I have a severe love/disgusted relationship with Quentin Tarantino. As in I equally love his movies and hate them for their awesomness, hilarity, ridiculousness, blatant ripoffery, and overratedness. They’re too popular to be cult classics, too good to not be B rated, chock full of decent to good actors, and just enough racist and perverted to make me roll my eyes. Do you see the complexity of this relationship?
I felt the full fury of it when seeing the Django Unchained trailer before The Dark Knight Rises.
Look.
Why this will be awesome:
Did you not see the trailer?
Jamie Foxx! That German Nazi guy from Inglorious Basterds is now a slave freer or something! LEO <<bites knuckles like Dr. Evil>>!
Why this will kill me:
As with every other QT movie there will be miles of unimportant dialouge disguised as clever commentary. Yes I still think about that opening scene in Resevoir Dogs when I tip a waitress, so what did that have to do with robbing a bank? Whenever we watch Deathproof I get soooooo mad about the pointless conversations the first group of girls had. And the texting! WTF was that about?! Planet Terror was the better of the Grindhouse flicks and yet it gets less praise. Whatever.
And I’m sure there will be gratiutous use of the N word cause its Tarantino and he said it for no reason in Pulp Fiction and that had nothing to do with niggas so I’m sure a movie about slaves will warrant tons of times to get it out. Yes I always quote Rose McGowan in Death Proof when she says “I’m built like a girl, not a big black guy,” but I mean was that line necessary?
And why does Tarantino get to make a movie about a renegade slave? Why hasn’t a black person gotten to make a movie about a slave kicking ass? I’ve seen two brief pieces about it on television that were phenomenal.
1) Aaron McGruder’s Catcher Freeman
and
2) Dave Chappelle’s Player Haters Time Travelers. (around 5:15 till the end)
But then again, what black directors could even get this movie made? We got Spike Lee and Tyler Perry, and most of the time I can’t really fool with either one of them. Oh what a world what a world.
I can’t wait till Christmas to go see this.
I'm so proud of my #1 daughter. Your blogs need to be syndicated, so you can get paid!
I don't know the secrets of Tarantino's heart or head. But the content that he's produced for the past two decades is public. Tarantino happens to utter racial epithets against Black people and writes scripts using epithets against Black people frequently, repetitively, often, and usually. With the financial support of The Weinstein Company, Tarantino has distributed racial epithets and content negative towards Black people around the world while Black directors with limited access have not had the financial means to counterbalance Tarantino's negative portrayals and distribute them with equal access around the world. Strangely enough, Tarantino does not utter or write racial epithets against Native Americans, Jews, Asians, Italians, Irish, or other racial and ethnic minorities with the same frequency (if ever). I wonder why that is? Also, the portrayal of the female "lead" in Django Unchained that he plans to distribute around the world is sexually explicit and extremely violence. He chose not to portray the female lead in Inglorious Basterds as a repeated victim of sexual violence. He portrayed her as a heroine and driver of action and then distributed that image around the world. Anyone with vocal cords can say a racial epithet and tell stories of sexual violence against Black people. Anyone with access to writing implements can write a script with racial epithets and sexual violence against Black people. Anyone with access to money can distribute racial epithets and sexual violence against Black people (on Christmas Day). However, anyone with eyes and eardrums and a tendency to bypass movies produced by companies and directors with suspicious motives can hold that person accountable.