Review: 'Django Unchained'

Quentin Tarantino’s greatest exploration of human evil
Justin Craig
December 19, 2012
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/12/19/review-django-unchained-quentin-tarantinos-greatest-exploration-human-evil

NEW YORK –  “Django Unchained” is Quentin Tarantino’s greatest exploration of the human condition, from its idea of what is right to its heinous moments of evil. Continuing with the theme of revenge explored in "Inglorious Basterds," Tarantino blends the Spaghetti western genre with 70s Blaxploitation, creating an insane concoction of vengeance and thoughtfulness, tossing between the disgustingly funny and the most primal notion of violence. “Django” is a shocking and bold film with a huge heart and soul.

Unlike his other films, “Django” is linear and follows a single storyline, which makes this movie, more than his others, a completely satisfying experience. Tarantino lets us live with characters for the entirety of the movie (which is a long 165 minutes) rather than bouncing between different vignettes. Christoph Waltz is Dr. King Schultz, a doctor-turned bounty hunter, who purchases Django from slave traders with the intent on finding a pair of wanted slavers. Only Django knows what they look like, so Schultz needs him to identify them. Granted his freedom, Django accepts the offer and becomes an apprentice bounty hunter, though he and Schultz set their sights on the ultimate target, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the socialite plantation owner who purchased Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).

Like “Inglorious Basterds,” Tarantino spends a decent portion of the film subjecting his protagonists, and the audience, to unspeakable horrors. With “Basterds” it was Waltz’s sadistic pleasure of executing Jews, here it’s the unconscionable treatment of slaves. While “Basterds” is a more visually violent film, “Django” primarily uses dialogue to convey the horrific treatment of African Americans, becoming a pressure cooker until the final bloody reel. While there are some gruesome visual moments depicting slavery, Tarantino really drives the point home with the excessive use of the ‘N-word’.

Tarantino lays on monologue after monologue, each more engrossing and entertaining than the previous, from Waltz’s lengthy and humorous diatribes justifying his kills to DiCaprio’s speeches about human cock fighting and slave ownership. Waltz most assuredly comes away from “Django” with the most lines spoken, and each piece of dialogue is meticulously written and delivered, enabling Waltz to deservedly soak up all the attention. Waltz hands-down gives one of the best performances of the year.

But Jamie Foxx is also riveting as Django, delivering a restrained, internalized performance. The power of Foxx’s acting lies in his subtle reactions to Waltz and DiCaprio. Though Django, in true Spaghetti western fashion, says little, his presence is undeniable in every scene. Waltz and DiCaprio may jabber on and on but Tarantino always keeps our eye on Foxx, whom unexpectedly at any given moment could strike out at his opponents. Between Tarantino’s crisp, tense dialogue and Foxx’s brooding, vengeful persona, “Django” is a master stroke of reserved suspense.

DiCaprio’s turn as a baddie is interesting. His Calvin Candie is weasely and unpredictable, like a spoiled child on the verge of a tantrum, though his tantrums would lead to certain bloodshed. This is the “Titanic” star’s most exciting performance, since it is unlike anything he has previously done, something that has come to be expected in a Tarantino film. This was a long time coming for DiCaprio.

The most surprising performance in “Django” comes from Samuel L. Jackson as Stephen, the head slave at Candie’s vast plantation, appropriately called Candyland. Jackson, under layers of makeup, is an aged, frighteningly broken man who dishes out brutal punishment to the slaves beneath him. Tarantino showcases quite a bit of evil in “Django,” but maybe none more powerful than Jackson’s Stephen. The character is a parrot atop Candie’s shoulder, feeding off his owner’s sadism and hatred. Watching Jackson slip out of his usual persona and become this chilling SOB is unexpected and most welcome.
Tarantino also unearths fossils Don Johnson and Dennis Christopher as baddies. Johnson delivers some uncomfortable laughs as he tries to get his ragtag Klan members, including Jonah Hill, to raid Django and Schultz. Also in a small role is the original Django, Franco Nero.

In typical Tarantino fashion, “Django” features a rip-roaring soundtrack with expected tunes by Spaghetti western maestro Ennio Morricone (who composed an original track for this film) as well as Luis Bacalov’s cult classic “Django” theme, plus pieces by Jerry Goldsmith, James Brown and Tupac, Brother Dege, John Legend and an original song by Rick Ross (“100 Black Coffins). Hearing Tarantino’s use of music is part of the experience of seeing one of his films. Not all the songs work out of their original context, but each piece leaves an indelible imprint on the film.

With “Django Unchained,” the “Pulp Fiction” director continues to play by his own rules and by doing so, further pushes cinema into new territory.

Tarantino Movie An Homage To Beloved Tarantino

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/next_tarantino_movie_an_homage_to

Next Tarantino Movie An Homage To Beloved Tarantino Movies Of Director's Youth
September 7, 2009 Issue 45•37

MADRID — While attending a European press junket Monday for his film Inglourious Basterds, director Quentin Tarantino announced that his next project, Jack Rabbit Slim, will go into production this fall, and will be an homage to his favorite director and screenwriter of all time: Quentin Tarantino.

"I've been a Tarantino fan for as long as I can remember," said Tarantino, who repeatedly referred to his hero as "The Master." "Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown—those movies were basically my film school. I mean, the ability to take a genre or a subgenre, embrace it to its core, and then blow it up and make it your own is something that has to be admired."

"We're talking about the quintessential writer-director of our time," Tarantino added.

A self-described "Tarantino geek," Tarantino said Jack Rabbit Slim was conceived as a tribute to his idol, and is deeply influenced by Tarantino's blaxsploitation movies of the late 1990s, Tarantino's classic multi-volume kung fu pictures, and the grindhouse films of the late 2000s that Tarantino made famous.

Tarantino has already cast the once-popular actor Eric Roberts to play Slim, in a role director believes will resurrect Roberts' career.

The film will reportedly feature elements and techniques lifted directly from Tarantino's past works, including numerous point-of-view shots from car trunks, and references to Tarantino's favorite cult films, My Best Friend's Birthday and From Dusk Till Dawn.

In one sequence Tarantino called "distinctly Tarantino-esque," Slim delivers an unexpectedly poetic monologue on cheeseburgers while dancing to an Ennio Morricone instrumental with a drug-addled Uma Thurman. And in the film's stunning climax, Slim remembers his training with a martial arts expert in China and then exacts revenge on the film's antagonists: a Nazi colonel, a Hollywood stuntman, and a Los Angeles syndicate of 88 yakuza warriors.

As an homage to Tarantino, Tarantino said he also plans to give the famed director a minor role in the film.

"If nothing else, I hope Jack Rabbit Slim makes moviegoers want to go back and explore the complete filmography of this great, great American artist," Tarantino said. "I really can't think of another living director who has made as large a contribution to the evolution of world cinema, and I feel it is my duty as a filmmaker to remind people of that."

Added Tarantino, "God, I love Quentin Tarantino."

The filmmaker, who became more and more excited when talking about the films of Quentin Tarantino, admitted that he has an autographed Reservoir Dogs poster signed by the director hanging in his living room. He also bragged about owning the syringe that John Travolta used to give Uma Thurman an adrenaline shot in Pulp Fiction.

"The actual one," Tarantino stressed.

Tarantino went on to say he was pleased to see that, almost 20 years into his career, director Quentin Tarantino was still going strong with his latest film, Inglourious Basterds, which Tarantino felt was one of the legendary filmmaker's "very best."

"If Jack Rabbit Slim is even a third as good as Basterds, I might just make a movie so good that Tarantino himself will give it a standing ovation," Tarantino said. "You know what, I bet he will."

The Holocaust, Tarantino-style

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1027043.html

07/10/2008
The Holocaust, Tarantino-style: Jews scalping Nazis
By Assaf Uni
Tags: Israel News, Holocaust

BERLIN - For weeks, Germany's tabloids and culture pages have been preoccupied with Quentin Tarantino's film "Inglorious Bastards," slated to start filming next week in Germany.

While the tabloids are drooling over the movie's star, Brad Pitt, who is moving with his wife Angelina Jolie and their children to a villa close to Berlin ("The most beautiful couple in Wannsee," one headline declared), the serious media is focusing on another angle: Is Germany ready for a Tarantino-style treatment of World War II?

An early draft of the script leaked onto the Internet three months ago suggested the film would contain scenes of bloody vengeance exacted by Jews against Nazis. One campaign would be carried out by Jews in the U.S. Army intent on scalping Nazi soldiers on occupied French soil; another would be a Jewish refugee's revenge against the Nazi officer who murdered her parents.

Pitt is to play Jewish-American Lt. Aldo Raine, the leader of a revenge squad known as "The Bastards," who launch a killing spree in which they hang, torture, disembowel and scalp German soldiers and engrave Swastikas on their foreheads, according to the leaked draft.

The film is raising controversy in Germany, where the subjects of World War II and the Holocaust are usually restricted to historical discourse.

"This is pop culture meeting Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with unprecedented force," said the film critic of SuedDeutche Zeitung, Tobias Kniebe. "The effects of this collision are utterly unpredictable."

German film critics blasted last week's decision to grant the film money from the German Film Fund and another local fund, saying that Germany cannot finance a movie that uses Jewish-Nazi relations as entertainment, especially one by Tarantino.

The SuedDeutche Zeitung warned that the film may be no less explosive than the Hollywood film Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise, about German officers' abortive attempt to assassinate Hitler toward the end of WWII. The movie, filmed in Germany and scheduled to be released in spring 2009, has already drawn fire from German historians.

"All the German historians and critics who were left gasping for breath by Tom Cruise and his worthy attempts to produce a correct image of Stauffenberg will be so shocked by 'Inglorious Bastards' that they will savage it on the spot," writes Kneibe.

Tarantino's film is not supposed to mix history and fiction, but to offer the pure, hyper-violent entertainment that the American director of "Reservoir Dogs," "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill" is known for.

"It is sort of a spaghetti western set in World War II," Tarantino told the German News Agency DPA. "I am not going to call it this, but if it had a subtitle for it, it would be called, 'Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France.'"

Films that treat the Holocaust period as pure entertainment could be destructive, says Alexander Kluge, a noted film director and author, who has been dealing with the Holocaust and its memory for more than 50 years.

He cites Swiss-Jewish director Dany Levy's comedy "Mein Fuehrer" as a case in point. This film raised a storm in Germany two years ago, when it portrayed for the first time a neurotic, empathy-evoking Hitler. "Such films can obscure the events' true significance," says Kluge.

Tarantino's film received a 300,000 euro grant from the state of Brandenburg, because it will be filmed in Potsdam's Babelsberg studios. Founded in 1911, this is the world's oldest major film studio. Films including Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and "The Blue Angel" with Marlene Dietrich were filmed there in the 1920s and 1930s, as were numerous Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda films.

Tarantino's film is also expected to receive 20 percent of its budget from the German Film Fund because it is being filmed in Germany. It is scheduled to be released in June 2009.

Britney Spears to play lesbian killer

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/2509196/Britney-Spears-to-play-lesbian-killer-in-Quentin-Tarantino-film.html

Britney Spears to play lesbian killer in Quentin Tarantino film
By Sarah Knapton
06 Aug 2008

Britney Spears is being lined up to play a killer lesbian stripper in the Quentin Tarantino's next movie, it has been reported.

The singer was apparently chosen by the Pulp Fiction director to play dancer Varla in a remake of the 1965 cult film Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

The movie sees three thrill-seeking strippers encountering a young couple in the desert.

Spears' character murders the boyfriend with her bare hands before taking the girlfriend hostage. The troubled singer will also have sex scenes with another girl before the drama ends in a blood-bath.

Tarantino is in discussions with other Hollywood stars to take the roles of the remaining two strippers.

A source said: "Quentin is convinced Britney will be brilliant. She's delighted. She thinks it could turn her career around.

"It is perfect Tarantino material. He wanted to get Britney first. She's playing the most important character."

Spears had her first starring role in the 2002 film Crossroads, portraying a high school graduate on a road-trip to find her mother. But despite grossing $60 million worldwide the movie, and Britney's performance, was panned and she received Razzie Awards for Worst Actress and for Worst Original Song.

Spears also made cameo appearances in Austin Powers: Goldmember and Longshot.

John Travolta becomes the perfect woman

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;jsessionid=XTZTTLZ5YYNP5QFIQMFSFFOAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/arts/2007/07/13/nosplit/bftravolta11.xml

John Travolta becomes the perfect woman
13/07/2007

When John Travolta finally agreed to star in his first musical since 'Grease', he had some very firm ideas about just how voluptuous his character should be, he tells John Hiscock

When you've been a sexy teen idol, a tough action star, danced with Diana, Princess of Wales and been nominated for two Oscars, you think long and hard when someone asks you to put on a dress and portray an outsized, overly protective mother.

John Travolta thought for 14 months before saying "Yes."

The decision was a good one, because he makes a sweet, lovable Edna Turnblad, who sings, dances and is madly in love with her husband, played by Travolta's old pal and fellow former Broadway hoofer Christopher Walken, in the third incarnation of John Waters's musical, Hairspray.

The story, as most people know by now, is set in Baltimore during the 1960s TV dance craze and centres on Edna and Wilbur Turnblad and their daughter Tracy (played by screen newcomer Nikki Blonsky), who graduates from outsider to celebrity trendsetter while kicking down racial barriers on local television.

Edna was portrayed in the original 1988 movie by the transvestite Divine and in the subsequent Broadway show by Harvey Feirstein.

But in this version, which the film's producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron describe as a "re-invention" based on the stage musical, the first choice for the role was always Travolta. They had originally chosen him for the Billy Flynn role in Chicago, but it went to Richard Gere after Travolta turned it down.

"When they asked me to be Edna Turnblad I said, 'Gee, 32 years as a leading man… why me? What makes you think I'd be the perfect woman?'

"It took me a year and two months to decide to do it. It was a long and arduous decision."

He was finally convinced by director-choreographer Adam Shankman's vision and passion.

"He basically said to me, 'I take this movie personally and if it doesn't come out right, I'm going to die.' And I said, 'Whoa, I've got to go with that guy,' because musicals don't work unless every throttle's on full, so when I got the sense everybody cared, then I said, OK.

"I had the biggest musical in history, Grease, and I wanted to leave it like that, so excuse the pun but it took a lot of grease to get me back in the frying pan."

He was so determined to create the Edna he wanted that he rejected several versions of the fat suit designed for him until he was given one he considered made her suitably curvaceous and voluptuous.

"It wasn't real to me to make her like a refrigerator," he says. "I said, 'Make her as big as you want as long as you give her a waist and make her pretty because it will be more interesting, more appealing and more entertaining.' I wanted people to enjoy looking at her, because if she's grotesque, it's not fun.

"My challenge was making sure I was convincing as a woman, so I drew on a library of memories of watching great female performances in the theatre and on film and in my family, and I used role models like Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, Elizabeth Taylor… these women with voluptuous shapes."

He had to spend up to five hours a day encased in a full body suit weighing more than 30lb with five separate gel-filled silicone prosthetic appliances for parts of Edna's face. But it had its compensations.

"I'm happy to be a man, but I miss being groped," he says, laughing. "Everybody tried to grope me all day. Suddenly having breasts and a big bottom gained me so much attention. Men and women wanted to feel my breasts and feel my bum. I must be a slut because I didn't care. Men were flirting with me and I was being given power I never had before. I found it fascinating. Women have power I didn't know they had."

Hairspray is a testament not only to 53-year-old John Travolta's versatility, but to his ability to defy the rules of Hollywood and continue to thrive.

In a business where the adage "they never come back" is especially true, he returned to Hollywood's A-list after languishing in semi-obscurity for a decade and is now as much in demand as he was when his portrayal of the posturing Italian-American Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, one of the signature films of the 1970s, earned him an Oscar nomination and international stardom.

Maybe it is due to his well-reported affiliation to the Church of Scientology, but he gives off the aura of almost unnatural calmness. He is remarkably easy to talk to and has an unexpected quality of being able to laugh at himself.

He and his actress wife Kelly Preston avoid the Hollywood social scene, preferring to remain at home some 100 miles up the coast, with their two children, Jett, 15, and seven-year-old Ella Bleu, who is already a budding actress.

An avid flier since he was 16 years old, Travolta also owns a fly-in/fly-out house in Florida, where he lands his Gulfstream 11 and customised 707 jets on a private runway, taxiing right up to the house.

Although he is all movie star nowadays, Travolta is a man who has paid his showbusiness dues. When he was six years old, he took dancing lessons from Gene Kelly's brother; he made his stage debut when he was 12 in Who Will Save the Plowboy?, dropped out of high school when he was 16 to begin work in summer stock and made his Broadway debut in 1974 in Over Here! with the Andrews Sisters.

But after achieving worldwide fame with Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978), he became trapped for nearly 10 years in a series of forgettable flops. He was in danger of becoming one of Hollywood's forgotten men until, in 1985, at a party at the White House, Diana, Princess of Wales asked him to dance and he was once more making headlines around the world.

"That was an amazing moment for her and for me because at that time I was having a dip in my career and no one was very interested in me," he says. "But with Princess Diana I was suddenly the only thing that mattered in America to her and I was reborn. I was like, 'Wow! I matter to someone again.' "

Then Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction (1994) restored his acting credibility and won him his second Oscar nomination. Since then, he has thrived in films such as Get Shorty (1995), Broken Arrow (1996), Michael (1996), Face/Off (1997), Primary Colors (1998) and Swordfish (2001), while emerging unscathed from such critically assailed flops as Battlefield Earth (2000).

His most recent film, Wild Hogs (2007), was a huge financial success, and he is due to start work soon on the Walt Disney film Old Dogs, which co-stars his wife and daughter. He is also awaiting a final script for Dallas, the movie version of the 1970s television series in which he is due to play JR.

"As you get older you have to force yourself to have new dreams," he says. "For instance, I've been flying for 37 years but now teaching others to fly is interesting for me. Sometimes you have to find new angles on life to keep you interested, like sharing successes and inspiring and helping others. You have to go out of your way to activate your dreams and keep them going in this third chapter of your life."

'Hairspray' is released on Friday July 20

CROSS-DRESSING AT THE MOVIES

Some Like It Hot (1959)
"Have I got things to tell you!" says Jerry (Jack Lemmon) to Joe (Tony Curtis). "What happened?" "I'm engaged!" "Congratulations! Who's the lucky girl?" "I am!"

The absolute mother of cross-dressing comedies, Billy Wilder's movie remains a thing of beauty - not, perhaps, something that could be said of the suspiciously big-boned Daphne and Josephine.

Mrs Doubtfire (1993)
Robin Williams is like a kiddy in a sweetshop as the husband who, after an acrimonious divorce, decides to pretened to be Euphegenia Doubtfire, nanny extraordinary, in order to spend more time with his children.

It all requires mammoth suspension of disbelief, but there's a nicely waspish edge to the script and much of it is far funnier than it has any right to be.

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Alec Guinness plays pursed-lipped Suffragette Lady Agatha, the fourth of eight members of the D'Ascoyne family (all played by Guinness) murdered by Dennis Price in pursuit of the dukedom he believes should be his.

"I shot an arrow in the air/She fell to earth in Berkeley Square," he says gaily after downing her hot-air balloon.

Tootsie (1982)
Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of a struggling young actor who turns himself into a middle-aged woman to get a part - and thereby gains an unwelcome insight into life on the other side of the sexual divide - won him an Oscar nomination. His biggest problem with the role? Getting the voice right, he said.

The Crying Game (1992)
If you've never seen this film, stop reading now, because the revelation that the sexy, sultry Dil (Jaye Davidson) is actually a boy is the plot's big twist, helping to make this one of Neil Jordan's biggest hits. Much confusion among male viewers who found themselves fancying her/him.