January 3, 2013

"Django Unchained"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is, among much else during its leisurely 165-minute running time, an adolescent male revenge fantasy about an omnipotent mass shooter wreaking carnage upon dozens of victims. I suspect the film would have appealed profoundly to the late Adam Lanza. 
You might think that this wouldn’t be the best time for a quasi-comic daydream/bloodbath about a deadeye gunman who always fires first and is immune to the thousands of bullets shot at him. But the recent unpleasantness in Sandy Hook has gone almost unmentioned in the critical hosannas greeting Django…because, you see, the invulnerable hero is a black gunman shooting bad (i.e., Southern) white people. 
It’s not much more complicated than that.

Read the whole thing there.

93 comments:

Anonymous said...

OT:

I believe it was Steve who mentioned Nathaniel Weyl's book on The Creative Elite in America, and I think Ron Unz who suggested that the book contained explanations for why the post-Puritan elite (i.e. Huntingtons) declined so suddenly in terms of number and success.

Excited, I went to find the book, but it seems that Weyl offers no explanations for the post-Puritan decline. He merely documents that it happened. So why did it happen?

I wondered if there's something about generations passing the point where they can recall the heroic deeds of their grandparents. It struck me in reading about post-Puritan elites c. 1900 (Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, George Hoar) that as children, they had been able to know men who had done heroic things in the Revolution...

Chicago said...

Nice movie to have open on Christmas day. The actors probably all clamor for tight gun control even as they make a living using them onscreen.

el supremo said...

"Waltz would be better suited to playing Wagner but the composer never killed anybody"

I for one would enjoy a Tarantino-ization of the composer's life that consisted of Wagner delivering martial-arts beatdowns French musical critics and opera patrons unsympathetic to his theories of music-drama and Germanic mythology. His incessant womanizing would hardly detract from the plot either.

Anonymous said...

Why can't they make a movie about a crazy Armenian shooter instead?

Nostalgic Futurist said...

It seems to me that Tarantino is the perfect filmmaker for this age of total ignorance about the past. Inglorious Basterds was also not about the real World War II, but a joke about World War II movies, and Django Unchained is about spaghetti westerns and not about the real story of slavery. Tarantino and his public are not interested in real History, but only in pop culture and its postmodern revisions. He's not Sergio Leone, who had a real interest in the Old West and its history. Dumb people deserve dumb films.

I'll post a review of it soon in my blog... I think.

Marlowe said...

To be fair Mr. T started work on this movie at least 2-3 years before the latest massacre. He may have written the screenplay even earlier. He had no way of knowing what events would occur concurrent to its scheduled release. If a black dude, after watching this film, dresses up in cowboy duds and starts riding around shooting crackers you may have a point. What next though? Ban murder mysteries for encouraging husbands to do away with their wives (or vice versa) in Alfred Hitchcock presents style?

Do the makers of films depicting terrorist attacks bear responsibility for any that take place around the time of the film's appearance at the cinema? (Don't blame America. Blame America's film makers.) It sounds more like sympathetic magic than science. One may as well stick pins in a voodoo doll and expect ones enemy to drop dead. Instead of tracking bin Laden down using patient detective work & intelligence gathering produce a film depicting his assassination and it will happen. Almost as convincing as the Richard Wagner caused National Socialism theory.

Anonymous said...

That may have been the most entertaining movie review Ive ever read. No kidding.

Shouting Thomas said...

One of your funnier posts ever, Steve.

Jeff W. said...

"But who cares about a quarter of a million murdered black people? What matters is white-on-white moral status striving."

I completely agree. That's what it's all about.

The way you win the moral status competition, however, is not determined so much by what you do; you win by determining the rules of the game.

c said...

There were possible Django Unchained attempted murders in Redondo Beach a couple days ago. Link. Two white kids outside a theater that was screening the movie were stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife by some random black guy.

Anonymous said...

Almost as convincing as the Richard Wagner caused National Socialism theory.

Satanism. It's all the fault of young punks summoning the devil to fulfill their unactualized desires.

Anonymous said...

What I don't get is, if Tarantino is a non-verbal genius, why does he waste all his time studying films made by and for idiots. Dyslexia doesn't prevent you from appreciating witty dialog, brilliant visual imagery, or intricate plot structures. His movies really seem like they were scripted and story boarded by Mexican seventh graders.

Whiskey said...

Black "bad assery" and killing both White and Black people by the truckload has worked out VERY WELL for Black people. VERY WELL.

Blacks have through ultra violence ethnically cleansed Whites out of: Detroit, Gary, Birmingham, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Chicago, and most other cities (NYC, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle excepted). This has been VERY VERY VERY good for Blacks.

It has allowed total Black political control in most cities and defacto control in places like Chicago, where Black votes elect Dems. This has meant far more money to Black people, at the cost of lives admittedly, than they could have ever afforded on their own.

Black violence leading to political control of urban areas has fueled enormous welfare and other transfers, allowing Black men to loaf around and buy $200 sneakers, and Black women to have four kids by different fathers. None of whom pay any support. For Blacks, this is as close to ideal as it gets.

That would not be my idea, or I suspect most Middle Class White guys idea of the best situation (rather, independence of earnings and government and potential oppressors/seizers of property and liberty staying away) but that's me (and I suspect most Middle Class White guys).

Black shoot-em-up badassery has been enormously powerful and successful.

Anonymous said...

Setting aside, for a moment, the political bunch in the iSteve commentariat's collective underpants, I thought the movie was really very entertaining. I laughed, hard, quite a few times throughout and I think anyone who enjoys violent action movies in general and westerns specifically should go and see it.

@NF
Your observation that this film that isn't a documentary isn't wholly concerned with history is a profound one and well worth a blog post. I await it with bated breath.

Whiskey said...

And let me add that Black political control, which depended on Black Bad-assery, helps the White elite in the "managerial class" to quote the late Sam Francis, maintain control over who gets what, in an ever expanding "Red Prince" big government resembling that of China.

That was the critical element in what amounted to a suddenly jump-started semi-hereditary class as Post WWII, institutions including corporations became very, very BIG. And absorbed a lot of new people into what amounted to a new aristocracy. This aristocracy needed basically a janissary class to maintain control, and that class was/is Black badassery guys keeping cities "free" of middle class White guys who cut down on corruption and political machines. Out: guys like Thomas Dewey, In: Jessie Jackson Jr.

Anonymous said...

Tarantino uses politically correct fig-leaves to cover up the obvious fact that he peddles cheap thrills. He gets past the cultural gatekeepers by assuring them that his products are uplifting and educational in the currently approved way. It reminds me of how pornographers in the 1950s went through the formality of claiming their films were exclusively for educating doctors, social workers and concerned citizens about the wild things young women can get up to when not properly chaperoned.

Tarantino gets the stamp of approval from our current bunch of progressives by assuring them his films are just some amusing but uplifting tales of Nazis, misogynists and white people being killed.

Anonymous said...

I guess everyone loves to watch revenge tales. RAMBO is Angry Viet Vet Unchained and equally mindless. I guess SWEETSWEETBACK'S BADASS SONG was just another such kind. And there's also JEREMIAH JOHNSON where an angry white man goes on a killing spree against Indians. And there's the New Zealand film UTU where a Maori warrior takes vengeance on whites.

I Haven't seen DJANGO UNCHAINED, but something tells me it's worse than most revenge movies. Revenge movies of the past either had passion or irony. And a sense of tragedy. And so, they weren't entirely mindless. RAMBO is almost entirely mindless, but one can still say the Passion of the Vet thing was sort of genuine. With Tarantino, I don't know what is real or unreal. Look at how Deniro shoots Fonda in JACKIE BROWN just for wisecracks.

Revenge films like SEARCHERS, JEREMIAH JOHNSON, and UTU have a sense of irony. Ethan becomes like the Indian monsters he is pursuing--or he's always been like them. Jeremiah Johnson becomes more Indian-like as he fights the Indians. Maoris in UTU kill a white woman, and her husband comes after them just like they are going after whites. One of the great films of the 80s. Also, there's a great sense of tragedy in all these films--though some laughter too.
The DJANGO movies of the 60s are hardly art--and well below Leone's classics--, but there's real passion behind the violence, ridiculous as it may be.
In the end, revenge solves nothing, and even the one who seeks vengeance is consumed in the fire of hate. This is especially true of BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA. But somehow, I don't expect any such from Tarantino's NAT TURNER'S DIARRHEA.

It's just gonna incite a lot of dumb laughter, and this will be taken as irony by some when it's nothing but childishness(of Howard Stern and Southpark). I doubt if it's anything but DJANGO BUNNY VS TEAM AMERIKKKA. Or maybe it can be called I SHIT ON YOUR GRAVE, HONKEY.
(On the other hand, I wasn't too impressed with Eastwood's hamfisted ruminations on vengeance and violence in the much overrated UNFORGIVEN either.)





Anonymous said...

I didn't like the movie in the sense that the plot seemed contrived to me. I don't understand the reason for the charade of wanting to buy a fighter when they were really interested in the wife of Django. why didn't they just come out and say so? And why was Leo' s character so upset about it? A better writer could have crafted this much better.

Anonymous said...

The Wild Killer Negro is unleashed from inside the Brojan Horse. Rap hatred finally hits the silver screen.

Funny how history repeats itself. In the 6os, white liberals swooned about black radicalism, and then came the explosion of black urban crime. Things got so bad that Hollywood suppressed blaxploitation cinema and people got serious about crime. But ever since Clinton began locking up lots of blacks and white urban liberals figured out a way to Europeanize big cities, they feel safe and affluent again, and so they are having fun with radical negro bloodbath fantasies again.

AS for the Weinsteins, they prolly like the notion that southern whites are conflated with Nazis. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS: Jews murder evil Germans. DJANGO UNCHAINED: Negro kills southern whites.

(But I'm sure Germans will get a kick out of this as the killer Negro is schooled by an Austrian-German. Americans have been lecturing Germans for having been bad bad 'racist' Nazis, but in this film, the good German helps a Negro against American southern Nazis. So, who's the 'Nazi' now, bitch?)

Steve Sailer said...

"A better writer could have crafted this much better."

A $100 million dollar budget should have afforded a quarter of a million for a script doctor to fix obvious holes in the plot, to add foreshadowing (which is remarkably lacking), toss in some more jokes, and to trim the huge number of words it takes Tarantino to explain anything.

JeremiahJohnbalaya said...

There's a ... theory? I heard that Tarantino gave himself a black wife in Pulp Fiction just so that he could say the n-word with impunity.

Anonymous said...

I guess everyone loves to watch revenge tales.

What about CARRIE, EVILSPEAK, and AKIRA?

Kylie said...

"Revenge films like SEARCHERS, JEREMIAH JOHNSON, and UTU have a sense of irony. Ethan becomes like the Indian monsters he is pursuing--or he's always been like them."

The Indians in The Searchers aren't uniformly portrayed as monsters. Scar, the Indian chief, and Ethan are monstrous in their obsession with vengeance at any price. (Ethan's mother was killed by Indians, Scar's sons were killed by whites.)

Ethan and Scar are two sides of the same coin. Ultimately, what makes the difference between them is Ethan's willingness to pull back from the final act of vengeance--killing his own niece because she's been with Indians.

I would call The Searchers a film of redemption, not revenge.

Anonymous said...

If you take away the 'moral tale' aspect of this movie, it's just a white boy worshiping the badass Negro. It's no different from a white boy going to a Negro athlete and asking for an autograph. Since the white boy cannot compete with the Negro in sports, sex, or funky music, he tries to gain some of the Negro magic by making a movie like DJANGO UNCHAINED.

In a way, Tarantino and Spike Lee have much in common. Lee is black but geekier than a Jew or Asian. I mean just look at him. Since he couldn't cut it in sports, sex, or music, he chose the geeky art of cinema to feel the power.
Cinema wasn't always geeky, but it turned into a geek art once film schools began to churn out filmmakers. Before film schools took over, a lot of film directors were tough guys who worked their way up the profession like Raoul Walsh and Peckinpah. Those guys knew something other than movies. Also, America in the past was a tougher place.
But your average film director today was raised soft in nice suburbs or gentrified part of cities. And they grew up watching too many movies. and then they went to film school. They are geek fans of movies. Both Lee and Tarantino are geek fans, but they worship the masterful Negro. Lee is black but so unblack in his geekishness. So, by glorifying blackness and black power via the cinema, he feels a member of da brothahood. Notice how in MALCOLM X, he played the friend of Malcolm.

And Tarantino is after the same thing. His cinema is a geek way to black coolery and badassery. By fantasizing about blackness, he thinks he's one of the badass mofos. But he's just a stupidass toady.

DJANGO UNCHAINED is just a goofy version of UNFORGIVABLE BLACKNESS. Ken Burns, a dorky white boy, is also enthralled with black masterfulness. But in both cases, Tarantino and Burns would have to admit to racial differences, i.e. they worship the Negro because the Negro is tougher, funkier, more badass, and stronger race than the white race. Since that isn't allowed, the narrative of black victimhood comes in handy. This way, they can have the cake and eat it too. They can celebrate black masterfulness all the while pretending that it's all about 'fighting racism'.

Though it had problems, I thought Ang Lee's RIDE WITH THE DEVIL was one of the more thoughtful films about the Civil War period and the problems of race. I thought the black guy was idealized a bit too much, but there was a rounded quality to his character,and some scenes were genuinely moving; and Lee didn't feel a need to dehumanize Southerners to point out the evils of the system. But it was a total flop whereas I guess Tarantino's flick will turn a profit.
Americans are a dumb people.

Steve Sailer said...

One unanswered question is whether Django is funny. I chuckled during it, but most of the audience didn't laugh at all. But it looked like a crowd of serious-minded middle-aged people. I've heard of other audiences finding it uproarious.

I'm sure Tarantino could make up a complicated theory about why he intentionally made it so it was hard to tell whether it was funny or not, that he could have made it actually funny if he'd wanted to, but he was trying to make it just like some 1967 spaghetti western where it's hard to tell if it's serious, funny, or just kind of incompetent.

Harry Baldwin said...

Marlowe said...To be fair Mr. T started work on this movie at least 2-3 years before the latest massacre.

If Django had starred Mr. T rather than Jamie Foxx I'd be more inclined to see it.

c said...Two white kids outside a theater that was screening the movie were stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife by some random black guy.

C'mon, that could happen outside any urban theater showing any movie any time.

I think we need a compare and contrast review of "Django," "Machete," and "Birth of a Nation."

Anonymous said...

I haven't seen a Tarantino film since I got roped into seeing "Kill Bill". Giving SWPLs some sort of intellectual or cultural justification for enjoying base entertainment is quite a valuable skill. Out of curiosity were there animals killed in "Django"? I kind of doubt it because Tarantino knows that SWPL audiences who will lap up his piles of dead human bodies will flip if they see a dog being mistreated.

Gloria

Kylie said...

Django Unchained couldn't possibly be as entertaining as Steve Unleashed.

Anonymous said...

Chicago said...

Nice movie to have open on Christmas day. ....


If I were an eccentric multimillionaire I'd pay to have someone interview the folks who went to see this film on Christmas. Lots of anti-social nerds and other kinds of people you'd not want as neighbours.

Steve Sailer said...

"Out of curiosity were there animals killed in "Django"?"

A horse gets shot in the first scene, so the second thing in the entire credits at the end is in big type:

"No horses were killed in the making of this movie."

Anonymous said...

Wake me up when Tarantino goes all 200 Years and self-finances a movie about the bloodshed in the Holdomor, or in the Spanish "Civil" War.

Anonymous said...

Is this BLAZING SADDLES UNHINGED?

DaveinHackensack said...

"A $100 million dollar budget should have afforded a quarter of a million for a script doctor to fix obvious holes in the plot, to add foreshadowing (which is remarkably lacking), toss in some more jokes, and to trim the huge number of words it takes Tarantino to explain anything."

True Romance is a good example of what a Tarantino movie looks like when you cut the fat. Tony Scott did a nice job starting with a Tarantino script and editing it a bit.

"Nice movie to have open on Christmas day. The actors probably all clamor for tight gun control even as they make a living using them onscreen."

You'll like this.

Anonymous said...

I thought the movie was really very entertaining. I laughed, hard, quite a few times throughout


Ah, it's a comedy.

An intentional comedy?

Anonymous said...

Tarantino is an immauteur.

Steve Sailer said...

The scene near the end with Quentin himself (looking awful) playing a random Australian in the mountains of Mississippi ought to go in the record books for bad screenwriting, bad acting, and bad directing. They could have the the entire 5 to 10 minute scene (one line of dialogue could have explained where Django gets the dynamite for the big explosion at the end), but you try telling Tarantino that his cameo stinks.

jody said...

"Do the makers of films depicting terrorist attacks bear responsibility for any that take place around the time of the film's appearance at the cinema?"

first of all, aren't there mass shootings every year or so now? there have been multiple mass shootings since inglorious basterds was released, so if hollywood executives were really concerned about this, wouldn't they have already, years ago, discouraged movies like django unchained by trying to get every distributor to boycott them, as they tried with mel gibson?

mass shootings are not new, so if the idea was to discourage mass shootings by not releasing any more movies which portray mass shootings, american movie executives aren't interested. movie executives from outside the US do seem to show some level of interest in this kind of thing, however.

one thing which is true is that some production companies (not all) are sensitive to current events, and occassionally change or alter their plans depending on a recent news story.

20th century fox film, "Neighborhood Watch", instantly had it's title changed to simply "The Watch" after the US news media decided to turn a minor local shooting in florida into a 24 hour a day national news story (which they have now dropped as it appears george zimmerman will not be found guilty of second degree murder)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Watch_(2012_film)

after the colorado dark knight rises shootings, another production company pulled all their trailers for their film "Gangster Squad" from the rest of the dark knight rises screenings. they felt it was not appropriate to show actors blasting away and shooting other people for a 1 minute stretch in front of all further batman showtimes.

Anonymous said...

So will we see a film about the Muslim slave trade? I understand that almost one million Whites, mostly women, were taken as slaves over a long period.

How about a revenge movie with a black asskicker taking revenge against the Muslims who helped out in the BLACK slave trade? Extra points if he's a voodoonist or some other African pagan rather than a crusading Christian.

Anonymous said...

I think we see so many of these anti-Southern white movies because the past 30-40 years have been such a disappointment to white liberals with regard to African-American performance in the North. The narrative was that Southern whites were bad and racist, but after the Great Migration northward the enlightened Yankees were going to show Southern whites how much human capital they'd wasted with their AA population.

The last two generations of AAs in the North has been a huge letdown, though. As you can see here: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/racialdisparity.pdf, incarceration rates for AAs are much higher in the North than the South -- Virginia has the higher AA incarceration rate of any state in the South, and it's all the way down at #23, after a ton of Northern states. In addition, AAs in the aggregate are delivering the ultimate insult to Northern whites: they're moving back South to be with those evil whites.

So a movie like Tarantino's lets Northern whites re-win their last victory over the South, even though it turned out not to be a victory at all.

jody said...

in addition to these smaller changes prodded by current events, production companies are always scheduling and rescheduling the wide release dates of their films almost on a whim. a movie can be scheduled for a may 3rd 2013 release, have that "set in stone" for months, then all of a sudden the movie can be pulled, moved back 6 months or 12 months, or anything, to avoid competitor movies, or to re-shoot, to re-edit, or any number of things.

some movies now are even completed, with 20 or 30 million spent on them, then never released, or never given a wide release, and the production company just eats the loss. 2012 saw one of these, a christian slater movie called "Playback" which somebody spent about 8 million dollars to make, and which was not released at all. it was the lowest grossing film of 2012.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playback_(film)

so if columbia pictures and mr weinstein actually wanted to push back django unchained 6 months in light of recent events, they could with no big repercussions. they move other films back all the time for various reasons. they will lose out on the academy award nominations, but they still make all their money back, as there will be no lack of buyers for tickets to a tarantino movie come summer 2013.

weinstein lives for academy awards, so moving django unchained for sensitive current events reasons would never happen. but, for example, the GI joe sequel and the red dawn remake, 2 other violent movies, were both pushed way back after an initial "set in stone" release date.

regardless, no high profile wide release like a rare, once every 4 years, tarantino movie, is going to be moved, edited, altered, changed, toned down, or anything like that no matter what is happening in the real world.

as i've said, many of the people in the US film industry are raging hypocrites, fanatical promoters of total disarmament for US citizens in the real world, while at the same time, hoping the same americans come and buy 100, 200, 300 million dollars worth of tickets to their violent, gun filled movies. personally i'm ok with real world guns, and movie guns, but most of these guys aren't, unless it's their bodyguards and personal security details having the guns.

Anonymous said...

Leezard Lizard said...
"So will we see a film about the Muslim slave trade?"

"Will we see a righteous White person taking revenge?"


Maybe one day they'll make a movie about the Crusades. Or the Inquisition.

anony-mouse said...

"Why can't they make a movie about a crazy Armenian shooter?"

Catch-22?

Anonymous said...

"I suspect the film would have appealed profoundly to the late Adam Lanza."

Actually, the news complaines that he was a shy nerd that played too much computer games. Which is to say: he didn't watch enough television and it's commercials and leftist indoctrination. Not the kind of person to go out and see a pop culture movie on it's opening night. More likely to watch 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' at home.

Tom Onion said...

It would be more interesting and relevant for today if Tarantino made it about a ticked off African immigrant who gets revenge in Israel for recent events by having a field day there. I'd pay the $10 to see that.

Anonymous said...

Tarantino is a terrible man but I wonder how many of his current critics (and IB critics and KB critics) just loved the guy for pulp fiction and reservoir dogs.

Yes, Django will probably get more people killed than PFiction did, but PF and Reservoir Dogs (and I don't know what else he wrote) were horrifying in their nihilism.

As a man whose grandparents were enslaved by the Nazis and much of whose extended family was killed by them there was no way that I was going to disgrace their suffering by paying Tarantino for using them as props. (I wondered if I was wrong and walked into a couple of minutes of IB after seeing another film in the theatre and had to walk out disgusted.)

SouthPark's conclusion about Mel Gibson simply being a sick man in love with violence is probably about as accurate as saying that they're sick men in love with toilet humor - iow, pretty accurate.

Tarantino though is even worse and this was as obvious and sickening before he made IB and Django as it is now. Unfortunately too many people are only "noticing" this because they dislike the ill-fitting political suit he hastily threw over his latest films. He is and always sick. He can occasionally manufacture a clever scene but with Tarantino (unlike Kubrik) it's not enough to redeem him.

There is nothing to his movies but gory nihilism.


Anonymous said...

Not all the actors are pro-gun control. Samuel L. Jackson supports gun rights.

Speaking of Sam Jackson, his role was definitely not PC. I can't recall any other depictions of black enforcers of slavery at its most barbaric on the big screen.

Anonymous said...

Tarantino is a terrible man but I wonder how many of his current critics (and IB critics and KB critics) just loved the guy for pulp fiction and reservoir dogs... only "noticing" this because they dislike the ill-fitting political suit he hastily threw over his latest films.

I would fess up to that. I will say that, at the time, I thought RD was "cool," but didn't really enjoy it. PF had Uma Thurman, without whom it would have been unwatchable. I really stopped being interested in Tarantino with Jackie Brown, which was pointless. Probably, if RD and PF came out now instead of when I was an adolescent I wouldn't have even bothered to watch them, as I won't DU.

Incidentally, how many have seen the original Django? An equally worthless piece of trash movie, I think.

Anonymous said...

Tarantino's obsessions probably stem from his looks. Man, he's ugly.

Anonymous said...

Tarantino's obsessions probably stem from his looks. Man, he's ugly.

Then what's he doing in Hollywood, the world's largest ugly-nerd-free zone?

Anonymous said...

Remember that the Bolsheviks also promoted the worst gentiles.

Anonymous said...

I saw it with a rowdy, youthful crowd at 1130 PM on a Saturday night. The crowd was about 90% black. I live in New Orleans.

I'm glad I didn't see it with a bunch of dour, self-loathing over-educated (yet pig ignorant) white liberals. The crowd laughed in places where Tarantino likely intended laughs, and they didn't in places where I'm sure he didn't.

I really wanted to despise this movie. To my surprise, I found myself enjoying certain parts of it. Tarantino can be clever.

The film is deeply hateful and anti-white, for the most part. There is a conspicuous exception. The problem building a case that Tarantino hates white folks based on this movie is the German character. He saves and helps Django.

This plot device had me involuntarily recalling Jonathan Swift. Certain critics accused Swift of misanthropy over the grim content of Gulliver's Travels. The problem there is the same problem. You can't build a complete case against Swift as a misanthrope because there is one pivotal character that is good.

- Lew

Truth said...

I don't see where the movie hated whites, it was all-in-all pretty even handed. There was exactly one redeemable white character, and one redeemable black character in the movie. The black characters, for the most part, were simple- minded ninnies and throwaways.

Ray Sawhill said...

Great piece, Steve.

I second Anonymous 3:21's enthusiasm for "Utu." It's the movie "Little Big Man" should have been, an epic tragi-comedy about the encounter between Euros and indigenous people. One of my favorite pix of the '80s.

Anonymous said...

Good review, Steve. Ties together a lot of your regular themes. I think your criticism is legitimate.

Anonymous said...

True Romance had a white boy kill a whigro and bunch of black thugs to save a white girl.

Later, his heroic dad expounds on race like Hitler did to Mussolini.
Hitler explained to Mussolini that Italians were inferior because they had some black blood. Father says much the same thing. He's heroic and dies like a man.

But the insult is also a kind of compliment since it's supposed to be cool to be black.

I think maybe Tarantino became more PC once he got famous. When he was a nothing, he could imagine whatever he pleased. But once he schmoozed with Hollywood types and won accolades of liberal critics, he had to appease them more.

But Tarantino films betray, consciously or not, the neurotic contradiction within liberalism. Liberalism says it was evil and paranoid to see blacks as sex-hungry mofos, and this image of blacks led to so many upstanding blacks of falsely being accused of rape. Movies like TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD, SGT RUTLEDGE, and GREEN MILE fall into this category of liberalism. It's like blacks are so noble and good that they don't have animal-sexual impulses.

But, another side of liberalism says blacks are so great cuz they are so funky, booty-shaking, instinctive, big-whankered or juicy-butted, and wild. Liberals tell us that 'jazz' and 'rock n roll' means sex. So, wildass blacks sexually liberated priggish whites.

So, blacks are too noble to have sexual thoughts--especially about white women--, but blacks are so sexual that they make us all boogie woogie. So, we have both Oprah and interracist porn all over our culture. The odd thing about Obama is the sexual duality. He is both the least and most sexual president. There's something almost gayishly androgynous about him--even kidlike--, but he sometimes turns on the smooth jazzy negro routine. He's fuddy-studdy or fud-stud.

What goes for sex also goes for violence. Liberals say we must stop being 'paranoid' about black violence. Most blacks are peaceable folks. But liberal pop culture gives us wild and crazy rappers, sports thugs, and black rage. Shame on whites for suspecting blacks of being violent, but how cool for blacks to be loud and aggressive.




Anonymous said...

I much prefer Walter Hill. There's no nerdy smarminess and pomo poseuring.

Hill admires tough ruthless guys of all races and cultures. Maybe not the most moral man, but I was impressed by HARD TIMES, THE DRIVER, WARRIORS, LONG RIDERS, SOUTHERN COMFORT, 48 HRS, JOHNNY HANDSOME, LAST MAN STANDING, WILD BILL, GERONIMO.

STREETS OF FIRE sucks but its opening scene inspired the opening scene of Bubblegum Crisis, my favorite work in any form or genre, so that's something.

Hill is a man. Tarry is a kid.

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/193587%7C0/The-Long-Riders.html

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2006/01/go-west/

Anonymous said...

Truth said...
"I don't see where the movie hated whites"

LOL

Anonymous said...

How about the Israeli-Russian Mafia sex-slave trade and organs trade in a movie?

Robert Mark Kamen could write it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Israel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation_in_Israel#Organ_trafficking

Anonymous said...

300 is one deranged movie.

Anonymous said...

"I don't see where the movie hated whites"

"LOL"

I suppose it only hates bad whites, just like Birth of a Nation only hated crazy...

Anonymous said...

Pontecorvo also made a film about WWII and one about black slavery. Even as I disagree with his Marxism, KAPO is the best Holocaust-themed film I've seen, and BURN! is powerful stuff and very insightful about the politics of morality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlBMzIYZl_4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd_WPdc2Mgg

Now we have INGLORIOUS BASTERDS and DJANGO UNCHAINED.

-----------

Herzog's COBRA VERDE is a notable(maybe even great) film about slavery and whites and Africa. Unsentimental and hardnosed in its fascination with human penchant for adventure and cruelty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4glquMRJLF8

Anonymous said...

SWPLs have to live vicariously through ultraviolence in the movies against southern whites because the reality would be a bloodbath from which Whole Foods would never recover its customer base.

DaveinHackensack said...

"STREETS OF FIRE sucks"

Too harsh. That was a fun movie, if a little over-long. Having the protagonist duel the bad guy (Willem Dafoe) with sledge hammers was an original touch; Diane Lane was in it; and there was a great song on the soundtrack (Deeper and Deeper by The Fixx).

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS-PmU7IKnE

Tarantino is such an idiot. Before things got bad during WWII, Italians loved Mussolini and saw him as the savior of Italy. He was their Napoleon. So, how does that tie in with black slavery in the south? Blacks didn't wanna be slaves. But during most of Mussolini's rule, il duce was extremely popular. Italians loved him like blacks love malcolm x. il duce made italians feel like a man. also, mussolini was a mild dictator and spared most of his enemies.

Anonymous said...

'Gay marriage' is what passes for morality. And Tarantino is what passes as a moralist. Some age we are living in.

Anonymous said...

Django and a white guy.
Obama and his white/Jewish mentors.
But then, Obama is like white and black rolled into one.

And conquis are whites who pretend to speak up for the oppressed browns. By attacking yanquis, it's as if the sins of conquis have been washed clean. As in the US, if a white guy embraces the cult of 'diversity', he's a good white man, an honorary person of color. Ironically, it is the northern yankees who push pc and multi-culti. When latinos bitch about yanquis, they mean all american whites. But in America, yankee whites go with obama, embrace the cult of diversity, and revile southern whites who aren't yankees.

Anonymous said...

I thought the movie was really very entertaining. I laughed, hard, quite a few times throughout and I think anyone who enjoys violent action movies in general and westerns specifically should go and see it.

Just as you would if it involved a white guy slaughtering a ton of blacks.

Fun said...

Just as you would if it involved a white guy slaughtering a ton of blacks.

If those blacks were slave-holders, murderers with dead-or-alive bounties, nazis, serial killers, assassins or gangsters like the antagonists in Tarantino's revenge films, sure.

Anonymous said...

Holdomor = Holodomor

Anonymous said...

"If those blacks were slave-holders, murderers with dead-or-alive bounties, nazis, serial killers, assassins or gangsters like the antagonists in Tarantino's revenge films, sure."

But why favor anyone then? Aren't all people in his films killers? I thought this is what made RESERVOIR DOGS interesting. Like the guys in the WILD BUNCH, they were bad men trying to live by a certain code. And it's ironic how the gangster remains faithful to the undercover cop while the cop betrays a man who became almost a friend. The undercover cop is the tragic figure in the movie. As cop, he betrays his gangster friend. As gangster, he shoots a civilian woman(albeit in self-defense). I thought Tarantino identified most with the undercover cop in the film, and it was this troubled moral sense of dual loyalty that had us thinking and searching our emotions. But PULP FICTION is like a film made by the psychopath character in RESERVOIR DOGS. In RESERVOIR DOGS, Tim Roth's pain from bullet wound serves as counterpoint to the sadism of the psychopath. One character feels too much pain, while another character is impervious to the pain he causes others. And it seems to say something about the nature of movies; no other artform makes us feel as much pain, but then, no other artform desensitizes us so much to the pain. There's a kind of fascinating duality. From the very opening, we can almost feel the pain of Tim Roth, and we see the tragic aspect of violence. But through its colorful characters, we see violence as something that's also hip and cool. We cringe and laugh and then cringe at our laughter.
In PULP FICTION, we never feel the pain. It's all laughing violence, all glibness and stupidity. I felt the same way about the violence in JACKIE BROWN though the film was a bit more sober than PF.

It's easy to be splashy with violence. It's much more difficult to make violence disturbing, and Tarantino forgot or abandoned the very talent that he had.

Anonymous said...

As for bad guys deserving to die, anyone can be made into a 'bad guy'. For Americans during the Cold War, anyone in communist nations could be killed for being 'evil commies'. For Communists, any capitalist could be killed for being 'evil bourgeoisie'. For white imperialists, any people could be killed for being 'savages' or 'barbarians'. For Muslims, anyone could be killed for being 'infidels'. For Jews, anyone could be killed for being 'antisemites'. Animal rights activists could say 'meat eating evil folks' should be killed, i.e. hogocaust is evil.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybj0kzxW9mM

Given what we do to animals, it could be argued that we all deserve to die.

Every culture can find easy excuses to kill people.
This is why it's easy for movies to find some excuse to kill people. And though I didn't like UNFORGIVEN, it did have a point about how people look for moral excuses to hunt down and kill 'bad people'. No one wants to say they're killing for money, power, or for pleasure. They seek moral reasons. The ending of UNFORGIVEN is especially subversive because it tests the lesson we learned throughout the film. The lesson we learned is "it's too easy to find moral excuse for violence." But Eastwood uses his black friend's death to turn to violence, revenge, and liquor. And the movie audience rooted for him and forgot the lesson of the movie. Since Eastwood's friend was black, it was okay that the 'racist' sheriff had to die. We learned a lesson but threw it to the winds--and besides, we demanded a bang bang shootout from a Western.

If white liberals care so much about black issues, why was BELOVED and RIDE WITH THE DEVIL total flops? They love to watch violence, and killing 'racists' is just the best excuse around.
In the past, it was okay to kill Indians because they were 'savage'. Now, it's okay to kill whites because they're 'racist'.
But if antisemites had the power, they could easily find excuses to kill Jews in movies for being parasites, Zionist oppressors, radical subversives, communists, etc.

Finding excuses to kill people is easy.

Baloo said...

Steve watches horrible, anti-White, historically-idiotic movies so we don't have to. Thumbs up to Steve! Riffed on and linked here:
Django Unwatched

Anonymous said...

Walter Hill's EXTREME PREJUDICE is pretty good too.

Anonymous said...

Hey, weren't the founding fathers slave-owners? If Tarantino really had guts, he would have had Django blow away Washington and Jefferson as like Hitler and Goebbels were blown away in IB.

Steve Sailer said...

"Hey, weren't the founding fathers slave-owners? If Tarantino really had guts, he would have had Django blow away Washington and Jefferson as like Hitler and Goebbels were blown away in IB."

That's a good one.

not a hacker said...

Since Eastwood's friend was black, it was okay that the 'racist' sheriff had to die.

Methinks you're a dummy. How did you decide that the sheriff wouldn't have had to die if Eastwood's best friend had been white? How did you decide that the sheriff wouldn't have killed Ned if he were white? Wouldn't he have killed English Bob, rather than simply beating him up, if Bob had not only violated the "no guns" rule but also killed a local citizen? Jeez.

Anonymous said...

I'm working on a script about a Gypsy jazz guitarist who seeks revenge on a corrupt club owner who kidnaps his girlfriend and pawns his drummer's kit. It will be called Django Unstrung.

Anonymous said...

"Methinks you're a dummy. How did you decide that the sheriff wouldn't have had to die if Eastwood's best friend had been white?"

Boy oh boy, you're a dumbassbutt, a combination of dumbass and dumbbutt. You totally missed my point.
You're talking of Munny like he's a REAL-life person. He's a fictional construct, and don't you think there was a conscious decision to have a black guy play 'nice negro' sidekick to Eastwood?
So, instead of speaking of Munny and Nice Negro as real-life characters who act on their own, we must think of them as constructs whose actions are decided by the filmmakers, and we must ask WHY.

True, if the Nice Negro had been a Nice White Guy, Munny might still have take personal revenge--if Munny was indeed a real person.
But you know full well that there's a certain social significance to Nice Negro characters. You know full well that rules of morality changes based on race. We know GREEN MILE would have had less social meaning if the big lunk had been white.
In our culture, black suffering symbolizes 'white guilt'. So, the Sheriff looks worse for killing a black guy--though not by me--, and the audience abandon their sense of irony as Munny kills the bad white guy who whipped and killed a black guy. Before the sheriff killed the black guy, he was a badass tough guy. A mean character in a tough world but not necessarily evil. We could kinda see things from his point of view, i.e. he had to be tough and rough in a tough and rough world. But once he kills the Nice Negro--and the Negro is indeed ever so nice--, the sheriff becomes not just a tough mean sheriff but tough mean 'racist' sheriff, and all of a sudden, we are rooting for his death. Of course I mean 'we' in a figurative sense as I was rooting for the sheriff to kill Munny. I liked the sheriff more just when he got tough with the Negro.

Remember when Eugene Terreblanche was murdered? Even mild-mannered anti-violence liberals were gloating that the 'racist' got what he deserved. Remember when Omar Thorton was Unchained and killed white folks? NY TIMES was wondering if the whiteys had it coming.
And Jews, who bitch and whine about how they were dehumanized by others, love to dehumanize the 'angry white male' with no hint of irony.
Now, I'm not sure Eastwood really knew what he was doing consciously, but the irony is there is you think about it.

Anonymous said...

SWPLs have to live vicariously through ultraviolence in the movies against southern whites because the reality would be a bloodbath from which Whole Foods would never recover its customer base.

Yeah, that's why we're living in the Confederate States of America.

Don't push Northern whites, Southerner, or you might have to be taught another brutal lesson.

gumm said...

"Steve watches horrible, anti-White, historically-idiotic movies so we don't have to."

Americans lost Vietnam, so they won the war through RAMBO.

White man lost to the Negro, so white man beat the Negro through ROCKY movies.

Jews didn't get to kill Hitler, so they got the chance in IB.

Blacks didn't get to kill white slave-owners--for the most part--, so they do it in this movie.

Stallone and Tarantino, they serve up therapeutic fantasies.

Anonymous said...

"Tarantino's obsessions probably stem from his looks. Man, he's ugly."

Very few directors are good-looking(but then film critics look even worse; they're mostly dorks or hags). The good-looking ones usually started as actors like Eastwood and Gibber.

Hitch was a bald fatty, Leone was a fatso, Bergman had a high head, Coppola looks like a beardo, and etc.
Some directors weren't ugly but nothing special in the looks department. Truffaut looked pretty okay. John Huston wasn't pretty but manly. Raoul Walsh looked striking with the eye patch.

Anonymous said...

(but then film critics look even worse; they're mostly dorks or hags).

correction: with the exception of Sailer.

Anonymous said...

The timing of this movie is rather interesting. I know now to not watch it like most of the dogma produced by Hollywood.

On a similar topic, the Unsilenced Scientist scored with a little recognition of the 2R allele of the MAOA.

http://theunsilencedscience.blogspot.com/2012/12/scientists-rediscover-violence-gene.html

Mr. Anon said...

"What would it have been like, Quentin wondered, if he had been Goebbels to Harvey Weinstein’s Hitler?"

"If he had been"? He is.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

It's easy to be splashy with violence. It's much more difficult to make violence disturbing, and Tarantino forgot or abandoned the very talent that he had."

When you get a chance sometime, watch "Torn Curtain" by Alfred Hitchcock. There's a scene in it where Paul Newman (as an American defector to East Germany) and a german farm-housewife try to kill a Stasi agent. Hitchcock had said he filmed it the way he did, because he wanted to show how messy, ugly, and difficult it could be to actually kill someone.

Maya said...

"If I were an eccentric multimillionaire I'd pay to have someone interview the folks who went to see this film on Christmas. Lots of anti-social nerds and other kinds of people you'd not want as neighbours."

This degree of antisemitism is truly uncalled for.

Anonymous said...

Blacks didn't get to kill slave-owners--for the most part--, so they do it in this movie and on the streets of Detroit, New Orleans and Chicago.

Anonymous said...

"...so they do it in this movie and on the streets of Detroit, New Orleans and Chicago."

But white ethnics were never no slave-owners.

ben tillman said...

As you can see here: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/racialdisparity.pdf, incarceration rates for AAs are much higher in the North than the South....

We've been through this before. That chart shows the opposite of what you claim it shows. But it also shows that incarceration rates for Whites are SO MUCH higher in the South & West that the White incarceration rate is closer to the Black incarceration rate in Southern states as compared to Northern states.

Anonymous said...

"So, Germans are cool as long as they side with non-whites."

Well, why shouldn't they side with us? Only White people, especially Anglo-British types, hate Germans. Jews hate Germans insofar as they were killed by them etc., yet they don't demean them as Huns or whatever. All us non-Celtic/Iberians seem to be in the same boat somehow.

TGGP said...

This review almost seems designed to confirm Steve's analysis.
"[T]he only recent film by a white American man that has the potential to advance race relations in America at the dawn of the 21st century."
"Sure, Tarantino's hallmarks -- tension mounted through dialogue and resolved through graphic violence, black humor and the invocation of absurdist tactics -- are on full display, but neither the humor nor the violence arrives at the expense of the oppressed, but of the oppressors."

Anonymous said...

Long time fan of Steve Sailer, except his movie recommendations (I love reading his reviews nonetheless): Django was just awesome entertainment, likewise Inglorious Basterds - the reason I go to the movies. Tarantino has panache. On the other hand, Midnight in Paris was so dull I wanted to walk out.

riches said...

Today, a California-based syndicated radio host (of neocon bent) asked a deity of Conservatism Inc., Mark Stein, for his thoughts on Tarantino/Django.

Steyn replied that the director is an idiot who tackled the Civil War without ever requiring of himself to read a book. Sounds like Steyn read this blog host’s review of same.