You probably already know that I love Tuesdays.
New Releases Day is great, but a Quentin Tarantino New Release Day is basically a holiday.
There is also a sweet Criterion Blu-Ray of REPO MAN out today, but we're talking QT.
I saw DJANGO UNCHAINED twice in the theater and my Blu-Ray just got here.
Going into DJANGO, I was super hyped.
I'm a huge QT fan and the screenplay for DJANGO was one of his best.
Me and the wife put on some Tarantino Shirts and ventured out into the snow for a matinee.
We sat, watched and when it was over, we both had the same reaction: underwhelmed.
I was expecting a faster pace, more fleshed out characters and was not overly impressed.
When I saw INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS in the theater, I stayed for a second showing.
However, when I saw DJANGO a second time, I realized something had completely changed:
The audience ate it up.
When I saw it the first time, it was dead silent in the theater.
I was laughing, a lot, but definitely caught some dirty looks.
I would have thought the people seeing a QT movie, on opening day, would be die-hards like me.
But they acted like we were watching ROOTS and not a dark comedy.
Was the movie shocking and graphic? For sure.
Did the 500 N-words scare people quiet? Definitely.
I just don't understand what motivated "the silents" to show up at all.
Maybe they just wanted to see what all the controversy was about.
The second time I saw it, people were basically rolling in the aisles.
Quentin's stuff is not for the faint of heart and definitely not for people who can't take a joke.
It's not like DJANGO was full of dumb, unfunny, racist jokes.
It was lampooning racists.
It had the courage to say, "Slave owners were scum, enjoy them getting shot full of holes."
Is that a truly outlandish stance?
Probably not, but it started some important discussions about who can say what in a film.
With the backlash from the toys and people calling out Tarantino, I felt I had to defend the film.
The more and more I discussed it, I realized how much I actually liked it.
Christoph Waltz was great and Leonardo DiCaprio was absolutely amazing.
It was a step down from BASTERDS, but DJANGO was easily one of the Top 10 films of 2012.
The fact is that average QT is better than 99% of the crap that comes out.
So grab your Action Figures, pop in the Blu-ray and try to enjoy it as a film, not a political issue.
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