One of Tarantino's better films

Rating: 8/10 (25 January 2013)

When slave Django is acquired and freed by German dentist King Schultz, all is not quite as it appears - Schultz is actually a bounty hunter, and he and Django (who turns out to have an aptitude for bounty hunting) go into partnership prior to setting off to rescue Django's wife from plantation owner Calvin Candie.
I approach Tarantino's films with trepidation. While he is undoubtedly a stylish director and a writer who has an ear for dialogue, he also has a taste for trash and a fatal tendency towards overindulgence - I don't subscribe to the "Tarantino is a genius and his films are masterpieces" school of thought, because the flaws in them are so manifest. It was in this frame of mind that I approached the near-3 hour, spaghetti western homage that is Django.
This, too, is not without its flaws, but its breezy good humour, notwithstanding its subject matter, is infectious, and it is a most enjoyable movie, not to mention often being visually quite beautiful.
I could leave it at that, but I think I need to mention the elements which, in my view, didn't work that well. One was the music - Tarantino's tendency towards musical selections which might not be the most obvious choices often works well: for me, here, the music was often unhappily inappropriate. Two is my reservations about Jamie Foxx as Django. I appreciate that, as a slave looking for his enslaved (and probably suffering) wife, and given the part he was playing within the part, there was no reason for him to be happy, but he struck me as rather one-note sullen. Three was the violence which was played for laughs - Tarantino did this in Inglorious Basterds, too, and I'm really not sure I am comfortable with it, particularly when it sits side by side with equally graphic violence which is not meant to be funny (D'Artagnan's death) - boundaries get blurred. Finally, the ridiculous bloodbath in Candie's house was the most self-indulgent sequence in the film. Perhaps he feels it's expected of him, perhaps he just likes doing it. I felt that less would have been more.
But all this fades next to the three things I loved. One was the dialogue - at its hysterical best in the sequence where the Regulators are arguing over their hoods. Two was Samuel L Jackson's malevolent Stephen (a character I have a great deal of trouble figuring out: his mixture of Uncle Tom-ism and equal partner status with Calvin, and his fabricated limp, are never explained). And three is Christoph Waltz's gleeful and grandiloquent Schultz - just because you are doing something unsavoury in a repellent time, place and society, doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy yourself, right? I continue to be extremely impressed by Herr Waltz.