JONATHAN
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As someone who could fairly be accused of being a fan of super hero movies, I find that Westerns, a similarly dominant genre in its time, do very little for me. Even a lot of the solid gold classics felt like fulfilling an obligation to be a film knower abouter rather than leaving me hungry for more.

In fact although there are definitely fairly tedious comparisons that can be made between these two genres, to my mind the real progeny of westerns is the 90s crime thriller. That is where the morally compromised sheriff and gold hearted outlaw stories have ended up, with the red and yellow hues of the prairie swapped out for the blue and neon of urban decay. Quentin Tarantino clearly has a strong foot in the latter camp and understands the conversation that needs to be had as he brings the tropes he helped develop back home to the Wild West. Firstly it was absolutely correct to hack down the genre’s cheerful airbrushing of slavery and exploitation, but secondly and more importantly it’s also destroying the Cowboy character. Django is not the noble avenger of Unforgiven or the tired samurai of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, (phew don’t think anyone will noticed that these are the only Westerns I’ve seen) But rather the sort of vindictive prick that is at the heart of most Tarantino movies, the sort of git who doesn’t run away from a fight but has to choose between a baseball bat and a chainsaw, who will eat his unarmed victim’s hamburger before gunning them down, who will pluck out someone’s one remaining eye before just walking off. He’s at best an inglorious basterd with a score to settle with the whole world.

What establishes him not as an invincible Mary Sue hero, but as a merciless force to be reckoned with is when even the (also fairly heartless) Christoph Waltz is looking at Django like maybe he’s gone too far. Django isn’t haunted by the man he left to the dogs, and isn’t even exacting justice at the end when he tortures both Samuel Jackson and Walter Goggins, and blows away a defenceless Lara Lee, he’s showing that he is at last completely unchained from any sort of self doubt.

I think one thing I was disappointed with was Broomhilda. When we first meet her she is being punished for some sort of transgression, and then when we catch up with her she has been locked in a box again as some sort of punishment, and I assumed that like Broomhilda it was because she was also an untameable lioness. So why then in this film is she a skittish, practically mute, Princess Peach character?

Now we know Tarantino has no problem writing chunky female characters, whether Jackie Brown, the Bride or even Uma Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction. Also Kerry Washington also plays Oliver Pope in Scandal, who is such a strong female character at one point in that show she becomes the head of the illuminati!The setup is all there for her to join Django in his enlightened Will to Power murder spree, Matilda to his Leon. But no.

Is she so weak to offset Django’s baddassery? To show that why she’s been broken, he has managed to rise up as a sort of superhero? It seems like a wasted opportunity and also presumably means that their relationship is doomed. They can’t really settle down to a life of “Hey honey, just gonna murder a man in front of his kid for money, looking forward to that pie you making when I get home.” Or are they just permanently on the run? In which case she is just gonna get shot and what’s Django gonna do then? Its a weird choice.

Of course this extra characterisation might have made the film even longer, and Illya says, it is just waaay to long. Even leaving aside that any film over ~105 minutes are usually examples of cowardly editing, there is a lot of filler that could have been lost. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it, but I just felt tired by the end of the film, although it’s possible I was just tired anyway.

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People have problems with Tarantino but he has largely avoided “selling out” which means he has built up a legacy as a film maker, and this legacy pays off in lots of different ways. By contrast if you look at the list of best selling movies of all the time there is a lot of shit, obviously, but one that stands out is Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland which made more than $1billion! Now I love the book to a degree which surprises even myself, but why would a $1billion dollars worth of people turn up for this film? To answer my own rhetorical question it was because on paper it seemed like all the ingredients for a nailed on classic. Tim Burton has a unique style and the rubes like me thought, “yes please I want to Lewis Carroll’s whimsical masterpiece mixed with Burton’s macabre charm” but instead we got, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland which happened to be directed by Tim Burton, and the outcome was both predictable and complete garbage. Now as I have said in previous posts Sleepy Hollow is one of my favourite movies, and who doesn’t like Nightmare Before Christmas? But it’s been ten years since Alice and I haven’t been interested in seeing a film of his since.

Not that I am full of uncritical praise for Quentin Tarantino’s work, but all his films feel like his films and he has a hallmark of quality in terms of production. I think the best way I can describe his added value is that there is a lack of creative claustrophobia. So many movies feel like they a start off in a box and sure they might break out of that box, or do something different with it, but you know where those films live, you know their lineages and reference points and tropes, you can lean to the person sitting next to you and annoyingly say “she thinks his hesitation means he’s going to propose but actually he’s a under the thrall of time travelling ghosts… you can tell by the camera angle, it’s textbook.” Because not only have we seen it all before but we have seen it done in a million spin offs, and indeed seen a million spin offs of a plot device where the characters are forced to live the same moment over and over. For most films and tv the narrative decision tree looms over everything, as evidenced by people moaning about Infinity War killing off Spider-Man and saying “oh well he’ll definitely be back, cos they’ve already greenlit the sequel” which managed to miss the point from a standing start. They knew audiences know that and they did it anyway.

This “fuck you, I’m gonna do it anyway” approach is how I docked with Tarantino in the first place. My earliest experience of Tarantino magic was Dusk til Dawn. Actually my first experience of his work was True Romance, which he also wrote, and that helped because when I saw Dusk til Dawn, I thought I knew exactly what I was getting. Dusty rust belt America where everyone is a fast talking wiseass, everyone is corrupt, and there will be a lot of murdering. And Dusk til Dawn sets that all up very nicely with your indie crime drama cast: you’ve got Juliette Lewis from Natural Born Killers, George Clooney doing his “range” work, Harvey Keitel being Harvey Keitel, and of course Tarantino himself who was famously redefining the crime-thriller genre at the time. So that serious cast in a hostage situation, there’s gonna be tension, character beats, betrayal and probably some of sort of shoot out. I feel prepped as an audience member so that when The Twist comes and it’s like a surprise birthday party when you thought you were getting takeaway chicken. Now it is not just the big twist of Dusk Til Dawn which made it seem to cool to smart-alecky 17 year old me, but it was that all the choices the film made seemed to care so little for how the film was supposed to go.

Discussing the Alien ending, it came down to “what if the Alien had killed Ripley?” But what if the Alien and Ripley suddenly had to put aside their differences and fight off a horde of vampires? Or what if just as the Alien was about to win Ripley’s Mexican connection turned up out of nowhere and blasted open the airlock to unknowingly save the day? Or what if Ripley killed Hitler and the Alien got away only to be branded with a swastika on its forehead?

In the “shake my hand” scene you are thinking both “Cristoph Waltz you know he’s on to you, just walk away” and also “Leonardo Dicaprio, these guys deadly killers, why are you making a fuss?” And both characters do what they have to do, regardless of whether or not it is particularly helpful for the story.

The scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta accidentally shoots a guy in the back of his car is probably the best example of Tarantino just following his characters around and escalating from there. It works not only to tell a cool story but also to provide narrative tension, because you know at any point things can get messy really quickly. Indeed he banks on this with the scene in the bar early on when Christoph Waltz kills the sheriff, you’re thinking “what’s this guy doing?! He’s deliberately antagonising an entire town. He’s crazy!” And the film gives you room to believe that maybe he is just that crazy before pulling things back in.

In a Tarantino movie the characters do not do as their told, they don’t conveniently follow to shortest route to the pay off, and that means you never “know” what’s gonna happen, which is such a ridiculously rare commodity that he remains one of the most interesting prominent film makers.