Showing posts with label spaghetti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spaghetti. Show all posts

Thursday, 14 March 2013

Mother of all spaghetti westerns!

Django 1966
The music score starts with a catchy tune 'Django'. A blue eyed cowboy drags along pulling his coffin through the muddy road.
In next scene, this cowboy (FrancoNero), shoots a gang of Mexicans and a group of cowboys who ungentlemanly shoves around a blonde damsel. The silent cowboy rescues the damsel in distress and heads to town.
A certain Major Jackson who terrorizes the town and has a bone to pick with our hero as the 5 men in the beginning scene were Jackson's henchmen. The Mexicans whom our hero, Django shot, come to town to avenge and take back Maria, the damsel in distress. Django had come to town to kill his wife's killers.
Django, with his secret weapon on the coffin that he drags - an automatic machine gun!, bulldozed the Mexicans. Django has a sad past, his wife had been gunned down during his absence. In the final showdown, Django with his broken hands, managed to gun down Major Jackson and his henchmen all his 6 barrel pistol at the cemetery scene.
This is one classic film in the genre of spaghetti western where the story defies logic but one should just watch for its entertainment value. Do not ask how a cowboy comes in possession of a machine gun which I think was invented in WW2. [Actually, check with Wikipedia reveals that early version of machine guns predates American Civil War, but was too expensive to be used, so it makes sense].
Also don't ask how a cowboy with broken hand can shoot a 6-barreled Smith and Western to finish off easily 10 bandits (or was it just 6?)!

Sunday, 10 February 2013

Fastest draw in the South!

Django Unchained (2012)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
This film has been praised to high heavens for its boldness in depicting American's not so pleasant past. Even though , the powers that be always paint a sanitised and just past of the invaders who not only raped the American continent of its resources and systematically annihilated an advanced civilization already present before their gungho appearance in the New World, it takes a renegade son of the soil like Tarantino to highlight their equally unpleasant past with the workers who were slaved and treated worse than livestock.
This film can be best described as one of those spaghetti westerns which Clint Eastwood is commonly associated with. In keeping with Tarantino's penchant for gore and violence (as in Kill Bill and Hostel), there is plenty of spurting of crimson sanguineous fluids to make Dracula go into ecstasy. It is set at a time before the American civil war and has very eloquent dialogue with poetic words that would fascinate any student of English Literature albeit its liberal lace with profanity.
A maverick fast talking and fast drawing dentist, Dr Schultz (Christopher Waltz), rescues a gang of black slaves from captivity in the pretext of looking for a particular black slave who could identify a particular band of outlaw brothers. After picking out Django (Jamie Foxx), Dr Schultz just shoots them with a small pistol, the sound of menacing enough to be an assault rifle!
Slave Baron DiCaprio
A smart talking fast drawing dentist rescues a gang of black slaves from bounty hunters. He takes Django away from the group in text of trying a group of brothers.
Dr Schulz is a bounty hunter who gave up his dental practice to gun down outlaws for a living. He deputise Django (now a free man) as his assistant and they go all around from Texas on hunting spree all through winter with good returns. After finding out about Django's own sob story, both of them go in search of Django's German speaking black slave wife.
They track her down to be at Candiland in Mississippi, in the heart of slave land, owned by a ruthless rancher, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). They are looked at suspiciously, seeing a black man on horseback. With the intention of purchasing fighters for a blood sport (mandingo), they get in close with Candie and his confidantes.
Candie's chief butler, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) smells a rat and alerts his boss. The slick Dr Shultz manages to gun down Candie before after which a blood bath takes part in Candieland. Dr Shultz is killed and Django is captured and sold off to a mine. He outwits his captors and returns to rescue the love of his life and avenge in the true style of a spaghetti western as Django rides in the sunset with his girl and a flaming southern mansion on the background.
If all movies from Hollywood are guilty of racial stereotyping, portraying the whites as saviours and the coloured as crooks and uncivilised, this film is also guilty of the same. It, however, paints the whites as aggressors with bad attitudes, bad manners, bad teeth and barbaric, save for the German speaking Dr Schultz. The blacks, on the other hand are all victims of abuse and are sincere. Even Stephen who is his boss' faithful dog is loyal.
The background music score is warped. The potpourri of songs spread range from country folk to hard rock and even hip hop. An entertaining flick despite the extreme unnecessary gore and violence.

“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”*