There is something wonderful to me about stories that imagine what would happen if oppressed people took revenge on their oppressors. When I saw The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo (Swedish version), it blew my mind to watch a girl punish a man who raped her. Women spend a lot of time feeling powerless, and it’s nice to see my gender refusing to take shit once in awhile.

But these types of stories seem rare, which is possibly because the people who make movies are usually white, influential, monied men, and it takes one with a lot of confidence to dive into the role of the oppressed. Cue Quentin Tarantino, one of the most confident people on the planet.

In one of the many times that Quentin Tarantino has blown my mind (the first was when I watched him on a late night show, having never seen his movies, and was charmed by how blatantly drunk he was), was when I read this quote from him in GQ:

I respect criticism. But I know more about film than most of the people writing about me. Not only that, I’m a better writer than most of the people writing about me. And I can write film criticism better than most of the people writing about me.

If most people said that, I’d think they were assholes. But Quentin Tarantino knows he can say that shit and people will just be like, “true, true, you rule.”

He tested the waters of the large-scale historical revenge fantasy with Inglourious Basterds, and it went over quite well, which is probably what gave him the confidence to take on slavery.  So anyway, I’m going to do a 1-paragraph review and then bring up a couple Becky’s Book Club-style talking points, which is what I do when movies seem to be worth discussion rather than just a bunch of adjectives like “intelligent thrill ride!”

1-paragraph review: Django Unchained is just about as good as it looks, but it’s not as good as Inglourious Basterds because it is missing a badass female, something that QT usually does very well. Kerri Washington was more of a haunting spectre in the movie. I would have liked her to at least kill someone. The pacing is slightly strange – what the commercial leads you to expect it to be about is accomplished quickly, leaving you to ask “What is the rest of this movie about then?” The answer is, plenty, but it’s all a bit meandering in how it plays out. It’s very gory, with a little less charm than Inglourious, but the acting is phenomenal, especially Christoph Waltz, Sammy L. Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio. Somehow Tarantino’s role brought out Leo’s childish charm, which I haven’t seen in any movies since he went and got really beefy for The Departed.

Talking Points:

1. Just how controversial is this movie?

In researching this movie I noticed that a lot of actors pulled out. Apparently Will Smith was originally going to play Django, which would have been way better, but he pulled out. Kurt Russell pulled out and so did Joseph Gorden Levitt, among others. This made me wonder if the script just didn’t sit right with a lot of actors, mostly because it is full of “the n word.” Discussion:  Is it ok to have white people using that word if they are playing the historical role of slavers, and other people during that time? How much awesomer would this movie have been with Will Smith playing Django?

2. Can white people tell minority stories?

We’ve spent the whole year going back and forth about Lena Dunham and her reluctance to create minority characters in her show Girls, because she is uncomfortable telling any other demographic’s story. I think this is a common phenomenon in our cultural studies-saturated generation, who grew up being annoyed at Seth MacFarlane and friends trying to make a show about black people by a bunch of white people. But white people just telling white people stories doesn’t seem like the best solution either. Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino is like, “I’m going to make a movie about a slave killing a bunch of slavers!” I don’t think he would ever stop to think, “Is this a story I’m entitled to tell?” But QT tends to put the minority characters in the power position, while Seth McFarlane just recycles stereotypes about them over and over. (As a woman, I appreciate his female characters, for what it’s worth.) Discussion: Can there ever be healthy guidelines for white people creating stories about minorities?

3. Is Quentin Tarantino the male Tyra Banks?

When talking about this movie with my boyfriend, he kept saying stuff like, “The idea behind it is so campy and obvious that it would take someone really delusional to actually do it.” I could only think of two people delusional enough to do this – Quentin Tarantino and Tyra Banks. She is an equally egotistical, do-everything-myself, big-balled storyteller, except she kinda sucks at it and is tone deaf about political correctness (she made the only Native American girl ever on Top Model dress up as Pocahontas). QT, on the other hand, knows how to find the pulse of hard-to-talk about societal issues and talk about them in an interesting way. Nonetheless, I keep thinking about how the two of them are weirdly alike. They probably have the same Meyers-Briggs or something. This opinion has proven unpopular with men, who hate Tyra Banks, except for the ones who think she is hot, like Turk on Scrubs. Discussion: Do you see any parallel there?

Conclusion: Django is a good movie for anyone who hates slavery, likes fake blood and loves Leo DiCaprio. So everyone!

–Becky Lang