Revenge is always the way forward...

Rating: 2/10 (8 December 2015)

Having quite enjoyed Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds, I was curious about Django. And in many respects I got what I expected.
The start was promising, and Christoph Waltz was very good to watch, with Jamie Foxx easing into the role of the wronged avenger. And the bit later on with the hooded gang complaining about not being able to see as their hood's eye cutouts were too small was hilarious!
But mainly it was just comic book cardboard cutout characters killing each other, with the ridiculous amounts of spurting blood reinforcing the unreality of it all in the final shootouts.
The take home message? Justified revenge is the way to happiness, even if you have to destroy an entire race of whites to achieve it. But the most shocking aspect of this film to me isn't the film itself, which was in the end just silly to me - it's that so many critics and fans seem to think it's brilliant! Have we now become that indifferent to violence that corpses spurting blood everywhere is all just jolly good fun? If so, it might go some way to explaining the current gun crisis in the US, which only seems to be getting worse. I'll leave the statistics out, there are plenty online.
Finally, obviously the film has the evil of slavery as the background against which all the revenge is justified. But there are a few people, Spike Lee included, who believe that this kind of Pulp Fiction treatment of "what was effectively a holocaust" is disrespectful of the countless victims of it. I tend to agree, but what does QT care? He keeps making PF-comic type films, and we keep lauding him for it.
So expect to see his greatest masterwork anytime soon - my best guess is a Nazi concentration camp revenge flick, where the inmates get to kill the SS guards, probably in acid baths and many other torturous ways, and then go on a rampage killing the inhabitants of the local German village for turning a blind eye. All good clean revenge fun. In bad taste maybe? - who cares if it's the great QT, and he shoots it on old school cameras to keep the nerds happy!