No worries, I wasn't trying to be snarky. During the final season, there's a fight between Sweringen's right-hand man, Dan, and Hearst's man, known as the Captain, that is one of the most gruesome street fights I've ever seen. I won't say Django's mandingo fight is tame by comparison, but the Deadwood fight, IMO, is even harder to watch.
That's one of the most memorable scenes in TV history. And not that I've ever witnessed a fight like that, much less been in one, but it struck me as realistic. Two big dudes going at it would look a lot more like that, rather than the chorus of flying fists and feet that you usually see in fights in movies and TV.
I didn't see that one, but Deadwood was fierce so I'm not totally surprised. What got me about the Django mandingo fight was that it was happening casually in a small room while people watched the fight but also talked about other things. These two men fighting to the death was, like, just part of the scenery. Like having on the news in the background while you're cooking. Or a string quartet accompanying your fine dining experience. One's attention can drift in and out of some things. Only this sideshow had two people who felt no animosity towards each other being forced to fight to the end. And then, of course, we all know what happens when the slave's soul is crushed by the experience and he refuses to do it again....
Saw it again. This movie is awesome. Paid attention to some things I hadn't like the Franco Nero joke, the Jim Croce song (which is a really touching scene) and Zoe Bell. Like I said, it's great on so many levels.
Django was great. Waltz and Tarantino are just perfect for each other. On the Mandingo fight, apparently Tarantino had that and the dog fight originally a lot worse then what we saw. He said he had to edit it down A LOT because audiences had trouble getting back into the movie due to those scenes being way too gruesome.
So I saw this yesterday ... I don't think I got even a quarter of the references. I need the annotated version. My big mistake was watching the 1966 Django today. I should have watched that movie first. There's a whole bunch of little obscure moments in Django Unchained that leave you wondering, unless you've seen Django. They aren't plot points -- just little homages and citations. Bloody, gory, cartoonish ultra-violence -- but a hell of a movie. Makes me want to watch more of the old Spaghetti Westerns to get a fuller sense of everything that was being funneled into this movie.
I saw Django a long time ago and I even thought it would have something to do with the movie (and it did with the Django cameo) and you're right. It also explains something like the whole criticism QT has been given about the pre KKK because of it's lack of historic reality but if one has seen Django, one immediately knows why it was there. I got such a kick when I saw them.
I thought the whole f*cking movie was a dumbed down, over the top, farce. Making sure that the lowest common denominator got it. Sorta like high school. Watching "Again" How could you.
No. I don't know why he choose the australian guys but it might be because of QT's love for Australian films (he appeared in the Australian movie documentary, Not Quite Hollywood) and maybe Australian westerns like Mad Dog Morgan. From Django, the homages I saw off the top of my head were the masks, the great Franco Nero cameo where Django meets Django and how whenever they were in a town, the ground was always muddy.
Not sure if I am reading it wrong, but the ground is far from 'always muddy' In 'Straylia - trust me. Feckers live down the road from the sun itself.
Django action figures being pulled after complaints from A.A. groups. Going for hundreds on ebay already
That was the strong point of the movie - it jarred me into really thinking about how violent, and inhuman, and brutal and plain awful slavery was. We're so removed from it now, it's easy to just say "Yes, of course slavery was bad and we as a society are still dealing with the repercussions today," and then kind of move on. But that scene made me think about it. There the villains are, sitting there casually watching ultraviolence. And what are we doing? Same damn thing (even if it's fake, it still resonates). It was good filmmaking. Then that sort of goes away, and the film becomes a treatise about white guilt while the black guy becomes a preening superhero at the end. Suffice it to say, I consider this to be a fairly uneven effort from QT.
I don't know why the rest of the film makes it uneven since in the end it's a revenge film just like Inglorious Basterds where. The difference is that the portrayal of slavery is worse because as you said, it's uncommon for people to know really how terrible it was. Since everybody knows how horrible the Nazi's where, I don't think there was a need in IB to set things up like in Django Unchained.
Just a side point. Slavery was certainly violent, inhuman, brutal, and plain awful but most history scholars say that mandingo fighting was a myth. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat...g_were_any_slaves_really_forced_to_fight.html And this article supports my recollection from having read The Peculiar Institution. Stamp is nothing if not thorough, so I doubt he'd have failed to mention something like mandingo fighting if it had existed.
Yes. Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained are both very similar in that they take a cruel historical period and "turn it up to 11" through exaggeration and dramatization. That, I think, can be a perfectly valid way to make art. Through exaggeration of the "facts" you can reach a different kind of "truth" that you can't reach by simply re-producing with verisimilitude. But I think that this maneuver depends upon the audience's familiarity with the facts-as-they-actually-were. And I wager that the moviegoing public is actually much more familiar with WWII history and the Holocaust than they are with American Slavery-- even though, for Americans at least, the events of the former happened on a different continent. So what I'm saying is, the "Mandingo Fighting" in Django is much more likely to spread misconceptions about history among the viewers than the movie theater denoument in Basterds. All that said-- does that mean that Tarantino can be faulted? I don't think so. But I do think that this movie ought to encourage us to teach American history more critically and carefully. Toward that end, I think that Django may actually help erode the Confederate apologist myths of "slavery wasn't that bad really" and "the Civil War wasn't about slavery."
No doubt. I agree with all of this. Again, I agree. Or at least....I would certainly hope that even the less-than-bright Joe Sixpacks out there know that Hitler and all the top level Nazis weren't killed in a Parisien theatre fire. Sure. And again, I was really making a side point with regard to this historical exaggeration. As I think I've stated in this thread, I liked the film overall but thought the last 30 minutes became a bit too cartoonish. And while I don't know that I'm as hopeful as you that this film will help erode myths that started being perpetuated almost as soon as Lee handed his sword over to Grant in Wilmer McLean's parlour and thus have quite a strong foothold, if it does....so much the better.