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Old 05.15.2013, 08:34 AM   #17003
Rob Instigator
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Here is my thing with Django, and Tarantino

Inglorious Basterds worked BECAUSE they sidestepped completely the horrors of Buchenwald, and Auschwitz and all the other death camps. They were mentioned in passing, but not shown, because that reality, that utter cold truth of how evil humans can be to humans, would have made everything in Inglorious basterds glare in an ugly way as the farce it was (and a good farce, but a farce nonetheless, a superflous tiffle compared to the real dramas and horrors of WWII)

because Tarantino was clever enough to focus on just the wish-fulfilment aspect of his story, IB worked and I love it.

Django however, showed, or tried to show, the various brutalities of the african slavery situation. By spending so much time giving the audience lengthy scenes of torture and violence and extreme inhumanity, (the "mandingo" scene particularly was terrible and pointless, and actually, if you do your research, false, as the concept of slaves fighting to the death for the master's pleasure is really a made-up situation. The plantation records do not show this happening. A strong male slave was an extremely valuable possession, horrible as it may be to think about.)

Because they decided to show this horror, it created a jarring disconnect for me a a viewer. I could no longer care what happened in the film. It felt like just a white guy's cartoon version of what a blaxploitation movie was back in the day, with none of the personal connection that made us cheer for the Nazi killers in IB.

I guess I found the attempted combination of humor at the cartoony stupid KKK ("I can't see out of this mask!"), and the showing of visceral, brutal violence in a ham-fisted attempt to "respect" the slave's experience to be phony.
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