Maybe if I had a TV, I would have seen an ad, and I would have known. Maybe if I had seen this trailer, like the 4 million people who saw it on YouTube, I would have known.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUdM9vrCbow?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
Maybe if the little senior citizen lady at Zumba hadn't called it a "lighthearted look at an era," I would have expected something different. She said DiCaprio was great.
Maybe if one of my friends weren't a huge jazz fan with a special love for Django Reinhardt, I would have not been misled by the name. I mean, Django. How many Djangos can there be, right?
But none of those things happened. So when Ish suggested a movie after dinner last night, and that movie was Django Unchained, I walked in thinking I was going to see a lighthearted jazz-era DiCaprio biopic, honest to God.
Instead, I spent about 90 minutes out of three hours with my eyes squeezed shut chanting Hare Krishna while Quentin Tarantino splashed the screen with his trademark buckets of blood.
It's funny, in a way. My tweets about it made Heather Barmore laugh til she cried, which is always a good thing.
Clueless woman, totally different movie than she expected. Duh.
But there's also a part of me that is seething with rage about it. The arguments over Tarantino and cartoon violence have gone on ever since his first film. I'm still not good with it.
Even when justice is done and the right guy wins while wearing hot clothes and he gets the girl, violence still feels bad to me. I guess I just want my cartoon violence more Wile E. Coyote and less man-getting-ripped-apart-by-dogs.
I'm not ready for a lighthearted look at an era when that era is pre-Civil War slavery. I don't think I ever will be. Suebob says thumbs down.