2013-05-20T16:30:30-04:00 Nicolas Atkin http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=nicolas-atkin Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Nicolas Atkin Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2576036 2013-01-29T15:53:54-05:00 2013-03-31T05:12:01-04:00

Nicolas Atkin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicolas-atkin/ Django Unchained has attracted well-documented criticism for its exploitation cinema-esque depiction of violence but its most serious flaw is a jarring juxtaposition of tones that completely undermines the film's purpose.

Quentin Tarantino's latest could have been a rewarding emotional experience, a cathartic metaphor for fighting racism, to give - as the director professes - African-Americans a hero in the Western mould.

Or it could have been a brutally sharp-witted comedy, a complete send up of people's attitudes to and ill-conceived views of racism, both at the time before the Civil War and in modern America.

But it attempts to be both, and inevitably fails to pull it off. The two tones simply do not interlock and mesh. We watch films to experience an emotional reaction, but Django blurs the lines too far as to render such a response.

One throwaway scene, where a gang of Ku Klux Klan riders on horseback quibble about not being able to see out of the eyeholes in the bags covering their heads is akin to something from an episode of South Park.

But the writers of that show keep the tone straight throughout and it is all the more effective for it. The message is clear.

In contrast, Django ultimately carries no message. We see horrific acts of racist violence against slaves but then two seconds later everyone in the cinema is in uproar because someone made a funny.

It all becomes overwhelmingly jarring, like Schindler's List crossed with Saturday Night Live. What emotional reaction are we meant to have to the film?

We see three dogs tearing a runaway slave's body limb from limb seconds after Leonardo Di Caprio's plantation owner Calvin Candie has poked fun at a slack-jawed yokel responsible for holding the beasts back, complete with pitchfork and drool falling from his lips.

Christoph Waltz's wisecracking Dr. Shcultz later recalls those horrific images and is rendered completely solemn, as the viewer should be, but each separate tone keeps undermining the other's attempts at creating sympathy and empathy.

Are we meant to laugh or cry? These two emotions are by no means mutually exclusive in films, but with subject material as serious as Django's any humour should most certainly be of the gallows variety.

It certainly should not be slapstick. The humour simply does not work, not when Django is making his horse dance after finally freeing his wife Broomhilda from years of horrific torture.

Not when the francophile Candie demands to be addressed as Monsieur Candie yet also gets angry when anyone actually speaks French to him because he is too stupid to learn it, before threatening to cave in Broomhilda's skull with a hammer.

Samuel L. Jackson's house slave Stephen is perhaps the most riling character in the film, an evil, maniacal man who tortures the female slaves under his charge, sent up and played for laughs by the actor and Tarantino as a comedic Uncle Tom figure.

His every line, muttering 'black ass' this et cetera, invites laughter but minutes after his introduction we see Broomhilda screaming in agony as she is removed from 'the box' - a horrific punishment dealt to her by Stephen for her attempt to run away.

But then everything is fine because Stephen asks the lingering Django, brought to tears by his wife's suffering, whether he wants to be shown to his room or sleep in the box. Cue more laughter, right?

All the humour just undermines the cathartic nature of the revenge Django takes out on Candie and co. Any true emotional payoff of seeing them all get their comeuppance is watered down because you don't know how to react to it.

Should we pump our fists because these evil bastards have got what's been coming to them? Or laugh because one of them is shot in his genitals?

Are we watching farce or something serious? The argument that by making the topic of slavery funny allows people to embrace it simply doesn't carry water, because no one is taking such a gravely serious matter seriously at all.

I'm reminded of those Youtube clips parodying dramas such as The Wire where someone has slapped a laughing track on a certain scene.

The canned laughter completely alters the serious tone of the clip, to comic effect.

That is Django in a nutshell - 2 hours and 45 minutes of it, to be precise.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2143945 2012-11-16T09:47:26-05:00 2013-01-16T05:12:01-05:00

Nicolas Atkin http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicolas-atkin/
Arndt is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine and Toy Story 3, and has written extensive treatments for a proposed new trilogy of Star Wars films, suggesting Disney are ready to get the franchise back on track to what made it so successful in the first place - basing the films around well-written, likeable and believable characters that can be emotionally invested in.

To be blunt, the Star Wars prequels were the biggest cinematic disappointments in recent history, fundamentally flawed at every basic level of cinema but none more so than in terms of script, and it is this problem Arndt is presumably there to fix.

The most glaring issue with the prequel scripts was the inherent lack of a protagonist whereas Luke Skywalker is clearly outlined as a fish-out-of-water hero in A New Hope who the audience could empathise with, whose eyes we saw through and emotions we felt. We consequently cared about his internal struggles and the affects they had on his surroundings.

These internal and external dilemmas were underpinned by a mythological battle between the primordial forces of good and evil, of Jedi fighting Sith and the Rebellion overcoming the Empire, making the journey we undertook with Luke all the more emotionally involving.

George Lucas deserves credit for writing the original Star Wars script but the fact Lawrence Kasdan was on hand to share screenwriting duties for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi cannot be overlooked - when Lucas was left to his own devices again for the prequels the result was a mess from start to finish.

It would have made sense to have Obi-Wan Kenobi, already a character Star Wars fans were familiar with, drive the prequels forward as the apprentice learning at the feet of Jedi Knight Qui-Gon Jinn.

Given the two characters become so closely tied in the events of the next five films, would it not also have been more logical for Obi-Wan and not Qui-Gon to discover Anakin Skywalker and express a desire to train him, with the wiser Qui-Gon warning of the danger?

This could have added a new layer to Obi-Wan's character, that it was ultimately his fault for Anakin's training, something that would resonate with the character in the original trilogy, perhaps hoping to atone for his mistake by training Luke to defeat his father who has become the evil Darth Vader.

Instead there is almost no character growth in Obi-Wan over the entire prequel trilogy. We do not care about him because there are few if any moments where he faces tension between the choices he can make which will have a direct impact on him emotionally as well as the plot, unlike Luke who had to choose whether to respond to Princess Leia's distress call and abandon everything he had ever known, whether to quit his Jedi training with Yoda to save his friends, whether to kill his father knowing it might lead to him joining the dark side.

And instead of advancing Obi-Wan and Anakin's relationship, the two become tangled in separate subplots for most of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. By the time they come to blows at the climax of the third film, we have no reason to emotionally invest ourselves in the fight because there was nothing to show us they were genuine, believable friends in the first place.

There is speculation Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher are being lined up to reprise their roles from the original trilogy in the new films. But as long as Arndt and Disney can steer the franchise back to what originally made it successful - characters we care about who undergo change with clear motivations and desires - it does not matter whether they use Luke, Han Solo and Leia or a new breed of galaxy-saving heroes and heroines.

It is a seemingly simple formula but one which is hard to master - if you could 'bottle' what made Star Wars so revered and loved then there would have been hundreds of films just as successful.

The fact Arndt is a self-confessed Star Wars fanatic bodes well though - he surely understands what made the original films tick, and if he can recreate that formula then Star Wars fans could yet have a follow up to their beloved films worthy of the title, that takes them back to that day when they first saw and fell in love with Star Wars.]]>