I was snobby while watching it, IMDB guy. I was.
Sukiyaki Western Django, Takashi Miike. October 18, 7pm. View count: One.
Well, to be right up front, I hated this movie a little. It had a cameo by Quentin Tarantino, and the whole movie felt in a way like his presence twisted the movie into a Tarantino Thing, all pastiche (in both senses of the word) and collage-like elements from other movies, with not much there underneath.
[Later] Now that it's a couple of days later, I feel like it's grown on me a little, and I'm pretty sure that it was specifically Tarantino's presence that soured me on the film. Conceptually, Miike's weirdness is really only separated from Tarantino's by their opposite cultural vectors, and maybe it's wrong of me, but my own cultural perspective makes me strongly predisposed to hate this wanna-be thing that Tarantino does. Also, I've never seen the original 'Django' (1966), so this may have been a big portion of the problem.
The western/japanese thing has pre-existing referents in, for example, Trigun, so it's not quite the surprising iconography-soup-pot that some people seem to be calling it. I also had problems with the tonal normalizing; maybe it's just me as A Lady, but I find a large gap between what amounts to 'cartoon-like violence' and very straight-faced things like rape. Dark humor is one thing, but just plain darkness with no leavening aspect is difficult to reconcile with the otherwise lighter tone. Again, had there been no Tarantino, I would have accepted this better, but his presence made me apply the template of his work, which is often all about dark violence and stupid humor.
Twitchfilm's review makes much of the many elements, but none of these is developed well or interestingly. Seriously, for real, who cares if one of the heads-of-clans is really into Shakespeare, when it's barely relevant? It's a possibility that this fixation could be a reference to another film where it is relevant, but lacking that putative context, it washes out into nothing. The many references were cute when I recognized them, but not really interesting. Wow, you're dressed up like Clint Eastwood. Wow, you worked in elements from other westerns. Wow, Quentin Tarantino does a good Brent Spiner impression (okay, not really, but he may as well have been trying to. I will try to refer to him as Old Often-Wrong from now on).
Oh man, and I forgot about the biggest drag: the phonetic spoken english. So intensive to parse, and so goofy. This is my largest indicator that the overall tone was supposed to be light, but to me it felt clashy and drew far too much attention to itself.
I'm willing to assume that had I been better versed in the relevant westerns, that I would have enjoyed this a lot more.
Well, to be right up front, I hated this movie a little. It had a cameo by Quentin Tarantino, and the whole movie felt in a way like his presence twisted the movie into a Tarantino Thing, all pastiche (in both senses of the word) and collage-like elements from other movies, with not much there underneath.
[Later] Now that it's a couple of days later, I feel like it's grown on me a little, and I'm pretty sure that it was specifically Tarantino's presence that soured me on the film. Conceptually, Miike's weirdness is really only separated from Tarantino's by their opposite cultural vectors, and maybe it's wrong of me, but my own cultural perspective makes me strongly predisposed to hate this wanna-be thing that Tarantino does. Also, I've never seen the original 'Django' (1966), so this may have been a big portion of the problem.
The western/japanese thing has pre-existing referents in, for example, Trigun, so it's not quite the surprising iconography-soup-pot that some people seem to be calling it. I also had problems with the tonal normalizing; maybe it's just me as A Lady, but I find a large gap between what amounts to 'cartoon-like violence' and very straight-faced things like rape. Dark humor is one thing, but just plain darkness with no leavening aspect is difficult to reconcile with the otherwise lighter tone. Again, had there been no Tarantino, I would have accepted this better, but his presence made me apply the template of his work, which is often all about dark violence and stupid humor.
Twitchfilm's review makes much of the many elements, but none of these is developed well or interestingly. Seriously, for real, who cares if one of the heads-of-clans is really into Shakespeare, when it's barely relevant? It's a possibility that this fixation could be a reference to another film where it is relevant, but lacking that putative context, it washes out into nothing. The many references were cute when I recognized them, but not really interesting. Wow, you're dressed up like Clint Eastwood. Wow, you worked in elements from other westerns. Wow, Quentin Tarantino does a good Brent Spiner impression (okay, not really, but he may as well have been trying to. I will try to refer to him as Old Often-Wrong from now on).
Oh man, and I forgot about the biggest drag: the phonetic spoken english. So intensive to parse, and so goofy. This is my largest indicator that the overall tone was supposed to be light, but to me it felt clashy and drew far too much attention to itself.
I'm willing to assume that had I been better versed in the relevant westerns, that I would have enjoyed this a lot more.