Over-hyped; Tarantino excess

Rating: 6/10 (31 August 2013)

Reservoir Dogs was a pretty conventional buddies-in-crime movie that became noteworthy for its level of violence. Tarantino got himself under control for his sophomore movie, Pulp Fiction--one of my favorites. Pulp Fiction was violent, no doubt, but it was held together by well-developed, interesting characters and dialog. With the exception of the pawn shop crew, you had some level of empathy for all the major characters.
Tarantino became much admired after these two movies and seems to have become lazy and dependent on shocking viewers. He reminds me of the creature in John Carpenter's The Thing. He watches other works and stores snippets away until he can assemble them into something different yet reminiscent of the other works. The extended conversations involving DiCaprio and Waltz kept bringing to mind the plantation scene from Apocalypse Now Redux. Waltz's accent and quite a few references to the German language kept me thinking about Inglourious Basterds. Couple the accents with the lack of emotion as Waltz pursues his bounties, and I was thinking Schindler's List. Long panoramic shots with soaring swells of music brings to mind every spaghetti western. Put all these snippets together and you have a contemporary Tarantino movie. Django lacked smoothness; it seemed a choppy agglomeration of...snippets.
Django is full of anachronisms. The count on this site is 22 plus three factual errors. Though many people rely on Hollywood to school them in history, I don't expect non-historical, fictional films to be 100% accurate, but it seems like Tarantino had a complete disregard for accuracy. Was this laziness by Tarantino or a deliberate disregard for accuracy in favor of being cool? The characters in Django were one-dimensional. Waltz's dentist was mysterious as to his back story and motivations, and Jackson's Stephen was interesting for his devotion and dismissive behavior toward his "owner." (No person can own another, but very often damn sure act like it.) In fact, Stephen's dismissive attitude was unbelievable given DiCaprio's Candies' general intolerance. I think that the attitude was allowed/incorporated to protect the Samuel L. Jackson image as an eternal bad-ass. Everyone else was explicitly good or evil. No shades of grey here. And speaking of shades of grey, there seemed to be a lot of images of women being dominated, whipped, and bound. Shades of misogyny? Rumor has it that $10 million of the $100 million budget was spent on prop blood and fire hoses from which to shoot it. More stylized Hollywood violence for the motive of revenge. Any wonder that people think that the way to right every wrong is obliterate someone? The violence level in Django compared to the general level of movie violence is the difference between pornography and erotica. Perhaps Tarantino's Thing incorporates a snippet from This is Spinal Tap by putting an 11 on his violence amp. Make that a 12. Okay, let's assume that killing three dozen people in a scene is necessary to tell the story. Do we also have to see geysers of blood with every shot? Too much of anything is desensitizing and dilutive.
The cast did a good job with their shallow characters. Waltz and DiCaprio stood out from the rest. Foxx, strangely enough, seemed to blend into the background in scenes involving Waltz and DiCaprio. Washington seemed to be a prop, a token as the boys played "no, **** you." You probably won't hate Django, but you likely won't be very satisfied unless you drank the Tarantino Kool-Aid. I'd love to see something from him again that is the caliber of Pulp Fiction.