Django Unchained-2 – Press Play Video Blog

Watch: Quentin Tarantino’s Best Visual Film References… in Three Minutes!

It is a well known fact that Quentin Tarantino is a self-proclaimed
cinephile. But the writer/director’s love for cinema is most obviously
expressed through his own films. In addition to showing his characters
spending a great deal of time discussing cinema, Tarantino’s films are
jam-packed with homages and visual references to the movies that have
intrigued him throughout his life.

Many
filmmakers pay homage, but Tarantino takes things a step further by
replicating exact moments from a variety of genres and smashing them
together to create his own distinct vision. Just like ‘Kill Bill: Vol 2‘
(2004) draws on ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly‘ (1966) and ‘Samurai
Fiction‘ (1998), Tarantino’s work often reflects Spaghetti Westerns and
Japanese cinema–both new and old. His unique way of referencing other
films allows him to bend genre boundaries and shatter the mold of what
we expect to experience. While his methods are often criticized and he
is accused of "ripping off" other filmmakers, it seems that Tarantino is
simply writing love letters to the art he is ever so passionate about.

From German silent-cinema to American B
movies, the following video uses split-screen to demonstrate a few of
the hundreds of visual film references over the course of Tarantino’s
career.

Tarantino Films:

‘Reservoir Dogs’ (1992)
‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994)
‘Jackie Brown’ (1997)
‘Kill Bill: Vol. 1’ (2003)
‘Kill Bill: Vol. 2’ (2004)
‘Death Proof’ (2007)
‘Inglourious Basterds’ (2009)
‘Django Unchained’ (2012)

Referenced Films (in order of appearance):

‘City on Fire’ (1987)

‘Django’ (1966)

‘Band of Outsiders’ (1964)

‘8 1/2’ (1963)

‘The Warriors’ (1979)

‘Psycho’ (1960)

‘Kiss Me Deadly’ (1955)

‘The Flintstones’ (1960-66)

‘Superchick’ (1973)

‘The Graduate’ (1967)

‘Citizen Kane’ (1941)

‘Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell’ (1968)

‘Lady Snowblood’ (1973)

‘City of the Living Dead’ (1980)

‘Black Sunday‘ (1977)

‘Game of Death’ (1978)

‘Miller’s Crossing’ (1990)

‘Death Rides a Horse’ (1966)

‘Gone in 60 Seconds’ (1974)

‘Samurai Fiction’ (1998)

‘Blade Runner’ (1982)

‘The Searchers’ (1956)

‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968)

‘Five Fingers of Death’ (1972)

‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966)

‘Convoy’ (1978)

‘The Bird With the Crystal Plumage’ (1970)

‘Unforgiven’ (1992)

‘The Searchers’ (1956)

‘Metropolis’ (1927)

‘Django’ (1966)

‘Gone With the Wind’ (1939)

‘The Great Silence’ (1968)

‘A Professional Gun’ (1968)

Jacob T. Swinney is an industrious film editor and filmmaker, as well as a recent graduate of Salisbury University.

VIDEO: What Does Oscar-Winning Cinematography Look Like?

https://vimeo.com/59908268

As a bonus to the “Who Should Win” video essay series that identifies this year’s truly deserving Oscar winners, this video compiles some of the most impressive visuals from the five films nominated for the Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography. Of all the Oscar categories, this one may lend itself best to a simple video compilation of clips that lets you decide for yourself which movie deserves to win. All you have to do is watch and decide. Or is it really that simple?

Of course, one can’t evaluate all the films in their entirety in one sitting. I’ve limited the selections for each film to two standout clips not exceeding a total of 90 seconds. To do this, I enlisted the suggestions of the Twittersphere. Over a dozen people tweeted their standout shots and images from the nominated films, with several moments getting multiple mentions and thus finding their way into this compilation reel. Based on sheer number of enthusiastic tweets on their behalf, it seems that Skyfall and Lincoln are the popular favorites.

I made one additional tweak to the video by removing the audio from the clips. It may be a bit jarring to watch these scenes without a soundtrack, but it’s for the sake of placing sole emphasis on the images and camerawork. I hope you’ll agree with me that, by and large, the visual artistry on display speaks quite well for itself.

Looking at these clips, I have my own opinion on who should win, but I’ll keep mum, as I’d rather see you cast your vote in the comments section. Perhaps a subsequent discussion below might tease out my favorite.

VIDEO ESSAY: Who Should Win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMzZ93_9tbw

Part of "Who Should Win," a series of video essays co-presented by Indiewire Press Play and Fandor.

This year’s Best Supporting Actor nominees are all previous Oscar winners, which eliminates some of the career achievement concerns that can affect these awards. Let’s hope that puts more emphasis on the quality of the performances, which are all worthy of consideration.

As a wisecracking, world-weary Hollywood producer, Alan Arkin gives a light-hearted lift to Argo’s political thriller proceedings. In Lincoln, Tommy Lee Jones plays the salty senator Thaddeus Stevens. Jones’ performance lives in his eyes. It shows the mental activity of an old man challenged to rethink his politics in order to achieve his lifelong dream of abolishing slavery. Jones is currently the narrow favorite to win the Oscar, but I think there are three performances better than his.

In Django Unchained, Christoph Waltz is a ruthless bounty hunter whose conscience awakens when he helps a freed slave on his quest. Waltz is a master of playing surface-level civility. But in this film, he peels away those layers ever so gradually to reveal his moral outrage seething underneath.

Robert De Niro gives his best performance in years in The Silver Linings Playbook. He plays a football-fixated father, whose attempts to help his son are undermined by his own manic temperament. It’s a display of late-career virtuosity, showing the emotional range he’s mastered over a lifetime: from explosive menace to wisecracking warmth. In this film, he adds an extra dimension through a sense of advanced age and frailty, which he uses to disarming pathos in this scene. But as it turns out, this emotional display is a put-on, as he just wants to loop his son into a crazy scheme. De Niro’s character is an inspired creation of demented obsession, charged with startling vitality.

But I have to give the top prize to Philip Seymour Hoffman for his work as the self-help guru Lancaster Dodd in The Master. It surprises me to say this because I’m not even sure if it’s a complete performance—by the end, his character seems to disappear into the movie’s unresolved clouds of ambiguity. But for the first 90 minutes of The Master, Hoffman is key to making this film work. He’s a pillar of authoritative self-control, a counterbalance to Joaquin Phoenix’s utterly unhinged lead performance.

But Hoffman is doing more than just playing the straight man. There’s an unforgettable scene where Hoffman’s Dodd first processes Phoenix. From Dodd’s face and his line of questioning, we see a refined man fascinated by a wild beast of a human, but we catch a glimpse of that same wildness lurking in him as well. That wildness explodes in a later scene when Hoffman is ambushed, and his lack of self-mastery is exposed. In just these two scenes, Hoffman is able to chart out the entire three-dimensional psychic landscape of a character. It’s this richness that keeps us watching even as the film takes us to increasingly difficult territory.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor’s Keyframe, and a contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

Quentin Tarantino’s DJANGO UNCHAINED and the Many Spike Lees

Growing up in the 1980's with the slave name Boone, I was delighted to hear the joke song my older brother brought home from school one day. He sang it to the tune of the Daniel Boone TV theme song in his best middle-school baritone, holding one arm out and extending his slight baby-fat belly like Burl Ives: "Daniel Boone was a man/He was a biiiiig maaan… But the bear was bigger/so he chased that nigga/up a treee…." This would thereafter cause me to choke with laughter whenever it was sung within my earshot. First off, there was the use of the word nigger as nigga, the way kids in my neighborhood used it, as a subversively goofy synonym for man. Second, the song turned a straightforward 1960's adventure show into an F-Troop-style lampoon, sending the kind of barrel-built frontiersman you'd expect to fight a bear one-handed scrambling up a tree instead.

The absurdity of the word nigger, and of the American empire that counted it as currency, inspire Quentin Tarantino nearly as much as Uma Thurman's toes. He marvels at a society that creates, perpetuates and forever fears a nigger class. In Django Unchained, we get to witness the entire nigger creation/perpetuation/demonization assembly line, and it looks like the most jackleg Rube Goldberg contraption you can imagine. It starts by showing slaves dragged along in neck and ankle chains; it proceeds to detail the auctioning, trading, policing and torturing of niggers. Greasy rednecks and pretentious Southern gennuhmen fumble at the levers of this ungainly contraption all the way along, spitting tobacco and ducking its blast of dirty locomotive exhaust.

We know, thanks to a voluminous amount of reporting, that Tarantino has filtered this view of American capitalism through his film critic lens, referencing Sergio Corbucci Spaghetti Westerns and blaxploitation, and, less frequently noted, Blazing Saddles and The Skin Game. I also spied the kind of anachronistic postures and quips that made Wild Wild West, Hogan's Heroes and, yes, F-Troop dietary staples of Tarantino's (and my) generation.

Now, there is a certain type of African-American intellectual whose grasp of the brute facts of history is firm but whose funny bone goes dead numb at the sound of the word nigger; whose measure of artistry in any film approaching the vast subject of "us" is whether it uplifts or insults us. These are the niggas that would stare sourly at my brother's rendition of the Daniel Boone theme song and at Django Unchained's approximately 115 utterances of nigga.

Spike Lee is one of those niggas. A talented filmmaker and brilliant businessman, his imagination often seems atrophied when he tries to build up his ability to choose topical, incendiary subject matter. In Malcolm X, he staged one of the most vivid, vigorous passages in X's autobiography, the Roseland ballroom dance, as a stagy, choreographed number with canned music—PBS Black History Month stuff. Later in that film, he recreated Malcolm's magical realist encounter with the specter of Elijah Muhammad as an interview with a glowing Yoda in his prison cell. The lowest point in the history of Spike's imagination was the scene in Summer of Sam where serial killer David Berkowitz's dog Sam, sounding like Jon Lovitz and moving his lips with the help of Purina-commercial CGI, ordered his master to "Kill, Kill, KILL!!!"

Spike brought that kind of imagination to a recent Tweet-review of Django Unchained, written without having seen the movie: "American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them."

Not to say that Django is an exceptionally subtle piece of work. Both Spike and Quentin have a Sam Fuller tendency to go all-caps, tabloid large when staging bits of provocation that would be juicy all on their own. But let's just lay it on the table: Tarantino is the better filmmaker, by many miles. His ability to organize screen time and space is more assured and rhythmic than Spike's generally antsy, grab-bag approach. Certain sublime stretches of Do the Right Thing, Clockers, 25th Hour and his lovely documentaries nothwithstanding, it's hard to imagine Spike sitting still for the carefully timed and detonated jokes built around Django's initiation into the bounty-hunting business. Both filmmakers are terrible actors who have trouble getting out of their own way, but Tarantino, more often than Spike, redeems his indulgences with scene-making that simply rewards close, patient attention. Both filmmakers quote the films and pop culture totems that inspire them; Tarantino just tends to do it more elegantly and purposefully (Radio Raheem's lyrical Night of the Hunter quotation in Do the Right Thing and Kill Bill's sometimes ungainly kung fu Orientalism notwithstanding).

What Spike had over Quentin, up until Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, was a political passion that made headlines. Tarantino, who had once criticized Oliver Stone for turning his nihilistic crime script Natural Born Killers into a bludgeoningly political "Oliver Stone Film," seems to have emerged as a junior Stone, speaking out with a strong liberal voice about how today's prison industrial complex is essentially "modern day slavery." His two most recent films are complicated reflections on American evil. The massacre of mostly civilian moviegoers in Basterds was uncomfortable even before the Colorado Dark Knight shootings; we could recognize ourselves in those doomed Nazi sympathizers and appeasers. We are the good citizens who sit by when our government and corporate elite commit crimes that we believe won't touch us, up until the moment the chickens come home to roost. The insurgent heroes in Basterds and Django don't discriminate much between active combatants and their abettors—a quality that resonates in all directions, at modern-day terrorists, soldiers, CIA torturers, tribal warlords and regional militia. A scene where freed slave Django argues with his bounty hunter mentor, King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), over the prospect of sniping a wanted man in front of that man's son, might as well be between two Defense Department employees pondering the morality of extrajudicial killings by aerial drone. Their view of the man pushing a plow on his quiet farm even resembles the kind of perspective drones and attack helicopters get on their Eastern prey.

Through Basterds and Django, Tarantino states that all power that dehumanizes an Other is bloody and treacherous, and that when it's performed in our name, we should know exactly what it looks like and anticipate tasting similar treachery in retaliation. A certain non-violent, ingratiating character in Django Unchained gets swept away in a cartoon-like gun blast. She flies back like a rag, as weightless as her convictions. At both screenings I attended, the audience roared with laughter in that moment—but it was an uneasy laugh.

So Tarantino has more interesting things on the Django plate than the ugliness or savage beauty of the word nigger, but they all orbit around the global condition for which that word is merely a place card. Daniel Boone was a big man, as 60's television taught us, but he also owned slaves, as I learned when I was a teen, digging for some link between my family name and a glorious American past. In history, the niggers are the ones you have to do some digging to find, typically under rubble or unmarked graves. To do this kind of digging as a filmmaker, a really fine-tuned sense of humor helps a heap.

Spike Lee showed that kind of raw but humanistic wit on Do the Right Thing and in great documentaries like Jim Brown: All-American. That guy would enjoy Django Unchained, I'll bet. The other Spike Lee, the one who Tweeted a psychic review of a movie he hadn't seen, has already spoken, inanely. Yet another Spike Lee, the one who has shown, in films like She Hate Me and the shallower portions of Bamboozled, a sense of humor every bit as trivial and callous as he claims Django to be, reminds me of that Lucille Clifton poem about Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor:

eddie, he a young blood

he see something funny

in everythin ol rich

been around a long time

he know ain't nothing

really funny

Steven Boone is a film critic and video essayist for Fandor and Roger Ebert's Far Flung Correspondents. He writes a column on street life for Capital New York and blogs at Big Media Vandalism.

DJANGO UNCHAINED Is All Too Restrained

A plantation in the antebellum South is a perfect setting for a Quentin Tarantino film. His movies flip expectations, revealing gangsters as mundane chatterboxes and assassins as loving parents, transforming the would-be victims of murderous stalkers and World War II Nazis into forces of vengeance. So with Django Unchained, Tarantino takes aim at the mythology of the southern plantation through his genre-colliding structure to bathe the culture in his excessive style. The film is intermittently thrilling fun—the director is in complete control of his camera—yet for all its surface pleasures, it feels oddly unfocused. It rarely displays Tarantino’s ability to undermine or reinvent the familiar. Too often it feels like a film by one of his poor imitators.

In many ways, the structure of Django Unchained recalls Inglorious Basterds. It’s a mix of spaghetti western and blaxploitation that takes its title from the Sergio Corbucci film Django, and even features a cameo by its star, Franco Nero. The film begins with a shot of whip scars on the back of the titular Django, played by a quietly soulful Jamie Foxx, as he’s led across the landscape as part of a chain gang. Dr. King Schultz, a dentist played by Christoph Waltz, approaches the slave masters in the middle of a forest, using words such as parley and malarkey to intimidate them with his control of the English language. It turns out the good doctor is actually a bounty hunter who needs Django to identify his next targets. When Django’s owners turn down Schultz’s request, he turns this nighttime encounter into a bloody mess, sending our heroes on their way, and planting the seeds of black revenge.

In terms of sets and locations, Django Unchained is Tarantino’s most expansive film, but it features his most straightforward story. Django and Schultz first team up as bounty hunters across the South before deciding to rescue Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). She’s being held captive by the vicious, maniacal slave owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, miscast) and Samuel L. Jackson as Candie’s loyal servant Stephen, an Uncle Tom to the nth degree. Schultz and Django must perform in order to deceive their captors, hiding their shock at the violence and pain of slavery around them. Playacting in service of the job is a Tarantino signature (see Reservoir Dogs’s undercover cop posing as the bank robber Mr. Orange, the Pulp Fiction assassin Jules bellowing Biblical passages as a prelude to murder, and the various role-players in Inglorious Basterds). Django doesn’t come at this theme with nearly as much originality or verve, nor does it present its bloodshed in a way that comments upon the moviegoer’s attraction-repulsion to violence. The characters obsessively discuss the savagery onscreen and the way violence is commodified, but their observations never add up to a critique.

Tarantino’s initial concept is promising; one would think that if anyone could re-imagine the clichés of Spaghetti westerns and slavery exploitation pictures, he could. But because the outcome of this tale feels inevitable and telegraphed, there’s little at stake, and the characterizations are disappointingly one note, and don’t defy our expectations as thrillingly as some of his other creations. Although Foxx plays Django with a cool and calculated depth, the hero never seems more than an archetype at the center of a myth, and Washington, another excellent performer, is given even less to do as Django’s mate Broomhilda. As much fun as DiCaprio looks like he’s having shouting epithets, his character is still a bombastic cartoon—stylish and fun but rarely complex. Only Waltz and Jackson give their characters more complicated, dynamic shadings. The plot machinations eventually lead to violent battle at the plantation, but it takes so long that when it arrives, it seems more a peak of excess than a satisfying climax, and throughout, the film lacks most of the other elements that make his earlier work more than just flashy entertainment. The hero slays all those who perpetuate the culture of slavery, but after the apocalyptic finale of Basterds, the bloodbath feels rote.

Tarantino, the Man Who Loves Movies, is still a virtuoso with the camera, taking inspiration from his idols to craft thrilling and exciting scenes. Sergio Leone’s tight closeups, Corbucci’s zooms, John Ford’s vistas and Howard Hawks’ editing patterns are all in play throughout Django, and there are echoes of blaxploitation films, too, particularly Shaft and Superfly. His camera movements are bold, taking you right into the action, and with Robert Richardson as director of photography, Western iconography hasn’t looked as good since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The film also boasts some of Tarantino’s most violent action, which for him is saying a lot, and its point-of-view is squarely with the oppressed rather than the oppressors. Scenes of violence toward blacks have an intense visceral quality and are often shot in tortuous close-ups with a grainy, oversaturated texture; violence against whites often plays in long shots, which lend these scenes over-the-top comical quality.

Unfortunately, Tarantino’s proficiency stops with the visuals. He seems more interested in its surface pleasures than actually engaging with his text. The movie’s most subversive moment—a comical set piece involving a very game Don Johnson and the Ku Klux Klan—feels less like Tarantino than a deleted scene from Blazing Saddles, and the deliberately anachronistic use of rap and soul artists, including 2Pac, Rick Ross, and John Legend, feels more intrusive than organic. (None of the songs feel as strangely right as David Bowie’s “Cat People” did in Basterds.)

More puzzlingly, the verbal tangents, a Tarantino hallmark, fall flat. Those elongated discussions usually serve one of two purposes: They contribute to the creation of unique character moments later, as in the TV pilot discussion in Pulp Fiction or the lap dance narrative in Death Proof; or they suggest what is not being said in a scene and build tension, as in the German pub sequence in Inglorious Basterds. Django’s talk lacks such richness. Much of the dialogue in the film’s second half centers on discussions of how slaves’ strength is rated; it should cut to the heart of the film’s subject, but it only underlines how much Tarantino loves his own phrasing. By the time Candie gives us an anatomy lecture with a human skull, the film seems as if it’s trying to be bold for boldness’ sake, without giving much thought to its ultimate goal. What, if anything, is the filmmaker trying to say about race, racism and slavery throughout Django Unchained? It’s not clear. The film plays out the fantasy of African-American revenge to an appropriately bloody conclusion, but it all seems more passé than inventive, clever but never revolutionary.

The movie’s failures are all the more depressing when one considers how many great films Tarantino has made, and how his talent has evolved over time. Twenty years ago, he revived commercial cinema with an adrenaline shot to the heart, but any complexity or surprise Django Unchained might have had gets asphyxiated under Tarantino’s love of his own craft. The movie is technically impressive but never emotional, its flourishes are witty yet superficial, and over time it becomes tedious. A film involving this many sticks of dynamite should have been more powerful.