Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds

Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds are cowardly film-making; their bold, fantastic opening statements turn into embarrassed scratch the back of your head and stare at the floor trailings-off...  

Quentin Tarantino  is  not  innovative.  He  was,  but  doing  the  same  thing  for  twenty  years is not innovation.

Compromise blights Django; it is two separate films forced together, oil and water in the same vessel: The slick romp; with prancing horses,exploding cowboys and Ku Klux kill-streaks. And the soulful, touching buddy-story of a former slave and the bounty hunter who freed him; and their visit to the slave trader who owns his wife.

The same goes for Basterds,where the tri-lingual tension of drinking milk, ordering three whiskies and waiting for strudel is juxtaposed against Brad Pitt’s dirty dozen knock-offs and their flighty ‘I spit on your (mass) grave’ revengeocide.      

There is enough material to split either movie in two; the moving,human struggle against an individual tyrant with the broad back-drop of holocaust - with jaunty revenge rampages as companion pieces. Four great films in total, rather than two ok ones.

What’s that? A famous director has something important to say about holocaust? Wait, never mind; it’s just Quentin Tarantino. 

I don’t want to take away what makes a movie so Quentissentially Tarantino, but the geysers of blood and winking in-jokes aren’t what make his best work great.

Colourful characters, unconventional narrative structure, iconoclastic dialogue; these are the hallmarks of his greatness.

But now it seems his fan boys will get antsy if a caricature of a bigot doesn’t get his junk exploded by a twelve gauge, with a quote-to-your-mates pay-off line, while kitsch 70s lettering scrolls across the screen, and a retro soundtrack plays.  

Hops from genre to genre, doing a Tarantino film. Does he have anything of substance to say? If not, fine; but don’t pretend like you do.

Django Unchained is an average film, on average; the great parts are great, but the rest just detracts from that. The rompy, fun bits aren’t bad; and from the opposite perspective you might say the sad slavery stuff gets in the way of the fun, and this is a valid viewpoint too. But Django, and Basterds before it, do not form cohesive wholes.

Fine performances, fine dialogue, fine story; but the end products are far, far away from their potential - stymied by the dilettante auteur Quentin Tarantino.  

Django: 3 Stars

Basterds: 3 Stars

 

Christoph Waltz owns the two greatest opening scenes in recent cinema history. 

QT’s recent work is shackled by the shallow veneer of 90s cool as much as Spielberg’s is by sentimentality, or Michael Bay’s by awfulness.