On 1/14/13 4:18 PM, Julio Huato wrote: > Longish but the sharpest review of Django I've read so far. It says > many sensible things that haven't been said on the discussion on these > lists. I'm also linking, below the review's link, the link to Henry > Louis Gates' interview of Q. Tarantino: > > http://politicalfilm.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/django-blowing-the-pulp-out-of-dixie/
Kim Nicolini: One of the biggest jokes in the film is the outfit that Django chooses to wear when he and Schultz hit their first plantation as business partners. When Schultz tells Django he can pick his “costume” to play his role of “valet,” Django dons a blue satin costume that mimics the attire of in the 18th-century Thomas Gainsborough painting “Blue Boy”. The outfit seems ridiculously funny, but Django wears it like a dare and a weapon, understanding on some level that the outfit is violating all kinds of racial codes (in the movies and in the South). It emblemizes the way in which this black character is disrupting traditional white narratives and dismantling the romantic view of the South. In a way, it’s also the perfect metaphor for Tarantino’s filmmaking strategy in Django Unchained, so wrong in breaking with every social convention that it’s deliciously right. Because the outfit is also blatantly anachronistic — the Gainsborough painting appears to depict someone playing “dress up” in a 17th-century outfit — it alerts us to the fact that Tarantino’s movie — though it doesn’t deviate from the historical record as obviously as Inglorious Basterds, with its climax in which Jewish American soldiers assassinate Hitler — is not striving for the sort of accuracy fetishized in reverential historical films like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. --- That's really fascinating. Nicolini calls the powder-blue Gainsborough costume the "biggest joke" in the movie. For me it was so devoid of internal logic that I walked out of the theater. My idea of a "biggest joke" is the scene in Buster Keaton's "The General" where he tries to deal with a runaway train. Of course, this movie glorified the Old South in the same fashion as "Birth of a Nation". That being said, "The General" and "Birth of a Nation" were truly great movies unlike QT's grindhouse junk. > > http://www.theroot.com/views/tarantino-unchained-part-1-django-trilogy > Explanation for Gates's softball questions: HLG: Let's see: We have Lincoln playing; Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave is about to come out in the next year, I suppose; I'm co-producing a feature film on Frederick Douglass for Sony with Peter Almond and Rudy Langlais -- that's in development. [Editor's note: Sony Pictures is the international distributor for Django Unchained.] Why slavery now? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
