Review: Django Unchained (2012) entertains but is oddly generic and surprisingly conventional.

Django Unchained

2012
165 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

Quentin Tarantino arguably made Django Unchained (teaser/trailer) because he wanted to try his hand at a Spaghetti Western, and that's basically what he has done.  Alas, the film is little more than a genre exercise, with little more than the obvious role reversals to justify its artistic existence.  That is is mostly entertaining and well-acted across the board goes without saying, but after the slyly subversive Inglorious Basterds, I frankly expect more from the filmmaker.  For a filmmaker known for narrative surprises and challenging the expectations of his audience, his newest entry is oddly conventional and almost timid in terms of how it approaches its subject matter.  Oh, it surely qualifies as another film focusing on revisionist revenge-fantasy history, as well as how we often use the cinematic lens to comprehend the least savory parts of our history, but as a stand-alone film it is lacking in substance.  It is a good movie, for sure, but it is quite frankly not a very good film.

Tarantino's Django Unchained gets a full trailer, keeps its awful Christmas Day release date.

As usual with most recent Tarantino films, if you look closely at the trailer you'll find bits of action surrounded by lots of people talking and talking.  The effectiveness of a Tarantino film generally rests with the quality of the conversations.  In this case, why not spend Christmas day listening to Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx, and Christoph Waltz chit-chat for a couple hours (or more)?  DiCaprio looks like he's having the time of his life and if the film earns Oscar love he seems the most likely recipient.  As I've said before, Tarantino makes *movies* and this gorgeous and richly-colorful bit of revisionist history looks like no exception.  Will it be high art, a subversive look at another very dark historical chapter through the wish-fulfillment lens of cinema? One hopes so, as Inglorious Bastards pulled off that trick three years ago.  But even if it's just a trashy good time, it looks like a fun time with good company.  I'm not sure how smart a Christmas day release is. If you have a bunch of family members in the house after Christmas, what are the chances everyone in the family is old enough for this hard-R action comedy?  Truth be told, the big family is going to probably see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey again as a consensus choice.  If I were Weinstein Company, I'd move this one to the December 14th slot vacated by Les Miserables, which is now opening alongside Django Unchained.  Oh heck, December 7th now has nothing but the Gerald Butler romcom Playing For Keeps.  Point being, being perceived as a box office flop won't help the film's Oscar chances, especially with voting occurring even earlier this season.   So I'd get the hell out of Christmas if I were them.  Anyway, what do you think of the trailer or the release date?

Scott Mendelson

Watch/Discuss: Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained gets a perfectly appropriate QT-style trailer.

Well this looks like a pulpy blast, as I suppose it should be.  There isn't much to comment on.  Jamie Fox suits the role just fine, Leonardo DiCaprio looks to be having a blast, and the soundtrack is vintage Tarantino.  Now, of course as we all know, the final film will probably be less action-packed than dialogue-drenched, but let's hope that it's a cocktail closer to Inglorious Basterds than Death Proof.  This is actually the 20th anniversary of Reservoir Dogs, which means that Tarantino has been making movies for two full decades.  He had a bit of a rut after Jackie Brown, as Kill Bill and Death Proof are basically straight genre homages without a lot of substance underneath.  But Inglorious Basterds arguably turned a corner, and seeing Tarantino explicitly tackle the uglier parts of history twice in a row is encouraging to say the least.  Could it be that act two of QT's career will plunge head-first into wish-fulfillment historical revisionism, with a side-eye turned towards the darker components of said vengeance-fueled fantasy?  I don't know how history will judge his filmography decades from now.  But I will say that Mr. Tarantino arguably has made some of the movie movie-ish movies of any major auteur in recent history.  Anyway, Django Unchained opens on Christmas day 2012.  As always, we'll see.  Thanks to The Film Stage for the embed.

Scott Mendelson   

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby gets a truly hilarious trailer.

Back in 2004, I cut a series of fake trailers for my personal amusement.  My favorite of these was a trailer I cut for Pay It Forward which sold the film as a tense and violent thriller ("On October 18th... no good deed goes unpunished!").  I used the music from the film and footage completely from the movie, only cheating by using the Backdraft theme for a closing action montage.  If I can find a copy of the thing, I'll put it on the site eventually.  It's choppy by today's standards, but this was before the whole 'satirical trailer mash' was a thing.   This Great Gatsby trailer feels like the same kind of thing, attempting to sell a somewhat reserved adult romantic drama as an uber-glitzy and action-packed melodrama.  Of course, since Baz Luhrmann's at the helm, that's probably not a false sell.  Depending on your feelings regarding the original novel and/or your thoughts about Luhrmann, that may be a good or a bad thing.  I liked the novel when I read it once in twelve grade, finding it a fine deconstruction of the whole 'girl who got away' myth that still dominates romantic melodrama.  But if Luhrmann wants to play around with it, have at it.  

Titanic 3D opens with $4.3 million, sails towards likely $20-$25m 5-day total.

The much-hyped 3D-release of James Cameron's Titanic debuted yesterday with a solid $4.3 million.  What's left to do now is merely play with the numbers to estimate where the five-day opening weekend for this 3D release will end come Sunday.  The wild-card for the weekend is that tomorrow is Good Friday, which means that many kids will be out of school for at least part of the day.  On the other hand, Easter Sunday means that families will be spending the day together, and even if a trip to the movies is in order, I can't imagine the entire family agreeing to a 3.5-hour emotionally-draining tragedy that most people own on DVD being the likely pick, especially as families with small children are less likely to shell out for the 3D upgrade.  Anyway, let's presume that Easter Sunday cancels out Good Friday and call it even.

A masterpiece then and now: Why James Cameron's Titanic needs no defense.

This is an expanded and updated version of an essay I wrote on November 11th, 2007.  

It was right at the opening credit sequence. That haunting footage of the various passengers embarking on the ship, with a sorrowful version of the theme playing in the background (a version that inexplicably was never been included on the soundtrack CDs back in 1997/1998) As the cheering crowds gave way to the ship's watery grave and the title unfurled on screen, I leaned over to a friend and whispered "I already love this movie". It was a symbol right there of what made Titanic great and what separated it from the likes of Pearl Harbor or The Day After Tomorrow: the film openly acknowledged that every single life lost on that ship was every bit as tragic and unfair as the eventual fates of our leads. And, as the film played over the next six months, when you asked people what part they cried at, it wasn't anything to do with Jack or Rose. It was the mother reading to her children so that they might be asleep as they drowned in her arms. It was Victor Garber setting the clock just right before the water came pouring in. It was the ship's band leaving and then returning to play it out. For those primal moments, for the brilliant first-act demonstration of exactly how the ship sank so that we understood what was happening two hours later, for James Horner's achingly powerful score, and for any number of reasons that I shouldn't have to reiterate fifteen years later, Titanic is still a splendidly powerful bit of moviemaking, one of the best films of the 1990s, and one of the best pure blockbusters of our time.

Titanic 3D gets a somewhat obnoxious trailer.

I loved Titanic in 1997. I still think the film is an unqualified masterpiece. I can and will defend its artistic reputation any chance I get. But this trailer, with its obnoxious onscreen text ("Take the Journey! Fall In Love! Drown and/or Freeze to Death in the Icy Waters!") and its use of the Celine Deon song over the painfully moving James Horner score, actually makes me not want to revisit the movie.  Oh well.

Scott Mendelson

Weekend Box Office (11/13/11): Immortals surprises with strong #1 debut, Jack and Jill underperforms (for Adam Sandler), Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar opens well.

In what counts as a somewhat pleasant surprise, Reletivity's Immortals topped the box office this weekend with a solid $32 million debut.  Tarsam's highly stylized Greek hack-and-slash action film was sold as a glorified rip-off of 300, which opened with $70 million back in March 2007.  If it needs to be said (because others are indeed whining), expecting Immortals to open as well as the lightening-in-a-bottle 300 (or even Clash of the Titans) makes about as much sense as expecting Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief to open as well as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.  The budget for this one was allegedly just $75 million, and much of that was apparently supplemented by foreign pre-sales.  The film also earned another $36 million overseas, giving it a near-$70 million worldwide debut.  Relativity took a major chance on the picture, fully financing it themselves and selling the heck out of it for at least the last six months.  Immortals received a B from Cinemascore and was heavily front-loaded, earning $15 million on Friday night alone for a pretty poor 2.1x weekend multiplier.  So while the domestic run may be brief, the new distributor Relativity needed to prove that they could open an expensive movie to quasi-blockbuster numbers (it's already their second-biggest grossing movie, behind the $79 million haul of Limitless).  On that scale, mission: accomplished.

A masterpiece then and now: Why James Cameron's Titanic needs no defense.

It was right at the opening credit sequence. That haunting footage of the various passengers embarking on the ship, with a sorrowful version of the theme playing in the background. As the cheering crowds gave way to the ship's watery grave and the title unfurled on screen, I leaned over to a friend and whispered "I already love this movie". It was a symbol right there of what made Titanic great and what separated it from the likes of Pearl Harbor or The Day After Tomorrow: the film openly acknowledged that every single life lost on that ship was every bit as tragic and unfair as the eventual fates of our leads. And, as the film played over the next six months, when you asked people what part they cried at, it wasn't anything to do with Jack or Rose. It was the mother reading to her children so that they might be asleep as they drowned in her arms. It was Victor Garber setting the clock just right before the water came pouring in. It was the ship's band leaving and then returning to play it out. But rare is the movie that lets you know that it's going to be an all-time classic within the first sixty seconds.

Scott Mendelson