Django (1966)

Tarantino might not be best described as a filmmaker, but rather a highly talented deejay artist who mixes, samples and scratches other people’s records, he is very good at doing remixes and it is true he is merely a product of the times of VHS and home viewing, but there is something superficial about his work as a result, take for example ‘Kill Bill’, it opens with the quote – ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’, fair enough but then the narrative that follows does nothing to enact or support this ideology, nor does it even really seem to comment on the idea in the film, the revenge that propels the story is never cold and cold is never presented as an option, the quote appears to be there merely because Tarantino thought it sounded cool, the reason I bring all this up is because ‘Django’ is the film from which Tarantino sampled the ear cutting scene for ‘Reservior Dogs’, and in its rawness here it diminishes the original power of the sequence in Tarantino’s feature debut, while ‘Django’ owes a lot to Akira Kurosawa in terms of narrative it is the rawness of its violence that makes it such an entertaining film, the film never relents from its violence as the titular hero continues to bring down pretty much every other character of the film, the camera never flinches and the violence is never treated as joke or neither a tool to critique American society, this isn’t that kind of the film, it is the kind of the film were the hero has his own theme song to prepare us for the killing and to wind us down after the killing, it is worth noting that this film spawned hundreds of unofficial sequels, so go on and see what all the buzz is about.