Django Unchained (2012)

DJANGO UNCHAINED  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Quentin Tarantino
    Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio,
    Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, James Remar,
    Dennis Christopher, Laura Cayouette, Don Johnson, 
    Bruce Dern, Franco Nero, Russ Tamblyn, Don Stroud, 
    Alto Essandoh, James Russo, Tom Wopat, 
    Cooper Huckabee, Zoe Bell, Amber Tamblyn, 
    Jonah Hill, Michael Parks, Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino's epic spaghetti western (more like a spaghetti southern) starring Jamie Foxx as a freed slave named Django, who joins forces with a German dentist (Christoph Waltz) to go into the bounty hunting business. Traveling as far west as Wyoming, he and the doc go about trading the corpses of bad guys for dollars, till they can buy back Django's wife (Kerry Washington) from a Mississippi plantation owner played by Leonardo DiCaprio. This movie does for American slavery about what "Inglourious Basterds" did for World War Two, and if the juxtaposition of hip dialogue and revolting brutality makes you queasy, maybe it's supposed to. Or maybe not. I'm not sure about that, and I'm not sure Tarantino cares. He's still the video store clerk who got to be the king of the movies, but where his sensibility comes down remains an open question. So you get to see a black slave being ripped apart by dogs and Jamie looking cool in an unlikely pair of shades and guys getting shot spewing geysers of blood and Leo laying on the corn-pone villainy with sadistic bravado and a cracker accent: a revenge fantasy in which atrocity gets recast and marketed as escapist entertainment. The word "nigger" gets used a lot, too. As somebody said in another movie once, "Are you not entertained?" Maybe. Maybe not. I'm still not sure.