Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. You may have noticed I've disappeared this week as I've been in production on a short flick and I needed a few days off. The Behind the Scenes Pic column returns this afternoon, but before I officially clock back in I wanted to address one of the more interesting bits of news to hit... namely the title of the mysterious Quentin Tarantino.
Django Unchained. Western fans will immediately sit up seeing that title. Sergio Corbucci's 1966 western Django, starring Franco Nero, is a classic and predates Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch as an incredibly bloody, hardcore western.
With most films the title is a good indicator of the movie to come, but with Tarantino it can be a frustratingly exciting. For instance, his Inglourious Basterds had virtually nothing to do with Enzo G. Castellari's Inglorious Bastards, though Tarantino admitted that film was a huge influence on his own desire to make a men on a mission movie.
Now, I love Basterds like nobody's business (it should have won the Oscar, sorry Hurt Locker) it was a shockingly different movie than I was expecting. The Men On A Mission aspect is such a small part of that story and like most of Tarantino's movies the end result has influences from wide and varied films all melded together to make something uniquely Quentin.
So, you have that and on top of all that there's even fewer guarantees with Django in the title. You see, Corbucci's original was so famous, so popular, such a money machine that the rip-off factory went into overdrive. There were probably a hundred spaghetti westerns that had Django as a character or a name on the poster. Shit, there were even Franco Nero movies that had nothing to do with Corbucci's films that were retitled and redubbed to make it a Django film.
So, Tarantino's film, even though it's rumored to star Nero, will more than likely not be a reboot/sequel/thing and more of a tip of the hat to that sub-genre of Spaghetti Westerns.
The title was broken by a twitpic from @AgentTrainee and I first saw the news from Drew's story at Hitfix. Looks legit and if Django is the jumping off point for a Tarantino Western (wholly spaghetti or not) that's only good news for cinephiles all over the world... Especially with Nero and Christoph Waltz involved.
Thoughts?
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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