R U Kiddin' Me?

Rating: 3/10 (4 January 2014)

Let us harken back to the 1960s. In America the advent of the TV western had pretty much killed off the big screen western, based on the notion that, why buy the milk when the cow is already in your living room? Meanwhile, in far-off Italy, a then-obscure director named Sergio Leone decided it would interesting to re-imagine the American western against an Italian backdrop. All the actors would speak Italian, which would later be dubbed over into the language of the country the film was playing in. Except for the main actor, who in this case was an ex-pat American named Clint Eastwood. Eastwood's TV series RAWHIDE had just cancelled and his career was effectively over. So,. when offered a few grand to be the only English-speaking actor in a "spagetti western" Eastwood agreed, and then forgot the experience. Until he later heard that the film, A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, had become the #1 film in Europe. But that is yet another story for yet another day... The original film DJANGO was one of the literally dozens of knock-offs of the Leone films, which (as said) were themselves knockoffs of American westerns. It starred Franco Nero, an Italian actor who spoke no English. It was hardly a prime example of the genre. It was hardly a prime example of anything. The more interesting story, a story that will fascinate film historians in the years and decades to come, is why one of the most honoured and respected film-makers on the planet today, a man whose work is actually studied in FILM SCHOOL, felt compelled to do a remake of one of the most forgettable films in the history of the medium...? This reviewer (who, by the way, considers Spagetti Westerns from the 60s a "guilty pleasure" - and has actually seen almost all of them in a real theatre, with a special preference for the ones starring Lee Van Cleef) could barely make it more than half way through Django Unchained, before being overcome by nausea and an overwhelming sense of loss for the way in which these resources might have been better deployed, perhaps in a parallel universe where "QT" is still able to pass an ink-blot test. Make no mistake. This is not fine film-making. This is a cry for help.