UNCHAINED & UNHOLY IN THE BLOOD OF A WESTERN MOON

Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's new brutal shoes, make for an intriguing walk through 1850's Southern plantation life. Having not been a great fan of his previous, well adored film Inglorious Basterds, this surprised and excited me. I had an issue or two, however- namely Tarantino needs to stop using pop music in these things- the movie doesn't need it and it's a distraction. Second, the end revenge bit is slightly redundant (let us not be naive, all Taratino films resolve in this manor)- it should have figured in the last bit amending to the first shoot em' up where Django surrenders, avoiding the needless demonstration of Samuel Jackson's Stephen as the ultimate power whip on the plantation- we got that in the first scene in which he was introduced, clucking about the place as if he were the main man all down the line. Leonardo Di Caprio does some of his best work here- a cruel, mean, vicious man. The issues brought up about slavery, how this film addresses such, may be an empty suit. This is just a really good action flick, like all of his pictures. A great action director creates an environment that hyper activates the suspense- drawing you into the tension of the moment, and Tarantino does this very well here. Using the slave trade as back drop, a near master stroke in creating that vile place in which we cannot wait to get out of- like Nazi Germany, or a warehouse with a dead cop. The movie gets to say some things about slavery, demonstrating a gross, inhuman violence, used for both purposes of revulsion and cranking up the tension. While everybody was crowing about the importance of the story, they forgot to plainly understand that within a truly great action film- The Running Man, Terminator, French Connection- you have always been given a compelling, nasty gutter to swim through in order to make the catharsis work more for your brain than complete bloody nothing. I nearly agree with Spike Lee that this may just be a Slave Auction Spaghetti Western, but that would be missing out on a thrill ride of a film that says no less about racism than Do The Right Thing did- except Tarantino chooses to pick at the past in an effort to show the horrors of chattel slavery, and the revenge fantasy that plays out. As a grand statement on the slave trade itself it would be a failure in total, due to it's reduction of scope, depth, and complete perspective of the thing itself- it's almost too big a moral enterprise to have your cake and eat it too. While Spike Lee used humor and neighborhood characters eating at each other on the hottest day of the year to create his tension, Tarantino does what he knows best- how to kill the bad guys with an honest to goodness, righteous reasoning that is immune to objection of motive.