This was a movie filled with interesting and risky choices. The setting, the dialogue, the casting, the style: it all panned out superbly. The chemistry between both Foxx/Waltz and Jackson/Dicaprio was unexpectedly astounding, and the choices in ghastly imagery were more than mere exploitation.

There were no gasps in my theater during the more grisly scenes, just a powerful silence. I’ve seen plenty of Tarantino violence, but it has never been so powerfully sickening. In my opinion, it was deservedly and rightfully so. The setting shouldn’t be treated any differently. What Spike Lee describes as a ‘Holocaust’ should be depicted as such, with no blows held back in regards to stark and grim reality of the time. For a movie based on and expected to be mostly mindless action, much of the violence was more affecting and deep than I had expected. He went places in depicting the “Peculiar Institution” in film that has rarely (if ever) been dared. The fact he was able to get laughs out of his dialogue despite the tone and style of the movie says quite a bit for Quentin’s penmanship. It is also worth noting that the dialogue flow and form didn’t stick out with the setting, despite it being well out of Tarantino’s comfort zone of the contemporaneous.

I originally posted this over at Rotten Tomatoes.