Django Unchained

Sally Menke died in 2010.  She was just 58.

Who was Sally Menke?  She was Quentin Tarantino's editor.  "Django Unchained" is the first movie he made without her help in the editing bay.

Her absence hangs over the film.  "Django" feels lumpy and misshapen.  It's basically split into two parts.  In the first, Dr. King Schultz frees Django and trains him to assist in his bounty hunting operation.  In the second, Django works with Schultz to free his wife, Broomhilda.

The emotional arc of the movie is in the second part.  Yet Tarantino spends far too much time on the first.  Django kills several people, and then there's the inevitable training montage.  Audiences don't need this much time to understand such a simple storyline.  There's even a scene lasting several minutes in which Schultz and Django ride through snowy mountains.  They come upon a sheriff's house, he invites them in, end scene.  The whole thing could have been cut from a movie that's already pushing three hours.  (Tarantino apparently thought it would be cool to shoot in the snow.  Perhaps, but you've got to be judicious with a movie this unwieldy.)

"Django" was never going to be great.  There's not a lot of A-grade Tarantino material here: no iconic setpieces and only one great monologue.  But it's frustrating to see what was left on the cutting room floor.  In particular, the character of Broomhilda could have been given some badly-needed backstrory: Kerry Washington is basically wasted as a pretty damsel in distress.  Similarly, the cut scene between Samuel L. Jackson and Jamie Foxx sounds like an excellent opportunity to demonstrate why Jackson's character has such a "house boy" mentality.

Writer-directors can be a bad judge of their own footage.  They may be too emotionally attached to certain storylines or unable to see how their film plays differently on the screen than on the page.  Tarantino either needs to be more discerning about his own work or get a better editor for his next project.