[Movie Review] Django Unchained: Spaghetti Westerns And Absurdist History

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Django Unchained: A Review
via Afrobella

With all the controversy surrounding Django Unchained upon its release, I purposely waited until after awards season to watch and review the movie. As much as I love getting into the thick of things, I'd already  seen and read so much about the merits and failings of Quentin Tarantino's latest offering that I knew that there was no way I could love or hate it in a void. I needed distance. So now, two weeks after the airing of the 85th Annual Academy Awards (at which Django won for Best Original Screenplay), I'm finally sitting down to ruminate on how I felt about this movie.

I almost don't know what to say about Django Unchained, but I will say this: I didn't hate it.

I've never seen any of Quentin Tarantino's other films. From the trailers alone , he seems to specialize in a kind of overwrought, violent camp that does not appeal to me. But Django was his first directorial credit since 2009's Inglorious Bastards, the film featured several actors that I loved, the buzz was deafening, and it was literally the movie on everyone's lips,so I decided to make an exception and see it.

My conclusions? It wasn't necessarily worth all the hype. It was not a bad movie, and I'll even say that I mostly enjoyed it. I was amused at the choice to shoot so much of it spaghetti western style (since I hate westerns with a passion), and I loved Christopher Waltz's performance as the gun happy, dentist-cum-bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz. Jaime Foxx gave possibly one of the best performances of his career, and it became clear to me that whether he plays a house slave or the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., nobody fucks with motherfucking Sam Jackson.

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