[Django Unchained Watch Online 720p Or 1080p
Abdul Soumphonphakdy
Quentin Tarantino has found his actor in Christoph Waltz -- someone who can speak Tarantinian fluently and still make it his own. When Waltz uses a self-consciously ostentatious word like "ascertain" (as in, "I was simply trying to ascertain..." -- the kind of verbiage QT is as likely to put in the mouth of a lowlife crook as a German dentist, or a Francophile plantation slavemaster, for that matter), it sounds right. As someone to whom Tarantino's dialog often sounds cliche-ridden and cutesy, it's a pleasure to hear Waltz saying the words in character rather than simply as a mouthpiece for the writer-director.
When I first sat down to write about Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" I kept discarding paragraphs like the one above because they all seemed to turn into backhanded compliments. And while I reckon that more or less reflects my feelings about this movie, a mixture of appreciation and dissatisfaction (and my favorite critical sentence formation is always: "On the one hand this, but on the other that"), I didn't want to approach "Django Unchained" that way. I wanted to start unambiguously with what I see as the highlights and later segue into discussing the reservations I have about the film in its current form.
And that brings up a caveat I'd like to toss in right up-front: Remember when the theatrical version of a movie was pretty much the finished thing? No more. Tarantino has already announced that he plans to release an "extended cut" of "Django Unchained," and that he and Harvey Weinstein considered putting out the movie in two parts, like "Kill Bill," but decided against it. At the New York press junket, Tarantino said:
"I'm going to wait until the film goes around the world, does what it does. And then I'm going to make a decision. I make these scripts that are almost novels. If I had to do this whole thing over again I would have published this as a novel and done this after the fact."
Of course, you can't judge any work by all the options that were considered but ultimately not chosen -- and virtually every screenplay (Tarantino's included) has scenes or sections that don't make it into the final cut, or that aren't even shot. But I think taking the screenplay into account is particularly important when it comes to "Django Unchained" for several reasons. Tarantino has repeatedly said that he sees his screenplays as "novels" and that they should be considered as works of their own, apart from but in addition to the movies based on them. His screenplays are published separately, alongside the movies made from them, and "Django Unchained" has already being issued in alternate forms, not only as a screenplay available online but as a six-part comic-book, which QT says incorporates the entire script. In the forward, he writes:
So even though things might have changed from the script to the finished movie -- I might have dropped chapters or big set pieces -- it will all be in the comic. This comic is literally the very first draft of the script. All the material that didn't make it into the movie will be part of the finished comic book story.
So, before I delve further into this, let me, as a former president used to say, make one thing perfectly clear: A movie is not a script and a script is not a movie. It is not necessarily the goal of any movie to be faithful to the script. And filmmaking, like any creative endeavor, is the product not just of planning but of trial and error, happy accidents, last-minute problem-solving and spontaneous invention.
Also: While filmmakers' original designs and stated goals can be fascinating and shed some light on the creative process, those things don't change what's actually there, in the movies themselves. Many a filmmaker has wound up making a movie that thoroughly undermines its creators' own proclaimed intentions. I try not to read much of anything -- reviews, publicity features, interviews, certainly not scripts -- before seeing a movie, so that I can experience it fresh, on its own terms. But if, while watching the picture itself, you feel that, say, a scene or a character feels underdeveloped, or that something feels odd or out of place, you can sometimes dig up some interesting clues about how a movie came to be the way it is.
Take Dr. Schultz's dental wagon with the big wobbling tooth on top, for instance. That was something devised out of necessity by the late production designer J. Michael Riva after Waltz had an accident and was unable to ride a horse for a few months. Tarantino loved it. As he told Tim Appelo in The Hollywood Reporter: "It changes the character and provides some interesting non-corny levity at the beginning of the movie, right when you need it."
My first impression was that "Django Unchained" was uncharacteristically sloppy -- not at all what I'd expect from a Tarantino movie. When I came home after seeing it I immediately looked up the screenplay (.pdf here), which I was sure would be available online "For Your Consideration" at The Weinstein Company web site. And there it was -- complete, as usual, with QT's hand-scribbled title-page (this time with conventional spelling, unlike "Inglourious Basterds"). There were a number of things I wanted to check -- like how much character development had been chopped out (a lot, as it turns out); if the movie had been re-structured (yes, significantly -- especially toward the end); and if the use of deliberately ostentatious language such as "ascertain" (in a cliched phrase: "I was simply trying to ascertain...") by both Christoph Waltz's and Leonardo DiCaprio's characters had been scripted (yes in both cases).
What I learned more or less confirmed what I felt while watching the movie, which reminded of the line Harvey Keitel says to Julia Sweeney in "Pulp Fiction": "Just because you are a character doesn't mean that you have character." This time, there are plenty of characters, but few with much character. Tarantino's eccentric personalities tend toward the caricaturish and/or archetypal, but they're usually embellished with colorful, individualized pieces of flair. Few in "Django Unchained" get the opportunity to make much of an impression, with the obvious major exceptions -- Dr. King Schultz (Waltz), Django (Jamie Foxx), Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson). It's not the choppiness of the filmmaking and storytelling that bugs me so much (more about that later), but that the characters are missing a considerable amount of their character.
Jackson and Foxx have said as much in interviews. In fact, their favorite scene together (a charged encounter when Stephen, the House Negro, shows Django, the Freeman, to his room at Candyland) isn't in the movie. Foxx told The Playlist:
"I still look at Quentin and go like, 'You should have kept it in the movie. Because me and Sam have this moment of black men -- the house servant, the field servant. And how are they going to get along? The house servant who is a manipulative person, and me, the field servant, who just wants to kick ass and kill everybody....
Also: Walton Goggins' character Billy Crash was folded into Kevin Costner's and then Kurt Russell's Ace Woody after Russell left the movie, and he still doesn't get to become much more than a generic henchman (although he does memorably take a glowing hot knife to Django's nutsack). And he's Walton Goggins, one of my favorite character actors from "Justified" and a spectacular guest appearance in "Sons of Anarchy" (and, I'm told, "The Shield," which I haven't seen). Candie appears to have some kind of weird relationship with his Looney Tunes sister, a seemingly brain-damaged Southern Belle named Lara Lee Candie-Fitzwilly (Laura Cayouette), but it isn't developed into anything. (She's cartoonishly disposed of -- gone with the wind, you might say, though the angle of the shot isn't quite right.) Other actors in small roles and bit parts are either unrecognizable (by me, anyway), or gone much too quickly: Bruce Dern, Don Stroud, James Russo, James Remar, Russ Tamblyn, Ted Neely, Michael Parks...
At times, the movie seems to run low on imagination or inspiration -- as in a long, bloody shootout that's nothing but long and bloody because you can't tell and don't care who the swarms of faceless, gore-gushing expendables are. Two characters are eliminated in almost exactly the same way, shot off their galloping horses from a great distance just as they are about to go out of range. The blood of the first one splatters the plantation cotton bushes; the blood from the second one splashes across the neck of his white horse. The dramatic point might have been that Schultz shoots the first one and Django takes over sniper duties for the second one -- except Schultz doesn't give Django shootin' lessons until the obligatory montage sequence that comes later, followed by another scope-sight assassination scene. (The latter, in which a man is picked off while plowing a field with his young son, just feels recycled, like we've seen it a hundred times before. And even though we know the bounty hunters have to retrieve the body, we never get close to the dead man or his family so the killing business remains "clean." There's an important dramatic/thematic note to strike here -- about Django learning to master his emotions, to stay "in character" and separate his professional role from his personal reactions -- but the movie doesn't reach it. Not here, at least.)
At two hours and 45 minutes, "Django Unchained" is a long movie, and feels even longer. But I suspect it's one of those pictures that would seem much shorter and faster-moving if certain missing scenes were restored. Although this is by nature a quest movie, a road movie, with a picaresque, episodic structure, the set-pieces (such as they are) don't build suspense and the overall narrative feels haphazard and dramatically slack -- which is really uncharacteristic of the usually energetic and focused Tarantino. The movie really feels unfinished -- like a hastily thrown-together work print. (I later learned that, despite eight months of production and 18 weeks of post-production, things came right down to the wire and the first screening at the DGA was delayed two days for last-minute mixing tweaks.)
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