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Django Unedited
Feb. 3rd, 2013 05:15 pmThe Star Wars parody really was inevitable. It's about a bounty hunter named Jango (albeit with a silent "D"), for heaven's sake.
I have the same internal conflict with Django Unchained that I have with all Tarantino's recent output, ever since he got so carried away with Kill Bill that he had to split it into two movies.
On the one hand, they're really cool, packed with style, memorable characters, tense confrontations and OTT violence (that shouldn't be entertaining but is!). And nobody writes and directs dialogue scenes like Tarantino. I could listen to his characters talk all day.
On the other hand, I do kind of feel like I am listening to his characters talk all day. Django is yet another Tarantino film which has no proper sense of pacing and is just too damn long for its relatively simple plot.
But here's the problem - I can't think of a single scene I'd cut. Every single scene is a joy to watch, and if it's not moving the plot forward, it's fleshing out the characters. It's just somehow that the film as a whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Still well worth a watch though. Christoph Waltz is just hypnotic as the enigmatic bounty hunter who frees Django from slavery and helps him on his quest for revenge. The rest of the cast do a good job too. The apparent invulnerability of the two leads gradually crumbles as they get deeper and deeper behind enemy lines (as it were), until everything suddenly kicks off in an astonishingly violent (and explosive) final act.
It's a western and a story about racism and slavery, but ultimately it's Tarantino doing what Tarantino has always done best.
I have the same internal conflict with Django Unchained that I have with all Tarantino's recent output, ever since he got so carried away with Kill Bill that he had to split it into two movies.
On the one hand, they're really cool, packed with style, memorable characters, tense confrontations and OTT violence (that shouldn't be entertaining but is!). And nobody writes and directs dialogue scenes like Tarantino. I could listen to his characters talk all day.
On the other hand, I do kind of feel like I am listening to his characters talk all day. Django is yet another Tarantino film which has no proper sense of pacing and is just too damn long for its relatively simple plot.
But here's the problem - I can't think of a single scene I'd cut. Every single scene is a joy to watch, and if it's not moving the plot forward, it's fleshing out the characters. It's just somehow that the film as a whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Still well worth a watch though. Christoph Waltz is just hypnotic as the enigmatic bounty hunter who frees Django from slavery and helps him on his quest for revenge. The rest of the cast do a good job too. The apparent invulnerability of the two leads gradually crumbles as they get deeper and deeper behind enemy lines (as it were), until everything suddenly kicks off in an astonishingly violent (and explosive) final act.
It's a western and a story about racism and slavery, but ultimately it's Tarantino doing what Tarantino has always done best.
