*Quentin Tarantino has gone and done it again: Made people hot and bothered with his controversial filmmaking.
This time with his new film, “Django Unchained,” starring Jamie Foxx as a slave purchased and freed by a German bounty hunter played by Christopher Waltz.
There are claims the N-word is uttered more than 100 times in the movie; 110 to be exact, but who’s counting really? Is it excessive? Yes. But if I’m being perfectly honest here, I don’t see what all the hoopla is about. It’s a “slave film.”
It’s ugly… but so was slavery.
The critics making the most noise are those that don’t want to revisit that kind of ugly. Those who don’t want to face the fact that the atrocities were actually committed.
White people especially, critics and otherwise, may have more of a problem with the movie than black folk. Oh, you’ll have your usual suspects; African Americans who criticize any film depicting the slave-era; and of course this will be exacerbated by the fact that Tarentino, a white man, had the nerve to tackle the subject; but the use of the N-word in a film by a white man spoken over and over again will be nothing new to black people … in fact, it is probably expected. Even when white people are not actually saying the word, black people believe they’re thinking it. Yep, there will be heated comments; but the real noise will be made by white people, many anonymous, some not; who are sick and tired of being reminded about what their ancestors did.
Its a tough legacy … and it will never go away.
“In the deep south, if we hadn’t heard that word as much as we did, it would have been a-historical. The language in that way was precise,” says Toure, co-host of MSNBC’s afternoon show “The Cycle” after seeing the film at a screening for press. “It’s so embedded into their society, its not pejorative, it’s ‘this is how we talk.’ They’re not even conscious of the racism or gravity. To make a big deal out of it, and if you watch that film and that’s what you get out of it, that’s just an incredibly unintelligent knee jerk reaction to the whole thing.”
Yes, the scenes in Tarantino’s movie are raw, showing white people releasing rabid dogs on a black man and shredding him to pieces; two black men entertain Leo DiCaprio’s character by fighting each other on the floor like dogs — (old) Michael Vick style, and more … oh so much more. But Tarentino showed people a long time ago the type of filmmaker he is: unconventional. “Django Unchained” falls right in line with that description.
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