Baby Driver

Engine Ears

Baby Driver
2017 UK/USA Directed by Edgar Wright 
UK cinema release print.

When I first heard that one of the more interesting directors of recent times, Edgar Wright, was working on a movie called Baby Driver, my reaction wasn’t exactly the most enthusiastic. I really like the music of Simon and Garfunkel, those middle three albums they released in the 1960s were absolutely perfect but... their song Baby Driver from their fifth album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, has got to be my least favourite of their songs. In fact, in all honesty, that last studio album together has not got that many good songs on it at all... at least ones that work for me. So yeah, taking one of their dud songs as inspiration for a movie was not my favourite idea... Wright uses it in this over the end credits.

And then I saw the trailer for this thing a few months ago... which was well received by everyone except me. It was a movie with gangsters/criminals and I really don’t like those kinds of people. I went through Grammar School as a kid so the kind of hoodlum mentality behaviour you see at these institutions in real life is not what I want to see reflected in my cinema viewing, where said thugs are armed with guns or similar methods of killing people. If I want to see a gangster movie then I’ll go with Bogart and Cagney, thanks very much.

So the film already had two strikes against it but... I do like Edgar Wright as a writer/director and I did want to support him and so, yeah, I went and saw this thing anyway. And I have to say... I really didn’t get a lot out of it, to be honest. Out of all the Edgar Wright movies I’ve seen, this is the one I wouldn’t ever want to see again. Ironically, though, I am glad I saw it because, while it didn’t ring any particular bells for me, there’s a lot to be admired in it and you can certainly tell that the deft hand of an auteur director has touched this picture.

The film tells the story of Baby, a young super-duper getaway driver played by Ansel Elgort, his burgeoning relationship with a young waitress called Debora, played by Lily James (who seems like a young Mädchen Amick as she used to look in the first two seasons of Twin Peaks) and his ‘work’ for his boss Doc, played by Kevin Spacey. Baby was in a car accident as a kid... where he lost his parents... but is the top of his league when it comes to handling cars and is working off a debt for Doc because of something he did in his past. However, the accident left him with tinnitus and so he uses a number of loaded up i-pods to distract from what Spacey refers to as his “hum in the drum” and the music is so ingrained in his nervous system... and in the basic DNA of the movie as a whole, actually... that he times out everything to music and this helps him keep everything ticking over like clockwork and excel at what he does.

And that’s the basic set up but, as you can guess, the various crooks involved in the jobs bring about disaster on themselves... and Baby and Debora... and everything works towards a conclusion which doesn’t necessarily take any of the easier routes to an ending but is certainly enough, I should think, to win the hearts of most audiences (just not me but even I’m happy to admit that the film is made with a heck of amount of skill and that it’s worth giving it a watch).

I said that the various songs in the film are entrenched in the film’s DNA and right from the opening heist, getaway and subsequent ‘walk to get the coffees’ which plays out over the opening credits, it’s clear that Wright is making a very personal movie. He uses the timings of the music to coordinate the way the characters are moving and even the title character lip synchs a lot of the songs so much so that, for a while there, I thought the film was going to go straight into the territory of ‘the musical’. It doesn’t quite get there but the musicality of the film is quite overt and, by the way the opening heist is choreographed, I thought for a moment that all the characters were literally using the timings of the song to carry out their criminal mission.

That subsequent post heist journey Baby makes to get the coffees, which accompanies the opening credits, is all more of the same and his dance/walk is cut in time with the music, with more lip synch and there are even some moments, during this section, where some of the lyrics to the song that’s playing are introduced onto the screen by way of signs or bits of graffiti in the background. And, of course, Wright manages to get them into the shot at the perfect times as they come up on the soundtrack and it’s one of the little things that, whether you like these kinds of movies or not, make this one worth a watch because, in terms of the visual/audio syntax of the movie, it’s pretty unique.

There’s another perfect musical moment in the film where Baby and the 'next crew' are being briefed by Doc and he’s listening to Dave Brubeck’s Unsquare Dance all the way through the scene. You don’t hear the briefing (you do hear some of it in the trailer, strangely enough) and everything on the soundtrack seems to make a comment on the nature of the visuals. That’s something which happens anyway when you synch music up to image sometimes but, of course, Wright pushes the visuals to synch up perfectly in this sequence so that they almost become a commentary on the characters and their attitudes in this scene. The writer/director also uses this to highlight an important point about Baby when one of the thugs, Bats, played by Jamie Foxx, questions Baby’s attention to the plan because it’s clear Baby has been grooving on the music as the briefing plays out. This is where we are shown that Baby, who also looks after a deaf foster parent, can lip read as he then reels back the entire briefing to Bats and the others with almost photographic recall (which is why Spacey’s words are not heard when the brief is actually playing out... who wants to have to listen to it twice). It’s a nice sequence and its moments like this that saved the film from being ‘something to endure’ as I sat through it.

Other than the sure, confident direction and the absolutely brilliant performances from all the cast in this, we have a central character who is, while certainly a criminal, a well meaning person with a good heart and the way he acts towards people and tries to stop 'death' happening (to an extent... there are some deaths by his hand in this too) are things which help him in a scene near the end of the picture... but I really don’t want to give anything away here.

So that’s my take on Baby Driver. I think Edgar Wright is a great writer/director and Hollywood needs to be throwing money at him to make more films. I really didn’t like the film all that much but, having said that, I can certainly see that there’s a lot to admire in it. I wouldn’t want to watch it again but I would certainly recommend it to people who don’t have my kinds of hang ups about films with gangsters in them and I think this will be a well loved piece of cinematic art for many years to come, as new audiences discover it over time. Definitely worth catching on the big screen, I would say, if you’re going to see this one.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Webutantes

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
2014 USA
Directed by Marc Webb
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big spoilers in this one.

Well, I think this is going to be a short review. Let me try to figure out what went wrong here.

The Amazing Spider-Man was called that from its first issue because of that character’s initial appearance in a successful issue of the comic Amazing Fantasy in 1962. However, the version of this and various other characters that appear in this current movie bear little resemblance to those running around in the first 100 or so issues of the comic (which is about as far as I read). It’s like the company has bought the rights to the characters and just done their own thing with them... which tells me they’re not aiming for a target audience consisting of fans of the original comics, that’s for sure. That’s a shame because, believe me, those early comics are cinematic enough that they would make great movies if adapted properly for the screen.

Now this film follows a fairly good opening movie, although it’s guilty of similar problems in translating the characters and situations to the screen. My review of the first in this series, The Amazing Spider-Man, is here and it also details the impact this character has had on me over the years. This sequel is pretty awful in many ways but, before I start pulling it apart, let me find the positives first.

The casting decision on the Harry Osbourne character is awesome. Dane DeHann looks nothing like the Harry from the comics but he is credibly able to go nuts in a sympathetic manner as he did when he played the central antagonist in the excellent teen superhero movie Chronicle (reviewed here), from a couple of years ago. Unfortunately he looks nothing like the Green Goblin either, not even being green, and his father has not yet, in this version of the story, been the former incarnation of the Green Goblin.

I don’t really know lead actor Andrew Garfield but he’s a very likeable personality and does what he’s doing here very well. He’s absolutely nothing like Peter Parker but the way his character behaves and is written is very much like the way Spider-Man is when he puts on his suit. He also has good chemistry with his on screen lover Emma Stone, who is equally likeable as Gwen Stacy. So these two are probably reason enough in themselves to watch this movie.

Okay, so other reasons why you should consider taking a look at this... um... okay. Well... no. Can’t say I can think of anything else. Let me now list the other bad things about this adaptation...

We all knew they’d be doing the death of Gwen Stacy storyline (or why have this character in there in the first place) but, Sam Raimi had already done that in his first Spider-Man movie... except he didn’t, did he? He took the exact situation of Gwen Stacy’s death, the original incarnation of the Green Goblin throwing her off a bridge and forcing Spider-Man to chose between who he saved, but Raimi substituted Mary Jane Watson in her place and, instead of dying from a whiplashed broken neck like Gwen did in the comics, caused by Spidey webbing her in an attempt to break her fall and save her, Mary Jane survived her onscreen version of this issue. In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, director Webb loses the specifics of the situation but keeps the whiplash element and Gwen does die... but it seems a cheaply won death after such a mess of a movie... at least to me it did.

Electro was my favourite villain in the original Spider-Man universe and I’ve always wanted to see him done right on screen. Looks like I’ll be waiting another good long while for that then. The white dude with the yellow and green costume culminating in a kind of starfish-electricity hat has been replaced with... Jamie Foxx playing him like a meek Spidey fanboy who suddenly goes mental, acts tough and can even convert himself into raw electricity. What a load of rubbish. I was heartbroken when it came to this aspect of the character... but they’ve also taken some pretty bad liberties with The Green Goblin so, I was getting distracted left, right and centre here.

Paul Giamatti, one of the great actors of our time, is just wasted here. The Rhino is not the mutated strongman of the comics wearing a latex rhino suit. He is an exoskeleton piloted by a Russian mobster. He plays a small role at the start of the film and then is ignored for the rest of the movie, despite the marketing campaign being heavily weighted by his presence, to be brought back as a kinda cheap punchline at the end of the movie. Admittedly, the scene where Spider-Man returns from retirement following the death of Gwendy to take on The Rhino is somewhat moving and will have the audience cheering but... seriously, it was underwhelming.

And I don’t know how this scene could have possibly been underwhelming when the movie was so slow and the villains, for the most part, so weak. The pre-amble to the creation of Electro was too long and, frankly, all the scenes with him in it, before and after his elevation to the status of super-villain, just seemed slow and boring to me. I took my parents to this one and they got so bored with it I had to keep nudging them awake. The action scenes with Electro were far from spectacular and, since you pretty much knew The Not-So-Green Goblin was going to kill Gwendoline Stacy in this, his scenes also felt like they lacked the necessary danger element.

Also, no J. Jonah Jameson (though he is alluded to), no Betty Brant, no Liz Allen and no Mary Jane Watson (although she would have been around in the same timeline in the stories as Gwen Stacy... they even resembled each other quite a lot). We have been teased with a character called Felicia who is quite possibly the same Felicia who will turn into The Black Cat... although she is lacking the white/silver hair here.

Even Has Zimmer’s music seemed to be all wrong for this picture. Jimmy Horner, who has a certain negative reputation with a certain segment of film score fans (including myself) did a credible and exciting score for the first movie. Zimmer, who is a composer I’ve really gotten into in recent years, delivered something that, on the few occasions I could actually hear it... since it was so buried in the sound mix beneath the various sound effects... seemed out of place. Now, I’m going to buy the album if it gets a release because I would like to actually hear what he did for this without the competing noise, but my judgement on it in the context of the accompaniment of the film was... not such a hot score. Which is kind of a shame because I really wanted to like this one. Maybe I still will, if the score album makes it into my player anytime soon.

And that’s pretty much me done with this movie. It was slow and boring, for the most part, and the only sequences which held any interest for me were the two handers between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy and, again, Peter Parker and Harry Osborne. Oh, and the one other good thing was the ghost of Captain Stacy haunting Peter and flooding him with guilt every now and again... that was a nice touch. But, seriously, this is not a movie I would recommend to anyone with an interest or love of the main title character. I think I’d probably rather be watching something like Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge from 1979 than this thing. Plaudits to some of the cast and some of the dialogue writing in certain scenes but, ultimately, I’d say don’t bother with this one and go see Captain America: The Winter Soldier (my review here) instead... it’s much, much better.

‘Nuff said.

White House Down

Going Down
In The White House

White House Down
2013 USA
Directed by Roland Emmerich
Playing at UK cinemas now.

They always seem to release these movies in twos, don’t they?

It seems like, as soon as somebody has a “just slightly different” concept for a movie, then suddenly two studios are putting very similar movies together at the same time. A cynic would say that this is just what happens when one movie studio wants to nick a chunk of the same box office of the other studio’s production... and I suspect the cynic would be right.

This happens all the time. Meteor movies, remakes of the same film being made as both a movie and a rival studio’s TV mini series at the same time etc. I remember Robert Altman, when he beat the Catch 22 release date out with his own military comedy M*A*S*H, had a poster put in his office which read, Caught 22. It seems to be a little game that studios, directors and producers like to play with each other... but with big stakes.

Inevitably, one movie is always seen as better than the other because they are usually released within six months to a year of each other and are, naturally, very closely compared by their target audiences, who are presumably the exact same target audiences based on the chemical make up of whatever concept is being pitched to them.

This year we have two films released which are, pretty much, Die Hard in the White House. The first of these two out of the gate was released back in April and called Olympus Has Fallen (reviewed by me here) and I have to say that the film took me by surprise by being, not only well made, but also quite entertaining. I seem to remember it had a lot of head stabbing in it for some reason but only, I guess, because stealth tactics are required when you are sneaking around the White House trying to avoid bad guys with big guns. It was an okay film and I gave it an okay review.

White House Down, on the other hand, while being a competently put together action movie at some level, really isn’t nearly as good a movie as Olympus Has Fallen.  It’s been suggested the two films should be treated as different beasts but, honestly, they’re both about sneaking around the White House trying to rescue the president and a young, close family member while avoiding machine gun fire and, incidentally, saving the western world. There’s really not a heck a lot of a difference between the two except... well Olympus Has Fallen seemed to me to be more economical and pared down when compared to this latest Emmerich movie, which did seem rather bloated.

Both movies try to build up some decent background detail on the main characters but Olympus Has Fallen seems to do it in half the time and more effectively than White House Down, which is surprising to me because I am not the biggest fan of Gerard Butler, who plays the main protagonist of the former film... whereas I do quite like Channing Tatum, who plays more or less the same kind of role in the latter. White House Down just seems to take more time than necessary setting up characters whereas the first movie started on an unrelated “incident” which absolutely explained the emotional stakes involved.

White House Down is not a bad movie, and if I had seen it in isolation, I might have thought more of it. But it just tends to go for grand gestures and over the top characterisations... which is, I hasten to add, no fault of the brilliant actors involved. It also takes itself a hell of a lot less seriously than Olympus Has Fallen and, while I would normally applaud going with that kind of tactic in a big action movie, there seems to be so much less here at stake as a result of that...  even though the stakes are pretty high.

Tatum’s character actually does team up, through quite a chunk of the running time, with Jaime Foxx’s character, the president, and although the two have fairly good chemistry between them and are entertaining as a double act, it does tend to act as an antidote, in a way, to the long and overwrought suspense scenes and action sequences which make up the majority of the last two thirds of the movie.

I think one of the problems was that I just didn’t care much for any of the characters, even though the casting is brilliant and the talent on display here is without question. James Woods, for example, is always going to make the perfect version of the role he’s chosen to play in this and a big shout out, too, to actress Joey King who plays Channing Tatum’s young daughter... she was really here.

The action sequences too, were a little more confusing than I could cope with in places and I think the editing could have been little more generous and maybe not got in the way so much at times. Having said that, there were some fairly conscious artistic choices made in the editing room, to be fair but, even so, some of this seemed a bit over-indulgent for the kind of movie this is. At one point a reverse shot matched to a scene of one character leaving through a door juxtaposed with another character coming through a different door in another part of the house did throw me for a second. It just seemed the wrong time to be doing stuff like this.

I’d like to tell you what I thought about the score to the movie but I didn’t really notice it as it struggled to be heard over the constant soundscapes of gunfire and explosions... which brings me onto something else. For a lot of the film, the bad guys are trying to find the good guys in a “locked down” White House. In Olympus Has Fallen, there was a lot of stealth plays involved and, as I remarked earlier and in the review of the film itself, lots of head stabbings as a result of this. In this one, however, the good guys seem to be comfortable with making as much noise as they want while taking out bad guys without their buddies a floor or so up taking much notice. You’d think at some point somebody would have said something along the lines of... “Hey, Frank! Does that sound like heavy artillery fire to you? I bet that if we followed the machine gunny sound, it would lead us straight to the good guys.” But, no, nobody seems to be able to work out stuff like this here, it would seem.

The other thing that annoyed me is that there is a twist antagonist revealed right at the end of the movie but, honestly, if you’re anything like me you would probably have him pegged as such right from the start of the film. This wasn’t, in any way, a surprise and I would have thought that the writers could have at least tried to throw us off the scent a little at some point. So this was a shame.

Anyway. I’ve seen the movie and I’ve cast my vote. If you want to see a half decent action movie at the cinema this month then White House Down will deliver all the adrenalin and machismo you’ll need as much as anything else out right now at your local. If, however, you liked Olympus Has Fallen and you’re hoping for something similar, well... yeah, okay... it is similar. But it does seem to be more a case of “Never mind the quality, feel the width” I’m afraid.

Django Unchained

Strange Fruit, 
Underneath The Django Tree

Django Unchained
USA 2012
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Playing at cinemas now.

In the words of Colonel Hans Landa, the main antagonist of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained is... "not too terrible."

That is to say...

I quite like the movies of Quentin Tarantino as a rule. Not too sure about the personality of the director himself but, while the films can, it has to be said, be a little hit and miss in some areas, they’re usually worth watching at some level, at least, and certainly Django Unchained flourishes at a certain level here. It’s no coincidence I use the word “level”, either, because most Tarantino films exist for a certain section of the audience (and I include myself in that particular section) as more of a giant game/puzzle than an actual movie. They are just an audio/visual hit list of famous (and some not so famous) movie references and the thrill and wonder of seeing a fresh movie from this director can primarily be seen at the “game level” as a half decent pub quiz loaded with film questions. And that’s often where the pleasures of these particular movies best exist.

Django Unchained is no exception and as soon as the movie started to the strains of the title song of the original Sergio Corbucci Django movie, I was sent immediately into “game mode” and, sure enough, like many Tarantino films before this one, more than half the movie seems to play out to cuts from old CD soundtracks in my personal library... including, of course, many much loved spaghetti western scores.

It’s not quite the spaghetti western movie everyone was expecting it to be, however, and right from just the movie’s title and poster campaign, which uses the typography from the original 1966 Django movie (and many rip off sequels, no doubt), Tarantino seems to announce that “the game” is afoot.

Lets have a look at this for a second...

A film which is actually only half spaghetti western in its make-up (but that half was pretty good) is called Django Unchained, uses the same kind of typography as the original Django, uses one of the original title song recordings (from the English language version of the film), uses a heck of a lot of spaghetti western iconography in it (and therefore also the trailer) and even goes so far as to cast Franco Nero, the original Django, in a cameo scene and give him a joke line about how you pronounce the name Django... well you kinda expect this to be a continuation or possibly a remake of the very first Django movie, right?

Nope. Against all those expectations, Django Unchained is not a continuation of either Django or Django Strikes Again (the two “official” Franco Nero Django movies) or even Takashi Miike’s recent Sukiyaki Western Django (which featured Tarantino as one of the main characters) however, I’m onto Tarantino’s game here. And this is how it starts, I believe...

When Kill Bill was released, the Japanese edition had several more gory sections in it (plus some alternate shots) and some extra shenanigans involving the final fate of one of the characters that was curiously absent from the US and International print of the movie. Why was this? Well... many people say that he didn’t want any extra censorship issues... to which I say, “Nah... he would have had those issues if the extra footage was included or not”. Tarantino’s game here is he, as a die hard movie buff, knows that a lot of the various exploitation movies from the 60s, 70s and 80s had a lot “harder” cuts in Japan than they did in their international versions. Hammer films famously had extra gore in their Japanese versions, for example. Fans of various movies would then have to jump through hoops to get the extended, harder editions of their movies and this is probably something that someone like Tarantino would feel a certain sense of nostalgia for. So he went ahead and created his own “Japanese edition” for the Japanese market, so fans could go nuts hearing about it and going out of their way to get hold of copies (I remember the feeding frenzy at the time of the Japanese DVD release to get certain editions of these movies).

So...

When the original Corbucci movie Django came out in 1966, it was almost as big, in fact I think it was bigger, than Sergio Leone’s famous first movies in the Western genre which he reinvented and reinvigorated with his personal stylistic flourishes. Django was big and everyone wanted in. Many “unofficial” sequels and prequels were quickly released onto an unsuspecting market, almost all of which had nothing to do with the original production team. Added to this were many movies which just took the name, Django, and just retitled the original film so it had Django in the title... whether there was any character who vaguely answered to that name in the movie or not. In terms of unofficial Django movies all released in a period of only a few years... I think we’re talking literally hundreds. The Sabata and Sartana films also, I believe, spawned many unofficial sequels in much the same manner (if I’m inaccurate on that point, keep watching the comments section for this article as I’m sure I know one guy who will jump in and correct me).

So really, what I’m saying is... Tarantino probably never wanted to make a Django movie in the first place... his game was he wanted to make another of those “fake Django” movies and unleash that onto an unsuspecting audience. That, I believe is what happened here.

Now, anyone expecting a full on spaghetti western here is going to be mistaken. True, there are a lot of the trappings of those movies in here... enough to make the first half of the movie Tarantino’s “mini-spaghetti” and on many levels that works really well. There are some great moments in here. Some of them even seem like they originated in this movie... I think... yeah, I’m sure some of those sequences are less referential than others but, who cares, the script on this one sings along and is a joy, in the hands (or mouths) of some of the actors, to behold. And, as I made clear earlier, it’s nice to play “spot the reference” with these movies anyway...I loved seeing a training montage shot to the strains of Riz Ortolani’s score for Day Of Anger, for example, although I didn’t quite see how the context of that sequence related to the original movie as no betrayal or rivalry is evident in this movie as that use of music might suggest. The relationship between the two lead protagonists in Django Unchained are not like that of Giuliano Gemma and Lee Van Cleef in that earlier movie.

There are a lot of moments in this film that, I dunno, don’t quite make sense in internal logic (as is often the way with a Tarantino movie) but are fun little moments to pick out anyway. For example, the snowbound landscapes from the first half of the movie where Django pairs up with a German bounty hunter are obviously quite referential to another of Sergio Corbucci’s key westerns, The Great Silence... but Morricone’s score from that movie seems curiously absent from these sequences and whereas the “bounty killer” in The Great Silence was played by a steely eyed, Klaus Kinski as a brutal antagonist, the German bounty killer in Django Unchained is played with much gusto and charm by the inimitable Christoph Waltz who is similarly steely in certain scenes but who is definitely one of “the good guys” when it comes to this movie.

And as he did with the role of Hans Landa in the earlier Tarantino movie Inglorious Basterds, Christoph Waltz quite literally waltzes off with all the scenes he’s in... as interesting as Jamie Foxx and his colleagues may be to some movie viewers (I’ve not actually seen Jamie Foxx in anything other than in a role in the Robin Williams vehicle Toys, and I don’t remember him in it... but I know he’s quite well thought of), it is always Christoph Waltz who you can’t help but watch in these scenes and when he is absent from certain portions of the film... that’s when things get a bit dull in places.

Leonardo Di Caprio, is another actor I’ve not seen in much and, although I can see that he’s an absolutely brilliant actor, I’m not the biggest fan of him and find him quite a boring actor on some levels myself. Unfortunately for me, and possibly the movie, he is also playing a quite unsympathetic racist and exploiter of his fellow man and, this coupled with his general drab personality, means that some scenes tended to drag for me.

In fact, the whole second half of the picture seems to drag in a fair few places and, although that might have been the intention, it really didn’t do much for me. And I like films with more talking and less action in them, quite often.

It’s been said that film making, and I think we’re just talking about the stereotypical view of US film making here, I suspect... is all about cause and effect. It’s often frowned upon or seen as something to not do to have scenes which don’t add anything to the general narrative thrust of the picture and it’s not a prescription I would prescribe to personally, when talking about movies in general. Early on in his career, Tarantino was praised for making films which had no extra fat and which told a story where every scene shown mattered,,, that’s hardly the case with the films we see by him now and the quirky indulgence of a director to take as many tangents as he or she wants from the storyline is always fine by me. That’s all part of the art of movies... as long as you remember the trick is to not be too boring. Django Unchained could, in my opinion, have done with a lot of trimming to get the running time down and to eradicate various scenes which dragged. In fact, I’d have removed great sections of the last third if it had been me.

But of course, it’s not me, it’s Tarantino... and he should be allowed, as an artist (and he is an artist and a damn good one sometimes) to be free to put exactly what he wants on the screen for the audience. Just as it’s the right of that audience to reject, accept, enjoy or hate what is up on the screen in front of them. Django Unchained, for me, was a movie that was just a little too long and not quite oiled enough to be as vastly entertaining as his great movies like Inglorious Basterds, Kill Bill and Jackie brown. 

Unlike those movies just mentioned, the movie strains to become something more than the sum of it’s celluloid drenched, movie referencing, post-modernistic parts... but you know what?

That doesn’t matter either because it’s still worth watching.

Fans of the specific movie genres referenced in this film are going to have fun spotting and hearing the references... and even people who don’t know or don’t catch the references should have fun too. And after all, good or bad, films like this one are always worth taking a look at so you can have some kind of opinion on them, right?

Django Unchained is playing at assorted cinemas and flea pits across the UK now. Check it out if you have the time.