Salon.com > Jamie Foxx

Tarantino is the baddest black filmmaker working today

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:44:00 +0000

There are some folks who won’t like to read these words: White guy superstar director Quentin Tarantino may be the baddest black filmmaker working in big-time Hollywood movies today.

That is a possibility which angers some, frightens others and disgusts a few more, saying as much or more about the sorry state of movie audiences today and the still-closed world of big-time filmmaking than any tart provocation Tarantino has managed to splash on the screen.

The reason we’re having this conversation — again — is thanks to the latest addictive confection of revenge film, spaghetti Western, Blaxploitation movie and anti-slavery fantasy Q.T. dropped on us all to close out 2012: "Django Unchained."

Beyond the fact that it is gleefully bloody, luxuriating in crimson-splattered shootouts at a time when America is deeply conflicted over how much it loves this stuff, "Django Unchained" uncorks the perfect revenge fantasy for black people descended from slaves and living in a still-white-dominated society.

Tarantino’s incoherent three-hour bloodbath

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:39:00 +0000

Quentin Tarantino no longer makes movies; he makes trailers. “Django Unchained” feels like a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens, a slavery-revenge melodrama cum salt-‘n’-pepper action film that would be awesome if it actually existed. Like so many trailers, it’s packed with memorable scenes that don’t go anywhere, and keeps promising payoffs that remain theoretical. It’s got Western scenery on a grand scale and scenes of madcap comedy involving inept members of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s got veritable geysers and fountains and gushers of blood, an ocean of fake gore even by Tarantino’s standards. You could claim that he’s “quoting from Sam Peckinpah” with those slapsticky water balloons full of blood, except that that’s not quite it. It’s more like he’s quoting from crappy ‘70s drive-in movies that were quoting from “The Hills Have Eyes,” which was quoting from something else that was quoting from Peckinpah. (I may be missing an intermediate stage there, such as a cannibal film that was dubbed from Italian into Spanish and projected once, with the reels out of sequence, at a downtown Los Angeles theater in 1983.)

Tarantino compares the War on Drugs to slavery

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 23:41:00 +0000

Iconic film director Quentin Tarantino believes that US drug policy, and the subsequent mass incarceration of African Americans, is comparable to pre-Civil War slavery. In an interview about his latest movie—Django Unchained, which documents the story of a freed slave, played by Jamie Foxx—Tarantino points out that the hierarchies of racial injustice have shifted but not wholly improved. "This whole thing of...this 'War on Drugs,' and the mass incarcerations that have happened pretty much for the last 40 years has just decimated the black male population," says the filmmaker. "It’s slavery...it’s just slavery through and through, and it’s just the same fear of the black male that existed back in the 1800s." He adds that the US prison system, which currently houses staggeringly disproportionate numbers of black men, mirrors the structure and appearance of slavery. "Especially having even directed a movie about slavery, and you know the scenes that we have in the slave town, the slave auction town, where they’re moving back and forth," he says, "Well that looks like standing in the top tier of a prison system and watching the things go down. And between the private prisons and the public prisons, the way prisoners are traded back and forth." African Americans throughout the US are 13 times more likely to face jail for the same drug-related offenses as white people, according to a 2011 statement by the NAACP; at 13% of the US population, they currently make up 53.5% of all imprisoned drug offenders, despite drug use being fairly evenly divided across racial lines.

Dumb tweet of the day: “Hollyweird”

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 22:07:00 +0000

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