An Endless, Thoughtless Bloodbath: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

by James Hansen 

Over the past few weeks, the internet has been abuzz with critics, pundits, and politicians considering the moral, ethical, and political implications in regard to the representation of violence – particularly torture – in Kathryn Bigelow’s highly acclaimed Zero Dark Thirty. Interest in the movie has grown in large part because of these discussions, almost making an actual analysis of the film itself a moot point. (I’ll still have something to say about Zero Dark Thirty once it opens locally in Columbus.) Not garnering the same amount of controversy prior to its release – aside from a breif dustup when director Spike Lee commented that he will not be seeing the film – is Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Recalling both films now, I have to admit the outrage(ous) [responses] to the films feel somewhat backward. What I want to offer here is a bit polemical as to the reactions each film has received (again, leaving a direct critique of ZD30 for later) which stand as indicative of the relative merits of each film. That is, if Zero Dark Thirty has been, at the very least, a “conversation starter,” a lack of furor over Django Unchained reveals an utter lack of seriousness, the complete absence of even a veiled attempt at critical dialogue, in Tarantino’s blaxploitation-slavery-revenge epic. 

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Tarantino: A Funny Ole Basterd

by Brandon Colvin

Critics, audiences, and QT himself have been locked in a nice, hot argument about Inglourious Basterds for weeks now. Punchy quotes, accusations, and defenses are flying like hurled Nazi scalps. Some of the least eloquent of these come from some of my favorite writers, and even Tarantino seems to dig himself a few holes in professing his love of this 70s revenge film or that unseen Jacques Tourneur WWII flick. Everyone, for better or worse, is chiming in. Few, however, are speaking for me. So, here I go.


Quentin Tarantino is not a fascist. Inglourious Basterds does not amount to Holocaust denial. Though influenced by the likes of Sergio Leone (among MANY others), it is not a self-serious epic in the vein of Once Upon a Time in the West. It is not a theoretical meditation on cinema’s ability to defeat Nazis. It is also not the best or worst film of the year; however, it might be the most controversial (sorry, Lars). One major reason – aside from the violence – for the film’s intense debatability is that it is not quite what was expected. Indeed, the most shocking and apparently befuddling aspect of Basterds is that the film’s closest relatives – cinematically and politically – are Ernst Lubitsch and Shaun of the Dead.

That’s right, it’s a comedy.

When the end credits were rolling for Basterds, my sides were hurting from laughter and my first thought was, “Tarantino must really love Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be.” Both Basterds and the 1940s classic comedy are WWII satires centering on a group of individuals practicing in an artistic medium (film in the former, theatre in the latter), and are full of intrigue, espionage, and wit. Both narratives make Nazis – especially Hitler – into laughable buffoons and feature charismatic heroes who endure some seriously genre-bending tense moments en route to memorably chaotic climaxes that take place in elaborate theaters full of Hitler’s finest fascists. Nobody accuses Lubitsch of complicity in political horrors as a result of his irreverent and playful Nazi farce, and if Tarantino’s film were construed by more to be what it is – a light, humorous, post-modern extravaganza – it might be receiving a bit more positive attention from cranky critics determined to paint Basterds into an ideological corner. Undermining Nazis with gags and cartoonish exaggeration doesn’t mean QT is not taking them seriously. It means he is attacking them with one of the most fatal cultural weapons – laughter, a la the likes of Stephen Colbert, whose routine mocking has had more impact on the American political climate than the actions of most senators.


“But the gore! It’s too gross and bloody to be funny! It’s just offensive.” To point out the fallibility of this opinion and to highlight Basterds’ similarly-toned contemporary, I cite a film that QT has repeatedly declared to be one of his favorites, even heralding it as the “greatest British film of the past 20 years”: Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead. Amidst the shootouts, forehead carvings, face smashings, and numerous scalpings, Inglourious Basterds remains stocked with pastiche, physical comedy, zinging one-liners, and all forms of irony, achieving a blend of visceral violence and humor only rivaled by the original “zombedy” and Wright’s other film, Hot Fuzz. Tarantino and Wright are like-minded in their allusion-heavy, cinema-centric approach to intertextual post-modern storytelling and their fusion-based comedies could be grouped into a recent wave of deliberately transgeneric works that refuse to be reined in by conventional approaches to tone and structure – namely homogeneity – replacing them with a difficult-to-taxonomize multitudinous mish mash that hybrids the artful and the exploitative, revealing them both to contain elements of the other (certainly Grindhouse would be included in this group). In creating a film so tonally unusual about a subject typically treated with immense gravity, Tarantino has done something bold and fresh, something in the spirit of two great comedies from Lubitsch and Wright


This is not to say Inglourious Basterds is without flaws. A handful of the scenes seem as if they could benefit from truncation – particularly the protracted finale – and from time to time Tarantino takes risks that fall a little flat (the voiceover narration from Sam Jackson during the Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) interlude). However, in addition to its comic effectiveness, Basterds milks its dramatic possibilities through dialogue that is as intense as it is hysterical and set-ups that allow actors Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, and Michael Fassbender to shine in their respective roles as Nazi Col. Hans Landa a.k.a. “The Jew Hunter,” southern-born Basterds-leader Lt. Aldo Raine, undercover Jew/cinematic terrorist Shosanna Dreyfus, and British spy/former film critic Lt. Archie Cox. Tarantino’s usual cinematic bravado is certainly there and his quirkiness is in full-force. All of these aspects of Basterds have been explored more effectively by others in recent weeks, and, appropriately, gaining an understanding of the movie might require reading all of the diverging opinions and analyses. (I would direct interested readers to Jim Emerson’s Scanners for a more comprehensive overview of the film’s impact, reception, and significance). In lieu of an all-encompassing examination of Inglourious Basterds – something I would love to begin if I had a book to write – I’ll leave this review to mainly serve as another voice, one that sees the funny side.
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Sneaky Cinema Standouts: Top 5 Heist Films

Like the proverbial velvet bag of precious stolen jewels, getting a grasp on exactly what constitutes a heist film is more slippery than one might imagine. Since the first luckless thieves with ambitions too big for their britches stumbled upon the ultimate score in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the heist movie has thrived as a sub-genre of the crime film, one that is nearly universal in its concept (are there any places where people don’t steal shit?) and which found a particularly comfortable home in French cinema, becoming one of America’s most influential cinematic exports.

But qualifying a heist film as a pure heist film is messy business – and we all know the key to a successful score is precision. A true heist picture is about process, not success. Planning, preparing, practicing – and let’s not forget double-crossing – are the essential elements of a memorable heist movie. Sometimes, this process reveals itself as well-paced foreplay, building up to a climactic procedural (which usually goes wrong).

Alternatively, the pre-thieving can also be used to conceal preparatory information as a mystery, keeping the audience in the dark before sneaking up and slyly saying, “You’ll never guess what I just did.” The forethought is the fetish in the heist film, regardless of the time of revelation. It is a genre of curiosity (Who? What? When? Why? Where? How?), with varying emphases on each query and varying proclivities for depicting desperation, humor, betrayal, existential tragedy, and, most of all, absolute cool.

I tried to maintain a good mixture of iconic classics, revisionist works, and modern standouts in my list, so there should be something for everyone. If you don’t find your favorite amongst the following then either A) I haven’t seen it, or B) I don’t like it quite enough – either way, you should leave a comment and rep for your most beloved burglars.


1. The Films of Jean-Pierre Melville [Bob le flambeur (1956), Le Doulos (1962), Le Deuxième soufflé (1966), Le Cercle rouge (1970), Un Flic (1972)]
Okay, so I’m cheating a little bit with my first pick. If I didn’t, this list would be unfairly overpopulated with films from the master of heists: proto-French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville. With deftly defined archetypal characters and a unique stylistic flair, Melville created a collection of the most influential heist films, working in the genre more frequently than any other filmmaker (though Soderbergh may overtake him). Melville’s laconic, no-nonsense heroes – played by the likes of Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo – confront their criminal missions with an almost religious solemnity and seriousness. His films are imbued with a quiet intensity that churns in crescendo just below their calm, collected surfaces, boiling over during dramatic robbery sequences.

Melville’s most celebrated heist films are Bob le flambeur and Le Cercle rouge, and deservedly so, as they are certainly his best. The great director’s stamp on the genre is undeniable: Bob le flambeur has been remade by Neil Jordan as The Good Thief (2002) and was heavily influential on Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut feature, Hard Eight (1996), while Le Cercle rouge is in the process of being remade by Hong Kong director Johnny To with a cast featuring Liam Neeson and Orlando Bloom – preserving Melville’s larcenous legacy.

A lasting influence on the films of the French New Wave and many others, including the next movie on this list, Melville’s oeuvre represents the absolute apex of the heist genre.

2. Reservoir Dogs (1992) dir. Quentin Tarantino
Perhaps most noteworthy about Tarantino’s much revered post-modern robbery-gone-haywire flick is that it is a heist film in which the actual heist is omitted. An undercover cop amongst the ranks of a group of would-be thieves (referred to as Mr. White, Mr. Brown, Mr. Blue, etc.) foils their diamond robbery, leading to a bloody whodunit clusterfuck that involves the surviving members of the group attempting to piece together what went wrong while hiding out from the police in a warehouse.

A non-linear film with loads of flashbacks and a decidedly elliptical mode of storytelling, Tarantino’s oddly-titled masterpiece is a violent, stylish, witty movie in which the big job is invisible and the preparation is presented after the failed robbery, filling all of the detailed planning, particularly that of the undercover policeman, with an inescapable sense of doom.
A cultural cornerstone as memorable for its lengthy discussion of tipping waitresses as it is for its infamous ear-slicing scene, Reservoir Dogs is a film whose freshness and energy is still palpable over 15 years later.

3. Rififi (1955) dir. Jules Dassin
Directed by then-blacklisted American filmmaker Jules Dassin after having fled the U.S. for France, Rififi is a seminal heist movie that established many of the tropes that would come to be associated with the genre: the rag-tag team of specialized experts, the use of exact models and practice rooms to hone efficiency, the commitment to pulling off “one last job,” and the breathlessly tour-de-force breaking-in sequence.

Adapted from a racy French novel by Auguste le Breton, the film follows the aging Tony le Stéphanois as he corrals a team of seasoned criminals in order to cap his delinquent career with a high-paying jewelry store send-off. A very brutal, unrelenting film, Rififi expands the novel’s short heist scene into a 32-minute, totally wordless set piece that comprises over one-quarter of its runtime. Shockingly, the safecracking and breaking-in techniques used in the movie were so effective that Mexican authorities had to ban the film in their country because so many thieves were successfully using methods borrowed from Rififi. While the film may not be the most sensational of all heist movies, its dedicated attention to realistic detail distinguishes it from nearly all of its counterparts.

4. Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Ocean’s Twelve (2004), Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) dir. Steven Soderbergh
Since 1996’s Out of Sight, Steven Soderbergh has proven himself to be the much-needed Viagra of the heist film, and his Ocean’s trilogy represents the genre’s 6-hour boner. Everything is in full effect with this trio of stealthy stories: the hugest stars, the richest pay offs, the most implausibility, the largest production budgets, the trickiest plans, and the funniest self-referential humor.

Soderbergh’s films inject 70s suaveness and outsider playfulness into the overblown Hollywood aesthetic, emitting an ultra-hip, super-sleek, often ridiculous vibe that comes across as nothing less than charming. Riffing off of the debonair cool of the original 1960 Lewis Milestone-directed “Rat Pack” flick, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, et al, epitomize the modern heist hero – always collected, always one step ahead, always keeping the audience guessing. Exercises in style and flamboyance, the Ocean’s films are not only entertaining, but also valuable in that they got the heist movie its groove back, introducing a whole generation of moviegoers to the alluring world of breaking and entering.

5. Bottle Rocket (1996) dir. Wes Anderson
A heartfelt, offbeat, independent comedy, Bottle Rocket is certainly an anomaly in the heist genre. Absurd and touching, the film is filled with characters that would go on to be mimicked and copied in numerous indie films of the past decade, while serving as a jumpstart to the movie careers of Luke and Owen Wilson, as well as whimsical writer-director Wes Anderson.

With a more hair-brained series of schemes than any other heist film in my memory (what do you expect when the plans are concocted by a mental patient and a guy who robs his parents?) Bottle Rocket presents what happens when amateurs pretend to be pros. A lighter yang to the heavy yin of 1, 2, and 3 on this list, the film pleases with its surreal silliness, expanding the dominion of the heist film from the hardboiled to the hysterical – even throwing in a bit of romantic comedy. Worthy of the praise of crime film maestro Martin Scorsese, who called it one of the top ten films of the 90s, Bottle Rocket is an essential and unusual entry in the heist film canon.

by Brandon Colvin

This article original appeared in Rise Over Run Magazine.
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