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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, December 11th, 2012 - 11 Comments »
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Review-ish: Django Unchained

(NSFW image  – which is why I didn’t just put it on top of the review – that likely inspired a scene in Django)

I don’t think I have a ton to add to the conversation about Django Unchained.

It is not a special film. It feels a lot like Tarantino playing out a contract. (No, there is no contract to which I am referring.) Or maybe someone with some real talent, but with no real ambition beyond imitating Tarantino.

It has laughs. It has a ton of violence. It has well over 100 uses of the word “nigger.”

I’d sit through it again and not suffer. But if I don’t, I don’t think I’ll be missing anything of note.

But for me, it was missing the curve ball that makes Tarantino interesting, even in his lesser works. It’s a 2 or 3 joke film. And those jokes repeat over and over and over again. Most of the audience seemed fine with that. I found myself oddly bored in a film that is so relentlessly in the audience’s face… perhaps the most aggressive piece Tarantino has ever made, even more so than the Kill Bills.

The tech side is excellent. No complaints. Robert Richardson is still a master. Acting performances are also uniformly strong. But I preferred the character Chris Waltz plays the first time I saw Robert Culp & Bill Cosby doing that schtick on “I Spy.”

The only exceptional element in this film, for me, was Samuel L. Jackson who is transformed into Uncle Ben – I mean, right off that old box – to the point where his head seems to be another shape. And he balances attitude and rage and a surface calm in the one thing in this film that seriously deserves Oscar consideration.

For a movie I didn’t love (and certainly didn’t hate), I didn’t mind the looooong running time. But the film lives on a hamster wheel of repetition that I wish someone had been able to get Tarantino to cut down. And really, I wish there was a point. Comparisons to Inglorious Basterds make no sense to me, as there were a load of interesting, subversive ideas in Inglorious Basterds. I can’t think of a single one in this film. And a love story? It’s a long story like Eraser is a love story.

I look at the trailer and TV spots and I see what this film was meant to be… good, fun, mostly brainless pulp. But it hangs around so long that the failure of QT to find anything to say becomes all too apparent.

I could pick the thing apart, but that would be silly. It’s not that kind of movie. Either you get on the ride and give yourself to it or not. That doesn’t mean that the film has no responsibility to entertain, but it does try. It literal pulls down its pants… or Jamie Foxx’s… and like so much in the film, it leads nowhere… except for a cool moment out of context.

This is the first Tarantino film that could have been made by Robert Rodriguez. Good or bad. You make that call.

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11 Comments »

11 Responses to “Review-ish: Django Unchained”

  1. spassky says:
    December 12, 2012 at 12:18 pm

    WTF where is that NSFW photo from???

    (Besides the bathroom at Johnny Rockets)

  2. Think says:
    December 12, 2012 at 12:19 pm

    “This is the first Tarantino film that could have been made by Robert Rodriguez. Good or bad. You make that call.”

    This is the most bullshit statement I’ve read in a long time. Rodriguez has never composed an image or constructed a scene that touches anything in this movie. This is the work of a master. Rodriguez is a B-movie mediocrity. I feel like you have no grasp of filmmaking if you can’t see or feel the difference here.

  3. StellaPD says:
    December 12, 2012 at 12:49 pm

    So QT diehards are going to become completely unhinged by any review that doesn’t proclaim Django a masterpiece?

  4. Sam says:
    December 12, 2012 at 1:02 pm

    David: Surprised not to see a dissection of the BFCA noms, which I believe you vote for, right?

  5. Big G says:
    December 12, 2012 at 1:04 pm

    So I guess someone might be calling bullshit if DiCaprio wins the Supporting Actor Oscar. I mean Poland doesn’t even mention him.

    And I wonder is Spike Lee will be going apeshit on QT yet again for that word being used 100 times.

  6. Joe Leydon says:
    December 12, 2012 at 3:52 pm

    It would appear David and that other fellow are vastly outnumbered. For now.

  7. Breedlove says:
    December 12, 2012 at 4:16 pm

    Lex posted something on Elsewhere that I felt like I could have written myself word for word, and almost posted here earlier today. Fair or unfair, I have a strong dislike for Kerry Washington, mainly because of seeing her on Bill Maher. She comes across as this super uptight, humorless, wannabe intellectual…I found her so painful on that show a couple times that I wish they got someone else for this flick…

  8. Big G says:
    December 12, 2012 at 4:36 pm

    Well, if you read that Owen Glieberman review in EW he and David are actually in total agreement.

  9. christian says:
    December 12, 2012 at 5:13 pm

    Lex only likes white women. End of his insight.

  11. Hendhogan says:
    December 14, 2012 at 6:17 pm

    I am greatly looking forward to the Asylum version: “Jdango Unroped.”

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
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“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon