Word: django
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...Happy and You Think It, Think Again and Stop Hitting Yourself. Stop Hitting Yourself. Why Are You Still Hitting Yourself? Pitka is famous, but, he thinks, not famous enough. Rather like the Sean Penn guitarist in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, who realizes he's no Django Reinhardt, Pitka rankles at being No. 2 to Chopra. His manager (John Oliver of The Daily Show) convinces him that he can get on Oprah if he can just restore the frayed marriage of Darren Roanoke (Romany Malko), a Toronto Maple Leafs star whose wife is having an affair with banana-schlonged...
...Among the prime directors of Italian Westerns (most of them shot in Spain, by the way) was Sergio Corbucci, who vaulted to prominence with the 1966 Django. It was The image of star Franco Nero coming into town not on horseback but on foot, dragging a coffin, was an instant sensation that cued more than 50 Django films, all unrelated to the original. Its theme song, by composer Luis Bacalov, remains one of those melodies that worms its way into a listener's brain and, as I can testify, can't be extracted for weeks. The Corbucci film also inspired...
...influence in Europe and Asia, Django got no Stateside release that I know about. In fact, few spaghetti Westerns beyond the Leones were released here. Americans stuck with the Duke through True Grit and patronized the anti-Westerns of Sam Peckinpah (notably The Wild Bunch) and Robert Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, another snowy oater). And then, bang, the genre was dead. The setting, the pace, the moral stakes all seemed so very 19th century. When the Western is periodically revived, it's not from popular demand but from the antique obsessions of powerful filmmakers...
...then saw his Eastern westerns remade in Hollywood (The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) and Europe (Yojimbo as Leone's Fistful of Dollars). Leone followed up with For a Few Dollars More--surely the most honest title ever given a sequel--and the spaghetti western craze was born. Django, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak riff on Fistful, with its hero lugging a coffin that has a machine gun inside, spawned at least 50 movies named Django. The most recent, Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, which played to rapt crowds at the recent Venice and Toronto film festivals...
...demand on the director is different too: not to make a blockbuster, just a strong, true film. Maybe these movies will grant the genre a stay of execution and ensure that the western will damn well not ride off into the sunset or be carted off in Django's coffin...