How Many of You Remember "The Legend of Nigger Charley?" Something fun for the weekend. Django Unchained builds upon many movies. Most obvious, is the original Spaghetti Western Django. Less obvious, for those who do not have a deep understanding of American film, are such movies as Nigger Charley and its various sequels/versions. "This will do as easy entertainment, I guess, but the novelty of a black cowboy shooting a white bad guy is sure to wear off sooner or later, and then maybe black Westerns will be made with the same care as the traditional item. " My man Ebert was wrong: the novelty of watching a black cowboy shoot a white bad guy never wears off. However, there are several far-telling gems of observation in Ebert's words. For those of you that lived during that period how did blaxploitation go so wrong, so fast? Here is Robert Ebert's original review. "The Legend of Nigger Charley" is an amiable black Western with sufficient episodes of violence to give it the appearance of heading somewhere.
Strictly speaking, this is the truth. The Ethnic Revenge Flick. Ta-Nehisi Coates ponders Django Unchained, the Quentin Tarantino slavery revenge flick in the vein of Inglorious Basterds: When I think of Django Unchained all I see are rape scenes and scowling dudes. One of the problems, at least for me, is that I don't actually hunger for a revenge flick about slavery. I understand why Jews might hunger for a some cathartic revenge in terms of the Holocaust. There's a certainly clarity to industrialized genocide. But slavery is something different, something at once more variable, intimate and elusive. J.L. Revenge in the context of atrocity tends to mean "desire to kill. " In Jeffrey Goldberg's review of Inglorious Basterds, he writes about dreaming about killin' NAZees as a kid, delighting in Quentin Tarantino's "story of emotionally uncomplicated, physically threatening, non-morally-anguished Jews dealing out spaghetti-Western justice to their would-be exterminators.
" After "Django Unchained" Will There be a Remake of "The Black Klansman?" This sounds like one of my post-coitus race conscious chats after riding Space Mountain across the colorline. And I thought I was original? Damn me my hubris. I learn something new everyday. I was reading Orgtheory when I came across the above gem of a movie mentioned in the comments about the (recent) and oft discussed movie Django Unchained. From what I can discern, The Black Klansman is about a black guy that can sort of pass, and looks like some of my cousins, who then infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan, after they kill his daughter, in order to bring them down. This brother is no Walter Francis White; however, he is very didactic and entertaining. It is true that popular culture is ephemeral and disposable. Nevertheless, there remains something to be said about populism, and how regular folks repurpose popular culture for their own ends.
Popular movies can make money, be distributed through the Hollywood system, and still offer some type of political comment and critique. 'Django' Untangled: the Legend of the Bad Black Man - The Chronicle Review. By Scott Reynolds Nelson Columbia Pictures A poster for Quentin Tarantino's new film In the 1970s, Sanford, Fla., had one movie theater. Everyone called it "the Ritz. " It played movies for children on summer mornings, but our babysitter sometimes took my brothers and me to see the "night movies," what are now called blaxploitation films. Sanford at that time was mostly a black town, and at 10, 8, and 5 when we saw Super Fly (in 1974), my brothers and I were the lightest-skinned people in the theater, and possibly the youngest.
So I was among the first in line to see Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Whether Tarantino recognizes it or not, Django relies on tropes that have long been a part of the working-class African-American memory of slavery and its aftermath. As other scholars have pointed out, Django borrows from three blaxploitation films of the 1970s, The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) and its sequels, The Soul of Nigger Charley (1973) and Boss Nigger (1975). Tarantino vs. Spielberg: Two Films About Slavery - The Edge of the American West. (It’s the month for guest posts! I haven’t seen either movie, so Patrick Rael, Associate Professor of History at Bowdoin College, weighs in about Django Unchained and Lincoln).
It’s hard to imagine two films set around the Civil War that differ more than Steven Spielberg’s historical biopic Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation western Django Unchained. In the broadest sense, of course, both concern the fight against the institution of American slavery. Django Unchained personalizes the struggle through a revenge-soaked bloodfest, in which an evil slaveowner receives his just comeuppance at the hands of an exceptional former slave seeking to reunite with his bound wife. There the similarities may seem to end. In contrast, any claims Django Unchained may make on historical accuracy are quickly belied by the film’s first intertitle, which reads: “1858: Two years before the Civil War” (of course, the war began three years after 1858, in April of 1861).
The Big Picture: The Takeaway From 'Django Unchained' Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required. Quentin Tarantino's latest movie "Django Unchained" is proving to be one of his most controversial to date. It's set in the Antebellum South, a few years before the start of the Civil War. In the film, a freed slave joins forces with a German bounty hunter, and they set out to together to find Django's wife, who is herself enslaved by a sadistic slave owner. And in classic Tarantino style, of course, much violence ensues. QUENTIN TARANTINO: What happened during slavery times is a thousand times worse than I show. HEADLEE: We want to do a roundup of various op-eds relating to this movie.
But then going on to some of the critical response that has been written, one of the most scathing critics of the movie came from the writer Ishmael Reed. To compare this movie to a spaghetti Western and a blaxploitation film is an insult to both genres. JAMES: I have seen the movie. 'Django Unchained' Action Figures: Black Writers React. Django Unchained action figures (blackyouthproject.com) The controversy over Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained," in which slavery is the backdrop for a spaghetti Western, ratcheted up a notch over the weekend when freelance entertainment journalist Karu F. Daniels, writing in the Daily Beast, reported that the movie characters -- slaves and slavemaster -- are being marketed as action figures. "Little White kids can play Calvin J. Candie and make Django and Stephen 'Mandingo fight' or they act like they're selling Broomhilda or just call them 'nigger' all day long.
The possibilities are endless," Columbus, Ohio, blogger Jeff Winbush wrote on Facebook when he heard the news. On amazon.com Monday, a customer reviewer identified as E. "I have to say, I never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that, unlike myself, my kids would someday have the opportunity to re-enact America's slave trade the way my great-grandfather did! As news, the story was a no-brainer, right? He's not. Nancy R. Reagin: 11 History Lessons From 'Star Wars' (PHOTOS) On Her Majesty's Secret Service [1969] Going into this project, if you asked me what my favorite James Bond movie, I'd have told you it was either On Her Majesty's Secret Service or Thunderball, depending on what side of the bed I woke up on that morning.
One of the things I've been most curious about in using this Double-0 Rating system is to find out whether that opinion would be reflected by the scores I assigned. After blogging the results up to this point, Thunderball currently holds the lead spot. So where will On Her Majesty's Secret Service fall? Let's find out. (1) Bond ... James Bond The general public probably still thinks of On Her Majesty's Secret Service (to the extent they think of it at all) as "the one starring that one guy who never showed up again. " Well, here at You Only Blog Twice, the answer to that question is a definitive "no.
" Let's get the negatives out of the way first. More importantly, Lazenby simply carries himself as though he were James Bond. We aren't here to talk about the novels, though. John Sayles Interview. Steve McQueen: 'I could never make American movies – they like happy endings' | Culture | The Observer. You've followed 2008's Hunger with the searing drama Shame, which stars Michael Fassbender as a sex addict living in New York. Is being in film still exciting? Shame Production year: 2011 Countries: Rest of the world, UK, USA Cert (UK): 18 Runtime: 99 mins Directors: Manju Borah, Steve McQueen, Yusup Razykov Cast: Carey Mulligan, Elena Korobeynikova, Helga Filippova, James Badge Dale, Maria Semenova, Michael Fassbender More on this film I've seen behind the curtain. It's a bit Wizard of Oz-like. I admit I was excited about Cannes when Hunger launched there and then that was a success and I went to Hollywood for the first time and, my God, I was thrilled, you know, seeing the big letters: HOLLYWOOD.
But after a few dinners with people and drinks parties, you realise it's all about rolling up your sleeves. The myth-making has disappeared for you? Well, it's not what I make films for. Does that realisation cramp your work, then? Wow, you're getting existential on my ass so quickly. Ha.