Django Unchained

If you can stomach the horrific violence, and if racial slurs aren't trigger-words for you, Django Unchained is something you might enjoy. 

I had great fun up to a point. The dialog was uniformly brilliant, the acting spot-on, and the cinematography served everything well. The violence was graphic, in a splashy sort of way, and I use the word "splashy" literally. I was actually okay with that up until the last 30 minutes of the movie, and then my brain took a left turn, and instead of interpreting the scene as campy, over-the-top gruesome, I was genuinely horrified. 

Weird.

I don't think it's Tarantino's fault. I brought that into the theater with me, and I'm not ashamed of it. I think it's a sign that I still have a human soul down there under the ash.

So how do I rate this? At the ninety minute mark I was having a fantastic, top-ten-list sort of time. But by the time I left the theater I was troubled, and not by the film's ending, (which was, at risk of spoiling things, "triumphant.") I guess I'll do what I did with The Dark Knight Rises, and split the difference. Had my soul not reached up and slapped my conscience around the film would have come in 7th. If there hadn't been any redeeming factors in the film at all it would have been all the way down with The Man With the Iron Fists. That puts this film at 22nd and a half, or squarely between The Lorax and Rise of the Guardians, which is such a hilarious bit of positioning I can't NOT put it there.

Your mileage is going to seriously vary on this one, folks.