy, sophisticated... Django felt to me more like an action-oriented fart joke.
And, in a world where 100% of gunshots are perfect bullseyes, do we really feel impressed when someone hits a bullseye?
There is just so much emotional content to be explored in a story about freedom, vengeance, realizing what it means to be an independent human man, etc. So much power. And Django didn't take up any of it. Could have been a long music video for Nelly's "Here comes the boom".
That's because you didn't understand what was going on. Not every movie is supposed to be a gritty, socio-political and realistic take where everything is laid out to you. It's a genre film. It's literally a Spaghetti Western as opposed to a story set in the pre-civil war era. It's supposed to be over the top, surrealistic at times, linear and have archetypal characters with the overall premise being the knight who goes on a journey to save the princess at the top of the hill (in which they even say as much). It's a throwback to all those classic Spaghetti Western movies of old. It's not even exactly a statement about slavery or whatever outside of "this is the story, this is the historical setting in which it takes place and deal with it."
The craft is in the situations he puts his characters in and how they deal with it. People love Tarantino because the main attraction is the colorful characters he comes up with and the awkward places they find themselves, with rythmic back-and-forth between them leading up to shit hitting the fan. I agree that it's not exactly as crafty/complex/whatever as his other films but that's the point of intentionally making a genre film: it's not supposed to be.