"i'm not your slave and you're not my master."

I just saw the movie for the first time and I want to get my major gripes with this film out while they're still fresh.

I didn't mind the gratuitous use of the "n-word" or the violence...in fact I loved the violence and I normally don't. To be truthful, I didn't really even mind all that much that a film that supposedly stars Jamie Foxx is was still very much a white savior film. I think that I took it for exactly what it is, a non-historical "cowboy" piece set in the antebellum South, a piece of entertainment, a QT film, and I still don't like it. My husband loves it. 

I don't see Django and Steven as two radically different characters, and that's why I found it hard to root for Django. Make no mistake, I loved seeing him kill all those whiteys. I know that his main focus was getting his wife back, but it seemed obvious to me that he didn't really give two shyts about any of the other black people in the film. Steven used his position with Candie to make life harder for the other slaves, but ultimately he was still a slave trying to protect himself. Django's character is actually somewhat disturbing to me because he was a free man (yeah, and I know, 1858 Mississippi), and his position with Dr. Schulz gave him a great deal of leverage, far beyond the slaves and even above the bottom of the barrel white people. But he used his advantage and his access to down-talk the slaves when he JUST became free, and he didn't let Schulz buy D'artagnan so that he wouldn't be eaten by the dogs. That was just it for me.  

According to my husband, I'm reading way too much into this but I didn't like that he didn't tell the three men being transported to the mine to go, to look for the north star or anything. I didn't like that he didn't work with any of the slaves. I think that it would have been awesome to have had a band of rogue slaves, or even a few, just fvcking up shyt. But to me, he just seemed like most uppity negroes who feel powerful because they're in with the white man, who use whatever power they have to get what they want (Broomhilda in this case) then go about their business then go on their merry way. And I don't know that it wasn't an accident. I feel like it could have been more interesting...or even just more entertaining...if it weren't just Django being unchained. 

But oh well.