Not too long ago (geologically speaking), white colored people started marauding around this continent on a genocidal rampage against the natives for not having the common decency to open up any burger chains. Turning a vast continent into a homogenized din of commerce and pollution takes a lot of work, so they imported some black colored people to do it for them.
That’s where the horrors of slavery came in. It’s easier to own a person if you can pretend they are not a person; therefore, white people had to convince themselves that black people were animals. It didn’t take too much convincing because the pros were you got somebody to fix your lemonade and call you master. The cons were that you had to pay them a living wage and make your own lemonade. This business of lemonade making was particularly labor intensive. You have to water the lemon tree, make glasses from sand, spoons from branches, oh and there is the nasty business of harvesting the sugar. White people hated harvesting sugar. They’re cool with it now because they can sit on big tractors and listen to Toby Keith sing about putting his boots inside an Arab’s rectum while acres and acres of cane are caught up in America’s annual sugar rapture. Then, Jesus rains down Coca Cola on us all. The natives get casinos. Guns replace our dicks, and we swim in a river of gasoline and diabetes all the way to the innernet store.
But before all that, when the white people were trying to keep their pockets full and hands soft by pretending black people were animals, many atrocities were committed. We call this period slavery. Now white people didn’t invent slavery, but they did mass produce it and turn it into an institution of perpetual greed and suffering. Quentin Tarantinomade a movie set in the time of American Slavery called Django.
Django is a spaghetti western kind of film because Tarantino likes making his new movies feel like old movies. It’s kind of like when your hipster cousin wears flip up shades to Christmas dinner. Let’s just say, sometimes Quentin comes to Christmas dressed like a Kung Fu master, sometimes he dresses like Shaft, but this time he walked into the dining room dressed like a blood-thirsty antebellum hero. It’s supposed to be artistic, but I really don’t give a fuck about any of that shit. I just like good movies. In any case, I’ll play along. In the vein of Quentin’s movie, I’m going to list The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly about Django.
The Good
Nobody likes a racist. Even in today’s society, most racists will pretend not to be racist. They will plead, I have a black friend! I would have voted for Herman Cain! or Tiger Woods was my favorite golfer! Those sentences are just the new N-words. Back in the day, the n-word was the n-word, and the er at the end wasn’t replaced with an a until Fredrick Douglass (the first black scientist who discovered the allele that makes white people smell like baloney) decided to create the first nine step handshake.
I honestly have bad concepts of history; all I know is that white people said the n-word a lot in this movie, and then they were dispensed of frequently and horribly. It was pretty cool. But even innocent black people were killed in gruesome ways, which just made it cooler when white people were equally killed. The violence just fed the violence in a gratifying violence machine that didn’t stop and won’t stop until George Zimmerman’s eyes have been replaced with skittles.
The soundtrack and scenery. The movie is so beautifully shot. It’s drugs for your eyes. Much of this was filmed just around the corner from me. America was so beautiful. No wonder we killed all those Indians Wagon-Burners for it. Despite the depraved horrors of humanity, America’s fertile fields, live oaks, pristine peaks, and deserted valleys and rolling grasslands will almost make you wish you lived in the 1800’s…until you realize you had to poo in a hole and there was no football. The soundtrack was great too: Django shooting racists while a James Brown/2 Pac collaboration played on. Brilliant.
The mutable storyline. This is a fantastically spun tale which starts out as a bleak expose about death for cash, which forms into a story of friendship, but delves back down into revenge, reemerges for justice and redemption, and then turns into a cat and mouse thriller for a while until unraveling into a blood-thirsty mess of explosions and bullets before finding its ending.
The actors. DiCaprio, Foxx, Waltz, and Jackson were almost perfect. Leo’s accent kind of fades in an out, but who gives a fuck. He had the best shit eating grin kind of face I’ve ever seen. Waltz and Foxx were wonderful together; their friendship could have used a little more development, but a genuine interracial friendship in this film was so welcomed that we drink it up in haste without skepticism. DiCaprio and Jackson’s relationship dynamics on the other hand are much more complex, curious, fascinating, and entertaining.
Their friendship is built around the same horrible institution that Waltz and Foxx are laboring against but stuck inside. To watch them all maneuver on screen at the same time was stimulating and joyous. Also, honorable mention: Boyd (Walter Goggins) from Justified is in this. If he doesn’t play the most mesmerizing, contemptible pecker-wood in the history of TV and film I don’t know who does. He should have had more screen time.
The Bad
The ending. Let me put it in football terms. Tie game and we are 3rd and 10 at the 15 yard line of the opponent. It’s the 4th quarter and there are 03 seconds left on the clock. Time for one last play. Quarterback drops back. There are three open receivers in the end zone. The quarterback doesn’t pick any. He tucks the ball and has a clear running lane straight into the end zone! But instead, he steps out of bounds. The game goes to overtime where we march down the field using dink and dump passes with a couple of pass interference calls to make it to the 20-yard line.
Then an anticlimactic field goal ends it all. I don’t know why the people in charge of this movie decided to go this way; maybe it was an homage to those old movies that always had dumb, convoluted endings. Heck, even Huck Finn has a wacky ass ending making Slave Jim go through all kinds of other dumb shit before he could be free. Maybe Quentin is a Mark Twain fan. Maybe he will come to Christmas dinner next year on a riverboat dressed as Colonial Sanders.
Django/Dr. King development. It would have been nice to have a few more buddy-cop type scenes to develop their friendship slightly more. Maybe Django could slap King’s hand and say, you never touch a black man’s pantaloons or something like that before they have a dance off and Dr. King gets served but learns about equality. Ok, maybe nothing that kitsch but something to that effect. We never find out what transpires to give King such enlightened beliefs in a time of ignorance.
I know there is subtext here, as his name is Dr. King and he’s also a German (Germans don’t have a great record when it comes to civil rights) but I don’t really care. Deciphering subtext from Quentin Tarantino would be about as meaningful as getting Honey Boo Boo to read your palm. And we never find out why Django is so adept at killing. Perhaps he is truly a natural, but some other explanation would greater assist our emotional investment. Anyway, it all still works because Waltz and Foxx are so great.
The Ugly
Tarantino starring as a miner/slave trader with an Australian accent stuck in some forced scene mugging it up for the cameras. Maybe Quentin didn’t end the movie when he should have because he had written a silly little part for himself. It’s clear he loves death and gore, but he’s running out of historical groups to use as fodder for his blood-lust. With Nazi’s and slave-owners already off the list, what’s next?
I can imagine his next picture: White Van Stan: a wrongly accused child molester is sentenced to life on an island inhabited only by pederasts. Stan murders everyone there by suffocating them inside his extra bushy pubes and then donates the island to Palestine where they can finally form their own autonomous state, free from oppression. Tarantino then goes on every talk show wearing a Kangol talking about how much he loves vintage porn and Palestinian food.