A couple of hunters of runaway slaves are leading a group of captured slaves through the desert (my beloved Alabama Hills) and the woods when they come across Dr. Tarantino very quickly establishes the world in which we are going to live in for 165 minutes. Some people complained about Strangelove in the same tone they now complain about Django. As for the complaints that you cannot treat a serious subject as dark comedy, come on folks, it is nearly fifty years since Dr. The predominantly white audience I saw the film with seemed to like it, and like the white audiences forty years ago for black exploitation films, they were rooting for the black underdog getting revenge against The Man. The split may come from treating the storyline as very, very dark comedy, with the usual violence found in Tarantino’s scripts. Some viewers, both black and white, love it and some hate it. Nazis are dead and buried, but the issue of racism is still a very live wire in America, which has caused splits among the audiences for the film. The subject in Inglourious Basterds was killing Nazis during World War II, and here it is pre-Civil War slavery in the South. All of those elements are back in Django Unchained, and in a year in which many big-budget movies played it as safe as they could, it is nice to see a movie that plays it anything but safe. He was also finally accepting the fact that violence can hurt people, not only those who are victims of it, but those who perpetrate it. In his own freewheeling way, he was taking on history as much as other movies, and he was focusing on characters. And as much or more than any other American screenwriter, he wants to tell off-the-wall, wildly entertaining stories.” One thing I liked about Inglourious Basterds is that Tarantino was not just ripping off other movies. As I said in that column “Like many American screenwriters, who are after all part of the American storytelling tradition, he wants to tell a tale. Lotsa stuff, including our ideas of history, blowed up real good: You may remember from US#32 that I liked Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) a lot.
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