I knew going in what QT movies are like (apparently, some critics did not know). I have loved most QT movies for a while and have grown to appreciate them more and more as time goes by.





*Possible spoilers below*

This one I liked on different fronts. It had some spaghetti western in it, it had some revenge motifs (see Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds), it had humor, it had references to literature, it had references to an actual branch of 'science' that was popular in the 1800s (phrenology), it had the horrors of slavery, it had a lot of stuff in it.

I think people are so divorced with the notion of slavery and what it actually meant that some people were turned off by the way QT portrayed. Yes, people were indeed whipped, people were indeed put in boxes in the ground for days at a time, people were branded for trying to escape (if not worse, as some were actually hobbled and disabled), families were routinely broken apart, etc. All this stuff happened for real. The n-word is repeated often, but I think its use is justified by the time period and the circumstances - i.e., it's not gratuitously used.

Leonardo DiCaprio was fantastic. Jamie Foxx was great. Christoph Waltz was superb. All the cast was great. Sam Jackson was excellent. There were quite a few cameos by well known actors. Bruce Dern, Don Johnson, even Jonah Hill. The scene with (Spoiler) the posse wearing bags on their head - a KKK precursor - was hilarious.

Like many other QT movies, the soundtrack alone was intriguing. Various styles of music, from western movie motifs to rap to classical pieces to an original song written by Ennio Morricone (who wrote several soundtracks for spaghetti western), sung in Italian.