Well, it’s been a long time since I have posted mostly due to the fact that I have been feverishly working on my car trying to get it back up and running as well as school starting. I’m not going to get into detail about my car yet though. I’m hoping that I will get the car running, take plenty of wonderful pictures, and give a thorough summary of what I did to my car when I go home next. Anyways, this post isn’t meant to talk about my car. This is about Django.
So I went and saw Django Unchained with my girlfriend and a
few other friends on the 7th. I expected to be the person who
enjoyed the movie the most, but I wasn’t expecting to be the only person to
really like it at all. I feel like maybe I was the only person to really going
into the movie having known what I was getting into since I have seen many of
Tarantino’s other movies multiple times. I am not really obsessed with but am
definitely a fan of Tarantino, so , after seeing all of the positive reviews of
Django, I was pleasantly excited to finally go and see it. I was not
disappointed. It was a true Tarantino movie, plenty of ridiculous gore, dark
humor, unique visuals, and great dialogue. Let me try and break apart this
review into a few chunks since there is a lot to cover. First, I’ll start with
the story.
Really, the story was cool, but it wasn’t my favorite part
of the movie. I know that is weird to say since story is such a big part of any
movie (and is a key factor to me liking a movie), but, in Django, the story was
fairly predictable and unspecial. Obviously, there were parts of it that were
original, but in the whole, the idea of a prisoner/slave getting free of their
bondage and taking revenge on wrong doers is fairly typical. There really wasn’t
anything wrong with the story. As in everything was fairly believable from my
general knowledge, and I didn’t see any holes in the plot that just made the
story impossible to comprehend/believe like some other movies (such as The DarkKnight Rises…). So all in all, fun story, it worked, but nothing as special as
a Pulp Fiction.
As for the acting/characters, I thought that everyone was good;
I didn’t catch any particular character just being poorly cast or characters
ruining anything. I enjoyed Samuel L. Jackson the most however. He had so many
great lines written and so much comedy added through his character. He really
was a great character. Jamie Foxx was good as Django, but I felt that the
character was sold short and should have had more time to seriously talk about
his feelings and future plans in order to connect the audience with him more.
The best and most touching scene that was used to connect with Django was the
part where you saw the flashback of when him and Broomhilda were running and
were subsequently captured. This was such a powerful scene not only because of
the visuals and acting, but also because it allowed you to really see a more
interesting side to Django than when he is just shooting people. Plus, this
scene also had second best movie song of any I’ve heard this year (second only
behind Adele’s Skyfall). This leads me into the next part of this review.
The soundtrack to this movie was sublime!!! There are so
many great songs in this movie but the true gem is the song I just referred,
which is Freedom by Anthony Hamilton and Elayna Boynton. I have playing this
song on repeat for the last 2 or 3 days because it’s just that good. Most of
Tarantino’s movies have really great music in it that although some don’t seem
to fit, just work (at least to me they did). At multiple points in the movie,
the music breaks into straight gangster rap, one of which is a great mash-up of
James Brown and 2Pac. When these songs started, I got many strange looks from
the people with me, but I loved it. It just made me laugh with happiness!! I highly
recommend checking out the soundtrack if you get the chance.
Anyways, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It didn’t blow my
mind, but it was one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. I would give it a
solid 8 out of 10.
PS. If you don't understand the title please watch this famous scene from Pulp Fiction and remember that Django was about slavery.
