3:48 pm - 02/02/2013
Dick Gregory blasts Spike Lee on controversial Django film
Edit: Turns out there are some NSFW photos in the video so be warned.
Legendary social activist, comedian and author, Dick Gregory, has weighed in on the controversial Quentin Tarantino film, “Django Unchained,” and he did so in explosive fashion.
In an interview posted to YouTube, Gregory says that the movie spoke to him in ways that no film had in all his years on earth. He then calls out Director Spike Lee for criticizing a film that he’s never seen, saying that if anyone has created movies that are disrespectful to our ancestors, it’s Lee himself:
"I’ve seen ‘Django Unchained’ 12 times. Never in the history of Hollywood, have they ever made anything that freed the inside of me. The inside of me. I’m 80-years-old, I saw cowboy movies, wasn’t no black folks in cowboy movies. I’m looking at a western, plus a love story. To those of you all that see it, you’ll never see a love story about a black man and a black woman where it wasn’t some foul sex and foul language, huh. And Spike Lee can’t appreciate that. The little thug ain’t even seen the movie; he’s acting like he white.
"So it must be something personal. And all them black entertainers that know Spike Lee, how you gone attack this man and don’t be attacking them … and then say everyone’s a fool but me. (Talking about) ‘it offended my ancestors,’ but when you did ‘She’s Got To Have It’ and some of those other thug movies you did … you took Malcolm X and put a Zoot suit on him … did that offend your ancestors, punk?
“It’s a game, man. So whatever he’s mad about is something that happened way, way a long ago. Thank God it didn’t work (to stop the movie from being successful).”
When the interviewer asks Gregory if he has a problem with Tarantino’s excessive use of the word “n*gger,” he said that he absolutely did not and that no other culture insists on the white-washing of their painful past in this country like black people:
“We talking about history, man. It happened. Nigger happened.”
Gregory goes on to talk about the history of “the dozens,” slave rebellion and racism in Hollywood.
Source
Legendary social activist, comedian and author, Dick Gregory, has weighed in on the controversial Quentin Tarantino film, “Django Unchained,” and he did so in explosive fashion.
In an interview posted to YouTube, Gregory says that the movie spoke to him in ways that no film had in all his years on earth. He then calls out Director Spike Lee for criticizing a film that he’s never seen, saying that if anyone has created movies that are disrespectful to our ancestors, it’s Lee himself:
"I’ve seen ‘Django Unchained’ 12 times. Never in the history of Hollywood, have they ever made anything that freed the inside of me. The inside of me. I’m 80-years-old, I saw cowboy movies, wasn’t no black folks in cowboy movies. I’m looking at a western, plus a love story. To those of you all that see it, you’ll never see a love story about a black man and a black woman where it wasn’t some foul sex and foul language, huh. And Spike Lee can’t appreciate that. The little thug ain’t even seen the movie; he’s acting like he white.
"So it must be something personal. And all them black entertainers that know Spike Lee, how you gone attack this man and don’t be attacking them … and then say everyone’s a fool but me. (Talking about) ‘it offended my ancestors,’ but when you did ‘She’s Got To Have It’ and some of those other thug movies you did … you took Malcolm X and put a Zoot suit on him … did that offend your ancestors, punk?
“It’s a game, man. So whatever he’s mad about is something that happened way, way a long ago. Thank God it didn’t work (to stop the movie from being successful).”
When the interviewer asks Gregory if he has a problem with Tarantino’s excessive use of the word “n*gger,” he said that he absolutely did not and that no other culture insists on the white-washing of their painful past in this country like black people:
“We talking about history, man. It happened. Nigger happened.”
Gregory goes on to talk about the history of “the dozens,” slave rebellion and racism in Hollywood.
Source
Most of his characters do have some kind of development in that you get to know them just a little more. Django has his wife and being a slave. We get to know where the other characters have been and what they're doing outside of the current narrative while Django is barely a person.
in reservoir dogs the characters are so undeveloped they don't even have a name. the only backstory you get is tim roth being a cop and knowing that madsen was in jail. pulp fiction has no development, other than sam jackson converting and getting the fuck out of crime and some half-hassed narrative arch on bruce willis. let's not even talk about death proof, and even jackie brown, there's not much of development. kill bill is the only one that works in that sense, but that's about it and it's a fundamental part of film. and a bit in basterds, but even there, other than shoshanna, and the flashbacks on stieglitz, do we really get to know any of them?
what do we really know about the other characters in django? other than a bit of backstory on schultz, there really isn't much else. there's never an in-depth character construction in quentin's films, they all pretty much barely people.