Imagine that you’re in a hot tub with Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson. Or Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds, depending on your gender and/or orientation. The point is, you find them very attractive.

“It’s just so strange,” Angelina says, looking off into the distance. “I’d been with Brad for so long, and now I’m suddenly single again. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. I feel…I feel…”

“Empty?” you interject politely.

You both are momentarily distracted when Scarlett takes her bikini top off and tosses it outside the hot tub.

“No,” Angelina purrs, her gaze switching back to your eyes. You’re suddenly aware of the pounding of the pulse in your temple. “I feel…adventurous. I’ve been monogamous for so long, and now that I’m not in a relationship, I feel like breaking all the rules and experimenting with my sexuality.”

“R-really?” you stammer. “Well, I guess that’s one way to go about it…”

Angelina slides over in the hot tub and casually drapes her arm around your neck, resting her cheek against your chest. You close your eyes, basking in the moment, and then open them a moment later because you feel something odd, which turns out to be Scarlett straddling you. Droplets of water roll down her cheeks and drop down onto her…well, down. “I’m afraid,” Scarlett says to Angelina, “that you and I are going to have to share.”

This is approximately what watching Django Unchained is like. It’s absolutely magical, it lasts for about two and a half hours, and every time you experience it you find new and creative ways to make it worth your while.

I’ve received some flak from certain commentators who accuse me of not liking anything. This is both true and untrue: I do dislike the majority of films I watch, which I think is somewhat normal with the universal truth that 90% of everything is shit. However, while I do like and enjoy many films, I typically do not write reviews of them. There are two reasons for this: the first being that positive reviews are rarely humorous or interesting to read, and second, if a movie is truly worth watching I don’t want to explore it or spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, so my review tends to be something along the lines of “It’s worth seeing, go watch it.”

In the interests of full disclosure, I concede that I am an enormous Tarantino fan. That does not mean I like everything he creates – Four Rooms was simply appalling, and despite my rewatches, Jackie Brown remains a dull and meandering film. While I’ve grown to enjoy Death Proof more and more, I cannot help but observe it has enough plot for a 30-minute Twilight Zone episode, rather than a 90-minute movie. But by and large, Tarantino makes excellent films, and Django Unchained is simply exceptional. It is, hands down, the best movie of 2012, and is on the list of the best 10 films I’ve seen in the past 10 years. The acting is great, the action sequences are bloody and brilliant, the dialogue is superb, there’s comedy, drama, horror, romance, adventure, violence, and a giant tooth.

Jamie Foxx, playing the eponymous Django, is perhaps the weakest of the actors [with the exception of Tarantino’s extended cameo]. I’ve never been impressed with Foxx’s acting, but at the very least, he does nothing to pull the audience out of the film. He’s simply overshadowed by the absolute brilliance of Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio, not to mention an absolutely stellar performance from Samuel L. Jackson, who should have received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

As always, I do have a few minor complaints. The scene where Django and Dr. Schultz discuss the legend of Brunnhilde is remarkably uninteresting, and has the added bonus of not remotely affecting the plot. Likewise, the scene with The Regulators, as humorous as it is, feels out of place with the rest of the film. These, however, are minor complaints.

I’d prefer not even to mention the controversy surrounding the film because I don’t want to give it any weight by acknowledging it, but, unfortunately, many panties got in a bunch over the language in the film, specifically the use of the word ‘nigger’, which is used 109 times. Like any reasonable person, I find racism abhorrent, and slavery doubly so, but I’m not so much of a fucking idiot that I am going to try to whitewash history to make it sound better, like the monumentally stupid individuals demanding edited versions of Huck Finn for school libraries. Let’s face it: humans, as a whole, have a long and glorious history of treating other people in inhumanely cruel ways. There are specific reasons why we should not try to forget about things like the Holocaust and slavery, and the reason is because we learned things from them. It’s terrible that it takes an unspeakable tragedy to change the public’s mind about certain things, but the only thing worse is to start forgetting about the lesson learned because stupid fucking people want to try and pretend it never happened.

From that view, I appreciate Django in everything it does. There is something remarkably unsettling about the casual racism present in the film, all the more so because almost no one thinks anything of it. This isn’t a film where the main character refuses to use the word ‘nigger’ because it is beneath him. This isn’t a film where every instance of racism is A BIG FUCKING DEAL. And it’s all the more powerful because of it, when you understand that that is where a society truly goes wrong, where certain ideas are so commonplace that no one, none of the characters, thinks anything of their racism, much less that they’re being racist at all. That is what is terrifying about Django: the idea that at a certain point in American history, people, because of the color of their skin, were not people at all. They were bags of living meat, living and dying at the whims of their master.

That is what’s great about Django Unchained. It’s not a heavy-handed tale of morality that spoon-feeds its Racism Is Bad, Mmkay? message to the audience. It’s a gloriously violent, over-the-top homage to blaxploitation, westerns, and revenge flicks, it’s compelling, brilliantly crafted cinema, and the fact that it actually has a subtextual point to it is just gravy.

It’s worth seeing, go watch it.

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