We Need A New Kind Of Awesome
So to celebrate my birthday yesterday, I went up to the North Side and ate pho and saw Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, a hugely enjoyable mashup of chambara and spaghetti-Western films into an explosion of weird, postmodern spectacle that at times looks more like Baz Luhrman than Takashi Miike, with costumes blending designer post-apocalyptic, 1970s-era Western, and Harajuku.

The movie concerns the war of the Heike (Taira) and Genji (Minamoto) clans, but the characters often refer to it as the War of the Roses, and the head of the Heike clan even renames himself "Henry". It's set in "Nevada," the subtitles explain, as they show the Japanese lettering on the wind-eroded Western sign over the town. The Reds and Whites have two giant Japanese tea-houses as headquarters, in the middle of a Western town straight outta Don Siegel.

The movie itself sets you up; almost the first line of dialogue after the credits (there's an extended tribute to the sound-stage Western tradition at the beginning, starring Quentin Tarantino) is something like "Best not get any ideas about playing Yojimbo on us, man." A sloppy, freewheeling remake of Yojimbo (out of Fistful of Dollars) immediately ensues, with occasional thefts from (or nods to) Corbucci's original Django among other movies.

But is it actually any good? This is the question posed by really great mashups like this that are, nonetheless, magpie nests or Frankenstein art: for example, the Venture Brothers. Even the crummiest spaghetti-Western knockoff, or cheesiest pop song, or lamest piece of French Academy historical painting, is saying something. Are mashups saying anything, or are they just commenting "I like Sergio Leone and samurai," or "Hey, 'Genie in a Bottle' has the same beat as a Strokes song." And where is the line -- is Kill Bill a mashup, or a reinterpretation? Is Grindhouse a mashup, or a tribute, or just cynical exploitation? And who's to say that cynical exploitation can't be art -- someone out there was moved by Monkees songs, after all, and I can attest to the saving power of the Sex Pistols. On a slightly more elevated note, does anyone really think that Shakespeare cared as much about The Merry Wives of Windsor, a ground-out Falstaff sequel to order, as he did about Henry IV, Part Two, in which Falstaff achieves uttermost heights of drama? Is there a difference between Falstaff and Django? I don't know. I know that I believe that Art comes from somewhere, and can come out in the oddest places. But I think we need (at least) two different kinds of awesome, to differentiate Django from "Django," and Jonny Quest from Venture Brothers, even though (or especially because) Venture Brothers is way more awesome than Jonny Quest.