Django Unchained (R)
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So. This is a Quentin Tarantino movie, which obviously means there is a ton of bloodshed. It also means it's clever and funny and awesome. It's inspired by old "spaghetti Westerns," particularly one called "Django" from 1966, which I've never seen. (Django inspired a ton of knockoff Westerns, I guess, but I never saw any of them, either.) It begins with a bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz liberating a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx; the D is silent, btw). Schultz wants Django's help in finding a trio of men he hopes to collect bounties on, since Django knows what they look like. It doesn't take them long to track the guys down and kill them. After that, the two of them continue to work together for awhile, with the ultimate plan of finding Django's wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). Django and Broomhilda had previously run away from their owners, but were caught and then sold separately to new owners. After Django and Schultz find out that Broomhilda had been sold to a man named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), Schultz comes up with a con to trick Candie into selling Broomhilda to them. However, Candie's head house slave, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), figures out the plan and warns Candie about their true intentions. Things get bad after that, but there's ultimately a relatively happy ending.

That's all I want to say about the plot. But I will repeat that there is a lot of bloodshed, and that there are a lot of really amusing bits. And Django's pretty damn cool, of course, as he turns out to be a natural sharpshooter, and a remarkably quick study at pretty much everything else. The movie also has an awesome cast (some of whom I've mentioned). Schultz is played by Christoph Waltz, whom I don't think I know from anything else, but he was pretty great in this. Schultz is one of my favorite types of character, someone who seems pretty intelligent and cultured, who can become seriously badass in an instant. Anyway... the movie was just a lot of fun to watch.