(no subject)

[seriousfic]

So maybe I've just soured on Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker (c'mon, half of Inglorious Bastards was entirely pointless, argue it!), but I'm not that excited about the prospect of him making a slavery-oriented Western. Possibly because the quotes on it thus far have been amazingly pretentious.

From a review: This film deals with racism as I’ve rarely seen it handled in a Hollywood film. While it’s 100 percent pure popcorn and revenge flick, it is pure genius in the way it takes on the evil slave owning south. Think of what he did with the Nazis in Inglorious and you’ll get a sense of what he’s doing with slave owners and slave overseers in this one.

From QT: I want to explore something that really hasn’t been done. I want to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.

So a movie that treats slave owners as incredibly, unrepentantly evil? I guess Tarantino is doing a homage to EVERY MOVIE ABOUT SLAVERY EVER (except Song of the South, Disney).

ETA: You guys know I've never seen Gone With The Wind?

Comments

[colonel-green.livejournal.com]

Song of the South was set during Reconstruction, so they weren't slaveowners.

Gone With The Wind would be a better choice.

[azarias.livejournal.com]

I dislike being beaten to the punch. En garde!

[azarias.livejournal.com]

Gone with the Wind.

Just sayin'.

[azarias.livejournal.com]

Okay, fine, The Littlest Rebel.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

The impression I get is that it's not so much about portraying slaveowners as evil or not, as making the whole movie as a genre pic, not a historical costume drama or a solemn civil rights drama.

There actually haven't been all that many theatrical movies about American slavery, and not many recently, so I'm okay with it.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

Aside from Wild Wild West and Jonah Hex... I don't think it's a lack of slavery movies so much as a lack of Westerns, period.

[madmonq.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Judging Tarantino's behavior in the 1990s when it was trendy to act "black" I'm not sure he's clever enough to pull this off without looking like an asshole. But he is never to be underestimated.