Suebob Unchained
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.
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.
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Suebob's Red Stapler 
Thank you Suebob! Sorry you got roped into that. Nothing ever good has come from that man.
I’m such a fainting lily that I have a hard time watching them. I closed my eyes for part of Pulp Fiction too. I think that’s the only other movie of his I have seen.
What’s all this fuss I hear about Unchained Melody?
Oh, I can’t imagine your brain trying to catch up. Part of me loves that you were surprised though. We get that so rarely, all of our media reviewed and teased and recommended by influencers we like and algorithms. Too bad it was a traumatic surprise–next time I hope you are delighted instead.
It was funny…afterward. The movies I’m usually pleasantly surprised by are documentaries. I LOVED “When We Were Kings” and I didn’t think it would be possible to interest me in boxing.
I can’t handle the violence in Tarantino’s movies. It’s just not OK.
Especially this month. Buckets of blood are a little too close to home.
I can’t to QT anymore. Ever.
I think I’m done, too.
Suebob-So sorry that happened to you. Nothing like a bad surprise. I have to confess, however, that i went on a friend’s recommendation, not sure what I would think, and I loved the movie. I feel sort of evil writing that here, but it’s true. P.S. Good to see your blog after a long hiatus.
I can see liking it. It was like a Dirty Harry movie set in slavery times, so there’s that catharsis…
I haven’t seen it, but I admit to being confused by the polarizing reviews. People either say the movie’s great or it blows. I will say that I saw it when Jamie Foxx did Saturday Night Live and he spoke about how great it was that a black man (in a movie) got to kill a bunch of white people. I figure that if killing someone on the basis of skin color is terrible…then it’s ALWAYS terrible. His comments turned me off.
I hope Jamie was talking about killing those specific abusive white people, not white people in general. Because that would be kind of scary.
I, too, think of Django Reinhardt every time I hear the title….then I have to say “Nope, this is that QT flick”, and remember that I don’t want to see it.
So glad it’s not just me.