Quentin Tarantino‘s new movie, Django, digs up the bones of a deplorable chapter in America’s history and in doing so he used the N-word a staggering 109 times before the end credits roll. Hooray! holiday movie…
Just to be clear, I did not go and watch Django (The “D” is silent,) and then count how many times the selectively forbidden word was uttered, actually, Hollywood heavy hitters, Variety, were the ones to take on that task — and here’s some of what they had to say,
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True to its spaghetti-Western roots, the pic reveals most of its stoic hero’s unspoken motivations through garishly colored flashbacks, though Tarantino and editor Fred Raskin (stepping in for the late Sally Menke) seem to realize that limited glimpses of such white-on-black sadism go a long way. Filmmakers who choose to portray this shameful chapter of America’s past bear a certain responsibility not to sanitize it. But here, even as it lays the groundwork for “Django’s” vengeance, dwelling on such brutality can verge on exploitation. To wit, the film problematically features no fewer than 109 instances of the “N word,” most of them deployed either for laughs or alliteration.
Anyway, I don’t really have a problem with multiple instances of the N-word in a movie, I got used to that in the blaxploitation movies of the 70s and 80s, what I have a problem with is Jamie Foxx, one of the movie’s co-stars, coming out on Saturday Night Live, saying he was delighted to get a roll where he could “kill all white people in the movie” I don’t care what anybody thinks, that is some ignorant s**t…