Getting Heated About Django In L.A.’s Leimert Park
The Black Panel Didn’t Like the Movie. The Black Moviegoers Loved It.
One recent night, the storied Eso Won Bookstore in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park was packed beyond capacity for a panel discussion of director Quentin Tarantino’s controversial new film Django Unchained. At least another 50 people gathered outside to listen via loudspeakers. The audience was almost entirely black. And the emotions were raw.
The panelists did not like the movie. They ripped it for distorting the history of slavery, for being wildly unrealistic, for celebrating gore for gore’s sake, and on and on. “Black people must tell our own stories,” was a …
