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Django Unchained, the highly anticipated Quentin Tarantino film, will be the topic at Eso Won Bookstore in Leimert Park at 6 p.m. Friday.
While Eso Won's James Fugate loved the film, I thought Django was Dterrible. The story wasn't very good, the gore was ridiculous and the topic was not handled in an interesting way. It's not on the same level as Pulp Fiction or Inglorious Basterds.
Though some critics loved it, many people are taken aback by the story and it's depiction of slavery in the years before the Civil War.
The panel will feature Ayuko Babu of the Pan-African Film Festival, Erin Aubry Kaplan, who has covered black issues in LA for over 20 years, and Dr. Anthony Samad, writer and creator of the Urban Issues Breakfast Forum.
Erin just penned a piece in the LA Times critical of the movie, which is a revenge fantasy where a former slave (played by Jamie Foxx) gets to kill an entire plantation of awful slave owners (including Leonardo DiCaprio) and their minions.
"The most disturbing detail is the emotional violence and degradation directed at blacks that effectively keeps them at the bottom of the social order, a place they still occupy today. And critics maintain it is this sort of violence that, like the endless gunplay, "Django" revels in more than it critiques," Erin writes.
While Anthony writes on his blog, and also penned a story in the Los Angeles Wave, "It was entertainment. Bullsh*t entertainment satirizing our most serious social infliction. But entertainment, none the less."
And ever the host, James will provide the refreshments.
"The audience should come prepared with questions as we want to hear your views on what is now being called The Best Picture of The Year. (I, James Fugate think that)," James said in his email invitation.
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Hey Eddie: Hope this comment doesn't get posted along with all of the comments/opinions about Django being made by the professional commentators. I just wanted to weigh in with thanks to you for this media effort called Leimert Park Beat. You stay current, have a broad outreach and all in all make a very strong contribution to the ongoing effort to keep LP/LPVillage viable and moving forward. Your residence is a clear demonstration of your commitment and interest. Keep up the good work. Clint
Thanks to Genius Bastard for pointing out this New Yorker article by Jelani Cobb to help me articulate my deeper problems with the movie -
"Django’s true nemesis is not the slaveholder who subjects Hildy to cruel punishments but Stephen, the house slave devoutly allied with the slaveholder. The central conflict is not between an ex-slave and a slaver but between two archetypes—the militant and the sellout. But in creating Stephen, Tarantino necessarily trafficked in the stereotypes he was ostensibly responding to. Samuel L. Jackson plays Stephen’s overblown insouciance and anachronistic mf-bombs to great comedic effect. There are moments, however, when ironies cancel each other out, and we’re left with a stark truth—at its most basic, this is an instance in which a white director holds an obsequious black slave up for ridicule. The use of this character as a comic foil seems essentially disrespectful to the history of slavery. Oppression, almost by definition, is a set of circumstances that bring out the worst in most people. A response to slavery—even a cowardly, dishonorable one like what we witness with Stephen—highlights the depravity of the institution. We’ve come a long way racially, but not so far that laughing at that character shouldn’t be deeply disturbing."
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