Original and fun

Rating: 8/10 (8 March 2013)

I enjoyed this movie, although I don't really know why.
It is ridiculously violent, downright cheesy, corny and melodramatic, rather artificial and unrealistic, occasionally aimless, overly complicated.
However, it is quite original and certainly fun to watch. Tarantino delights in showing moviegoers bold, shocking characters and images . Many of them are cliché but at the same time they are strangely original and seductive, and not cliché at all. Vampire aliens and Nazis have served as the villains in his past movies; now it is the turn of slave owners and traders, and their redneck yahoo workers.
In the "horrors of slavery", Tarantino has found a juicy historical scab to pick, and he works at it for over two and a half hours. He shows us things about the South that probably never happened, but that we think must have happened. This movie made me wonder why we don't see more movies about what slavery was really like (not just in the South, but everywhere).
Some of the characters are memorable and the performances truly excellent: Christoph Waltz and Samuel Jackson in particular have created astonishing, powerfully evocative characters that will be hard to forget. Glorious bastards.
However, the scene with Tarantino and the men with Australian accents didn't work for me at all. It was like the movie had stopped and we were now watching a skit or rehearsal.
And go see this movie if you're ready to go through the psychological experiment of seeing what happens to your understanding of the N-word after you hear it repeated 5,000 times (in 160 minutes).
It's a strange thing that the Dutch film distributors chose to allow the N-word to be translated as "neger" in the Dutch subtitles, which is roughly the equivalent of "negro". For English speakers, imagine if "negro" had been used 5,000 times in this movie instead of "n*gger". No, I think the right Dutch translation would have been "nikker". They chose to bowdlerize the translation.