Oscar and BAFTA winner for screenplay - which is extremely canny, providing a spaghetti western blaxploitation revisionist Civil War Black Power revenge story! (Why does it begin '1858 - two years before the Civil War' when that began in 1861? ) Much more effective for me than something like
Twelve Years a Slave, as it shows the horror of slave life but gives us a hero to fight back - I hope it went down well with black audiences. (Spike Lee declared is 'disrespectful to my ancestors' without having even seen it!) But it's also crafty in that the Samuel L Jackson character is the Hattie McDaniels Mammy but pushed so far that he's now actually an equal to the master - and he's somehow become white. (Another great performance.) And Christoph Waltz won an Oscar for his polite bounty hunter - a terrific character - and Jamie Foxx has all the necessary brooding anger. Leo's rather good too and makes me think he'd make a good Billy the Kid.
It's Peckinpah's violence dialled up by a power of ten. Crazy funny as well, and smart. Can you imagine having to reset one of those blood-soaked sets, the continuity problems...
I like the way that the huge 'Mississippi' title comes on left to right like
GWTW's titles, and the end explosion is a riff on
The Good the Bad and the Ugly, one of QT's favourite films,
My only thought is we could have done with a more gutsy female character (which QT is so good at writing) - but it's not necessary to the story.
With an extremely eclectic film score and wonderful photography from Robert Richardson (on film), which uses the zoom lens in a funny way.
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