Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Django Uncahined

SF: I liked some westerns, others I find boring, protracted and painful. This managed to be both. We track the course of Django's rise from slavery to bounty hunter and his quest to rescue his wife. On paper this should work rather well. It has been done many time before and tends to yield good results. The problem is that the character I was really interested in wasn't Django at all but Dr King Schultz (Christopher Waltz). If the film had just been about him, it would have been great. The first 90 mins are a fairly enjoyable mentor - padawan type film. Great pace, excellent character development and mildly humorous at points. I honestly thought I liked it as much as True Grit. Then we get to the quest and this is when my stomach turned, maybe it was suppose to - the Mandingo fight was one of the most horrific scenes in of any Tarantino movie. From there on out the whole thing was just dull. Violence for the sake of it was to be expected but nothing really held my attention, not even the scene where you see EVERYTHING of one Jamie Foxx. The last 25 mins were particularly dull and I just want to go home. 6/10

50 Eggs: I'm not the biggest Tarantino fan but I enjoyed his earlier stuff. Unfortunately this is more like his latter stuff, i.e Deathproof. There are some engaging scenes, and as usual the dialogue is great, but mostly this is just an overblown, over-long rescue movie. I don't have a problem with that, but I do have a problem with the film strutting around , thinking its clever when it isn't. 6/10

DonkeyB: I have no original thoughts on this film. It is unoriginal, its supposed to be (I think). It is far too long. There is a bizarrely misguided directorial cameo. If the defence of the numerous uses of "nigger", is that this is how people spoke back then, why is all of the other dialogue proto-typical Tarantino (highly entertaining this time) verbo-babble? Christolph Waltz gives a performance several levels more entertaining than that in the vastly over-rated Inglorious Basterds.

The film is in two parts; the first part- the mock western is very, very, entertaining, the second part- the exploitation revenge action film with long and dull scenes of Leonardo DiCaprio chewing scenery (and watching his dogs chew his slaves alive for entertainment), is unnecessary and unwelcome. I know the 'heightened' violence is supposed to be entertaining (I never find it such), but actually I find myself wanting to take Mr Tarantino to a gun range and have him film real life things getting shot with real guns (if he insists in extreme close-ups and ultra-slow-motion). If the purpose of the second part of this film isn't to glorify and fetishize violence then I don't know what it was for. I was very, very bored by it, and quite annoyed.

So can I review the films separately? First half 8.5/10 Second half 2/10 = 5.25

This review was brought to you by the punctuation mark "-"

Overall: 5.75/10

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