Django Unchained - A Review and Rant

Well, hot damn, Tarantino. You did it and you did it good!

I loved the movie. It was full of passion, romance, action, butt kicking, and most of all good acting. I loved the music too. It was The Good the Bad and the Ugly meets crooning meets the body-thumping bass of hip hop. It was hardly flawless but I think the flaws are greatly overshadowed by the spirit and realism of the story.

The story begins in 1858, Texas, USA. Django (Jamie Foxx) is rescued by a German "dentist" named Dr. Schultz-who is really a bounty hunter. He needs Django's help in identifying some wanted men, as Django was once a slave of these wanted men. The good doctor, in my opinion, carries the show. He's funny, against slavery, and is a smooth talker. Django, was separated from his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) and desperately wants to find her because they are in love. A ton of chaos and adventure goes on... you'll have to see it. There is a lot of Tarantino-style blood, where it looks like guts come out of people no matter if they're shot in the arm or the stomach. A bit graphic, but that's Tarantino's fantastical nature at hand.

What truly makes this movie a success is its polemic. Not since Roots has there been a mainstream slave-time depiction on film, television or otherwise. When it came to the true horrors of slave life, Tarantino did not go the route of fantastical and cartoonish. He went the route of what was dark and real; frankly, things that aren't talked about anymore. When I was growing up in middle and high school, slavery was a bad thing that happened long ago. End of story. Django, very realistically, showed exactly the kind of bad that slavery was. It rehashed the severity of 300 plus years that is largely trivialized today; many kids naively conceive black slavery as a bunch of people working in fields, who were sometimes whipped.

So to Spike Lee and other dissenters of the film, get over yourself.

People need to be reminded what it was like. The story is fictional, obviously. But the N word was not.  It was 1858. That's what black people were called back then. Anyone criticizing that lives in a bigger fantasy world than Tarantino. Hot boxes were something I never learned about in school. But they were very real, as were the mandingo fights, mammies, field slaves, comfort slaves, and courtesan (mistress) slaves all depicted in the movie. And frankly, if you research these slave functions, you'll find a surprising "family tree" of how these functions have manifested themselves in today's society. The brutality in Django was nothing short of accurate. It wasn't any less true than the chained slaves thrown off ships during the Middle Passage journeys (Roots).

Was the "Spaghetti-Western" style fictitious? Yes. Was the overall storyline fictitious? Yes. Were some of the guns in the movie not invented until after the Civil War? Yes.

But that's the nature of Tarantino's work: extreme, hyperbolic. Who doesn't want the underdog to have power?  Who can make that a downgrade of the movie when so much of it welcomed an unadulterated depiction of slave life?

In the end, I'm forced to think that Spike Lee is mad for two reasons: He has become irrelevant. His last big hit was He Got Game. He has released movies since then but not with as much positive reception. And I'd like to add that Summer of Sam was a movie that said the F word more times than any movie that had existed until then. It's hard to say that this expletive was even a little bit historic as was the use of the N word in Django Unchained. It is easy to say, however, that there is a lot of unnecessary hypocrisy going on. Spike is drinking some haterade.

In my opinion, the movie was both entertaining and educational. I don't think you can ask for much more than that when so many movies are trash today. If people decide that they dislike the movie, they should evaluate why. It was gory because slavery was gory. It was depressing and cruel because slavery was depressing and cruel. It had an unrealistic ending because Quentin Tarantino wrote it.

If you can't handle the heat, then get out the damn kitchen.

Performance Practice

The longer I study music in a school setting, the more curious I become with the schools of thought surrounding interpretation of music. I personally think that music should be performed any kind of way that the performer feels best expresses themselves and their ideas. That is not to say that education should do away with teaching performance traditions. Rather, the idea of free, sensible expression should be encouraged more in secondary education.

In my limited observations and experiences, self-expression is a limited privilege to aspiring classical musicians. Unless you fall in the prodigious category or just have no respect for the thoughts of your teacher, you must resign to the conventional, to the common practice, to the historically accurate. It doesn't matter if you are in school to sing, conduct, or play. There is an air of "you're too young to know how you feel. So don't let your feelings interrupt

I think of instrumental music like an argumentative essay. No matter how outlandish or commonplace your argument is, your it must be supported by evidence and take a progression that is logically followed with relative ease. To that point, why is it looked down upon to approach music the same way with something like Bach Cello Suites, Telemann, Mahler or Tchaikovsky symphonies? In these instances, I often hear people say "their interpretation went too far," or "it was too fast," or "the cello suite was too romantic." I always ask, "Well, did it sound good?" Ultimately that's what matters right? I mean, if we were meant to scrupulously follow the "intent of the composer," how would anything we listen to ever sound different?

While Bach, Tchaikovsky, et al possessed a level of genius that I'll never reach, they were also human. Musicians seem to forget that. The pedestal that musicians put these titans on is more like hagiolatry than it is admiration. There is trepidation and needless apprehension, in my opinion, when approaching their music. Music is innately connected to the human experience. So is it really music if the performance of a piece ignores (even if a little bit) the experience of the one resurrecting it? I would say no. It's almost music. It's something watered down. It is academic and contrived.

Two of my favorite people in all of music epitomize the kind of interpretive ideas I'm suggesting. The first is Pablo Casals. He was a brilliant educator, cellist, and conductor. I recordings of him performing all of Bach's Cello Suites. Plainly stated, it's expressive and it's beautiful. He did not concern himself with the "musical right wing," if you will. Rather, he would study the music intimately; its repeated motives, harmonic structure, direction of line, all to render an accurate, human performance. His thoughts are crystal clear and rather moving in David Blum's book, Casals and the Art of Interpretation. It's a long, methodical read but it is full of expression and lots of stories from and of Casal's himself.

The second person whom I really love when it comes to expression is Leonard Bernstein. He possessed a rare fearlessness when on the podium. The first, most powerful thing that comes to mind is a recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 he did with The London Symphony Orchestra. The composition is itself very flamboyant but Bernstein takes it to a pleasant extreme. It is a vulnerable openness that I admire and that I strive to bring to everything I perform. Listen to it. It's seriously awesome.

History and the present together make for the most compelling performances and the most authentic ones. Again, just my opinion. But it's something I feel very strongly about.

Random aside:
There is something about moderation these days that evades American culture. Take politics for example, religious right or sassy socialist. Purist or wholistic person?  Choose one. There is no middle ground. Weird.