movie review - Django Unchained
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Everyone loves this thing, it's current rating on imdb on 8.4/10. I thought the whole movie was in poor taste but eventually watched it while on a plane. I found the Mary Sue nature of our putative hero distracting. I found the scene where his pal, who tosses his life away seemingly to make a punchy scene in the movie, idiotic. Rap music in a period piece is fine, but rapidly updating the characters through decades is really annoying. Tonally adrift and endlessly unpleasant, the whole thing had the wrong feeling, and I have no idea why people gush over this stuff.
I note that the writer-director's early works like "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" stuck with me. This film is an attempt to recapture the magic of those films. But what it is the reverse; lacking tension and fun and a logical pacing, it tries for slick and unexpected but instead delivers trite and tiresome. Looking back, I've seen a steady decline in the body of work. I liked "Jackie Brown" at first, but after a recent re-watching realized that it wasn't what I'd remembered. By "Kill Bill" I could feel any enjoyment slipping away. Then .. "Death Proof". That's what did it for me. I never saw "Inglorious Basterds" and don't expect to. I regret seeing this one.
I want to make it clear: my expectations were low I have to say they weren't met. With some characters ludicrously updated and period-inappropriate dialog and motivations galore, the Mary Sue character romps through the late 19th Century like a winking time traveler and emerges from an epic bloodbath spouting glib crap and ticking all the right politically-correct notes on the way. Whatever has taken a-hold of modern story-telling, where political messages trample the story and obvious mechanics murder the medium, I can't abide it.
Save your time, don't watch this; do virtually anything else instead.
Avoid. I apparently stand completely alone in this.