Django Unchained: The Good, The Bad, and The Silly - Part 1

Rating: 7/10 (21 January 2013)

Now a criticism of an old Spaghetti Western or World War II action film was likely to be that the dialogue was weak and the characters were poorly developed and both were obviously secondary to the action scenes. Of course in a Tarantino film the characters and the dialogue become the show and the action is secondary. So it is in Django Unchained. As Inglourious Basterds was not at all like Enzo Castellari's Inglorious Bastards, Django Unchained is not Sergio Corbucci's Django...although Franco Nero does make a brief throw away appearance in the film to wink at the use of the name Django.
In a way Nero appearing in the film is the key to understanding what Django Unchained and what Tarantino's filmmaking career is really all about...a love of movies. Tarantino may not have the best taste in film, he may overindulge his love for B or Z grade pictures but he seems to do so in the spirit of a young Orson Welles who once described making motion pictures at a film studio by exclaiming "This is the biggest electric-train set any boy ever had!" What is any Tarantino film really about above all else...simple...it's about movies and his unabashed love of them. It is why I laugh a little when people start to point out historical inaccuracies and anachronisms in his period films Inglourious Basterds and now Django Unchained. Tarantino is not making films about actual history and he flaunts that fact. Nor is he making films that are intended to seriously comment on the Holocaust or slavery.
Tarantino is making films about film history and commenting on how movies in the past have addressed these subjects. One thing we all know about movies is in general they are concerned in most cases less with accuracy and realism than they are with drama, artistic license, and ticket sales. Truths in movies are often not revealed by telling a true and accurate story but rather by artistically opening up an event to allow an audience to use their imaginations to experience the emotions of that event through the characters.
Here's where you go through the looking glass in a Tarantino film...his characters are not playing emotions inspired by any kind of true event but rather emotions inspired by other movie characters and how these movie characters and other movies inspired Tarantino to create the ones in his own films.
So, in a Tarantino film you are in a "movie world" that was inspired by other "movie worlds" pretty much leaving any comparison to the real world pointless. This is why anything can and pretty much does happen in a Tarantino film...he has freed himself from any rules of realism.
To give you an example of how Tarantino's mind works in this way in Django Unchained the characters he created Django and Broomhilda Von Shaft are supposed to be the relatives/great or great great grandparents of John Shaft...yes, that John Shaft...the one played by Richard Roundtree in the 1971 film Shaft.
When you understand that Tarantino is showing us the story of the great great grandparents of John Shaft and using a pile of references to other films to do so you begin to see how ridiculous it is that a person discussing this film would concern themselves with historical accuracy and anachronisms. I'm sure the fictional John Shaft is not rolling over in his celluloid grave about how Tarantino portrayed his great great grandparents...of course in Tarantino's mind John Shaft might have a score to settle, ha! So, in this Southern Fried Spaghetti Revenge Western Tarantino has dreamed up, his German dentist bounty hunter Doc Schultz and Django - the slave he sets free to help him complete a job - wander through a candy colored world that seems part Blazing Saddles, part Mandingo (the 1975 Richard Fleischer film) and part Euro-Western as seen through the eyes of a young video store clerk that seems fascinated to have discovered this strange, vulgar, and exploitive movie universe.
This really is not a story about a slave taking revenge on those that enslaved him but rather a story about a couple of movie characters taking revenge for the things that happened in the film Mandingo.