Django Unchained

This season has actually been a pretty good one for movie watching.  After a dry spell, I found mainstream movies released around these holidays that I actually wanted to pay to see.  Still waiting to see Les Miz, I just want to mention in passing that I liked the Hobbit.  Is it overstuffed?  Yes, but that's like complaining about too much of a good thing.  We saw Django Unchained on Christmas day, and it was a lot of fun.

Leave it to Tarantino to create controversy, much has been written about this movie, there's not a lot I could say that would be new.  I have always wanted to see a film version of the Confessions of Nat Turner, which I consider a nearly perfect novel.  Maybe Spike Lee could direct it.  This film isn't that, but it approaches themes that most movies do not touch, so for that alone it has my admiration.

There are things I just like about Tarantino.  One has always been the dialogue.  I wouldn't consider it nonstop action.  Mostly it's just people hanging out an talking, and this is a remarkable thing since they say interesting things.  They fully inhabit their world, anachronisms and all, it is a world.    Some find the dialogue overly pat, but I find it liberating.

Another thing I like is the seventies.  There's a rawness to that era, slick and gritty.   Newer movies are more slick in terms of sleekness.  ADHD riddled.  Frenetic.  No appreciation for the finer things.  Django Unchained tells a good story, with good performances playing good characters.  It's a simple combination for success.  I find it old-fashioned, somehow.

I previously wrote praise for Black Dynamite, but noted it didn't really contain the anger of those older films.  Machete bashed you on the head with that kind of anger.  I think Django does, but it's a slow awakening, in a way that seems authentic. Yes, we're reveling in a somewhat juvenile state of enlightenment, but there's something more going on.  It isn't about degradation as much as retribution, and the power of film to create and alter our iconography.  Here's to the movies.