HOLLYWOOD RED

Hollywood Red

Quetin Tarantino likes blood, hot red blood gushing, splashing out from mortal wounds of numerous, often nameless characters murdered in cold blood. It is hard to forget those scenes in Uma Thurma’s Kill Bill where it got so bad the pictures turned black and white. I must say, a rather mild way to temper down on gory sights. It would have been better if viewers were advised to use their discretion, making a decision to watch or not but then… Quetin Tarantino wanted us all to see blood in its raw state. So we sat down and watched.

Transforming the rather sweet character often played by Uma Thurma, from the movie Vatel, or the gawky broad, and the personae of a jilted heroine with special powers in Super Ex- Girlfriend to the assassin on a vengeful spree in Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino’s making of the character of Uma Thurma played is…profound, ingenious, mind blowing and the bloody scenes are mind boggling.

 Her one mission was to Kill Bill and she did. Uma Thurma role in Kill Bill was a product of the very red coloured imagination of Tarantino. Good with the sword, great in her very broken good heart, and gruesome in her revenge. And so was Django when he was left unchained, except that unlike Uma,guns and dynamites were handy for the rugged Jamie, the Django.

When Django was unchained, I must confess, my very predictive mind, accustomed to an average product churned out annually from Hollywood creative studios, waiting for huge success at the box office, and at least an invitation to Golden Globe if not Oscar had formed a picture of how the movie would end. I was wrong.

In a twist so great it left me speechlessly laughing, Dr Shultz the funny and rather German dentist turned bounty hunter bought a slave, Django (played by Jamie Foxx) and set him free. Free to work as his valee, a very pleasant way to refer to servant in his own words. And from a servant, the freed slave who was enjoying his new status became a partner in business? What they did? Selling wanted criminals’ corpses for money.

Set in 1858, two years before American civil war, there came a Negro riding on a horse at par with the white man travelling together with him into towns full of hostile white people and looking for criminals with money on their heads. And what else would they get from white folks who wanted Django dead, only because a Negro had the gut to act like that. The dead part was the issue. Blood was not spared; it was sprayed again, splashing into the camera and dead people dropped like potatoes as one the victims of Django searing bullets was told by him (Django) in a scene “I like the way you die” in the most pleasant manner.

Perhaps what got me intrigued was the gun slinging character of Dr Shultz, who combined deadly wit with curiously smart brain, which also made Leonardo Dicaprio (Calvin Candie) curious too. The Wild W`est setting, brings to mind a gunman character in J.T Edison novel Dusty fog and the like of historical character like Calamity Jane and those other bunch of trigger loving folks we read in novels while young at heart. Whatever Dusty fog couldn’t handle with his fist, he did with his gun and he was too fast about it, killing before his victim blinked.

What more to list from Death Proof a 2007 movie which was about a stunt driver who spilled women’s blood in staged accident after stalking them, written and directed by Tarantino. And his very first movie Reservoir Dogs, regarded by a certain critic as “Greatest independent movie of all time”. Released in 1992 Reservoir Dogs was a huge success at the box office.

In Django Unchained ( released  on Christmas day 2012), the brave hero with mind so set, either by gun, and with money to buy back his wife from slavery with $12,000,(a whole lot of money in Lincoln’s era) set off to Mississippi to free her from the brutal hands of Calvin Candie.

This is no sickly sweet, slushy, mushy movie. Django unchained is one end product of a creative mind. With the trademark of violent crime, non-linear storyline and flash backs, Django Unchained though bloody has a soft part to it.

Our hero Django believed in marriage (so did the heroine) and so he was ready to walk the thousand miles danger land of arid Texas desert to get his wife back from a plantation in Missisipi. The experience afterward left a bitter, acrid taste in the mouth as Shultz in one final attempt pulled the trigger that led to some gruesome chain of events.

Django did not need to revenge. He could have gotten his wife (a black slave who surprisingly could speak German, PLAYED BY Kerry Washington) and turn back, both of them could have just walked away into the sunset. But then, blood had to be spilled.

I will like to direct a movie someday. But definitely not with blood splashing or with scenes full of men snuffing life out of the other either using bare hands or pointed guns with “very lethal intentions”. And certainly not about women whose blood was spilled by a stalking psychopathic, bloodletting stunt man who staged accident for his victims in Death Proof (another of Tarantino’s creation)

 I would rather a feathery tale of love so compelling it drew a free man Django to Mississippi where the knot of slavery was cruel and firm till the civil war ravaged Great America. Yes, such is the romantic part of Django unchained. I would rather a movie where the hero walks into the night with his freed sweetheart into a bright future. Just as Django (with the “ D” silent) did. But then, Quetin Tarantino likes blood and so do his fans. So he gives it to them messy.

Teju duru is a free lance Journalist and artist. She devouted her lil heart to Jesus sometimes ago

© 2013