Also watched
DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012) and THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015), directed by Quentin Tarantino. Two spaghetti western/blaxploitation homages that compliment each other quite nicely.

What put me off going to DJANGO when it was in theatres is Jamie Foxx. I really don't like his acting at all. But I tried to put Jamie Foxx out of my mind and see the character as Django--and for most of the movie he's not very Jamie Foxx, so it's possible to see this as being a different actor in the role.

What I liked about that movie is the way that it becomes a big mythic tale of this Django person, who even gets his theme song by the end. Samuel Jackson's character in THE HATEFUL EIGHT could almost be the same guy, years later--but I don't think the timeline works for that.

Of the two movies, it's hard to pick a favourite. I think that THE HATEFUL EIGHT was more ambitious, because Tarantino imposes limitations on himself that force him to use the location in many different ways.

Watching reviews of these movies, it's quite frustrating, because the reviewers talk a lot about the controversy surrounding the movie or they try to find fault with what the movie is doing. I prefer reviews that look at what the director is doing in the movie and analyze how he goes about doing that--without making judgements of good and bad. For directors on this level, it seems pointless to pick at them. Tarantino knows what he wants to do (whether you like it or not) and it's more interesting to study how he does that.

It's only with DEATHPROOF that I felt like he wasn't in complete control of his movie and he let things slide--maybe that was an experiment on his part. Trying out new approaches to see how they work and then applying those lessons to his later movies.

I found one video on youtube that did a great analysis on THE HATEFUL EIGHT, pointing out a lot of things I missed. That's the kind of thing I want to find, to help me better appreciate the movie. I don't like the off-the-cuff pot shots at movies taken by most reviewers these days.

And I wonder why it is every time I look for a movie on youtube, the top review has a thumbnail of this rabbit-faced guy named Chris Stuckman. I don't know if he's a good or a bad reviewer, but I never click on his reviews--out of obstinance now, and also because the way the algorithm works on youtube if you click one video, it will keep bringing up the other videos from the same guy. I wish there was a way to discourage youtube from always showing me reviews from the same guy.