Django is a BAMF*

I recently saw Tarntino's "Django Unchained," the first part of PBS's "The Abolitionsists," and the season opener of "Justified."

"Justified" was entertaining and had a number of sudden turns. A conflict is being set up between Boyd Crowder and an evangelical preacher who is successfully weening the residence of Harlan County off of Oxycotin and the other drugs Crowder is peddling by turning them on to the opiate of religion. A down on her luck prostitute could be the Crowder's downfall. And it was gratifying to hear Walton Goggins quote Asimov and Keynes to one of his pushers who had found the Lord and stolen Boyd's money.

Goggins was also in the highly entertaining "Django Unchained." Great performances by the actors: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel Jackson, and Don Johnson (and Jonah Hill,etc.) I loved the soundtrack. While Tarantino helped the Germans look bad in "Inglorious Basterds," in "Django Unchained" one of the protagonists is a anti-slavery German bounty hunter played by Waltz. Waltz's Dr. Schultz is a great humanist and shows that Germans have a great liberal, pro-enlightentment tradition - see Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Marx - one that was crushed by war, economic depression and fascism.** Southerners come off really bad as the Germans did in Basterds. All the actors do an outstanding job, but Jackson's Uncle Tom Steven is the one who stuck with me. What a nasty fellow. I liked DiCaprio's speech on phrenology and the supposed submissiveness of blacks (everyone tossed about the N word.) And I liked how Tarantino had that one slave who hated Django because he thought he was a black slave trader. Pretty brutal but entertaining movie. DiCaprio could get some awards. Jackson should.

"The Abolitionists" was kind of brutal too but very thought-provoking and educational. It was the first of three episodes and focused on Frederick Douglass, Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe. All of the whites were hardcore evangelical Christians who believed slavery was a sin. Douglass was a slave at first. He wasn't submissive enough for his owner so he brought in someone out of Tarantino movie, a guy who would "break" slaves by beating them once a week. Douglass fought back, even though it meant death, and bested the "breaker" guy who never told or came back, because if word got out his reputation would be damaged. Douglass said up to that point he had been a boy, but from there on he was a man. Grimké's story was very interesting as she was a black sheep of one of the wealthiest Southern (slave-owning of course) families, if not one of the wealthiest in the world at the time. But she felt slavery was a sin and worried for the souls of her fellow white southerners. So she moved north. In one dramatized scene, Garrison was attacked by a pro-slavery mob in the North and was so rattled he bowed out of the movement for a while. A lot of drama about Slavery these days, see "Lincoln" also.

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*Bad ass mother fucker.
**Dr Shultz at one point asks a southern musician at the plantation to stop playing Beethoven, because I assume it's offensive to him to hear such beautiful music in such a context. He notes the irony of the plantation owner admiring the black French novelist Dumas. He holds up the idealism and morality of art in contrast to corrupt institutions. On a personal, emotional level, Shultz also has bad flashbacks over the recent mauling of a runaway slave by dogs he witnessed. This reminded me of similar episodes or stories about Europeans like Nietzsche and William Wilberforce, both of whom became unhinged after witnessing the beatings of a horse by its master.

I have some German ancestry. On my father's side my great-grandmother emigrated from Germany to New York City where she married another German immigrant who died young. One of her nephews (my grandfather's cousin) was conscripted late in WWII and sent to the Eastern Front. He disappeared as the Red Army advanced westward. My grandfather fought in the Pacific.
    "Inglorious Basterds" did have some good Germans, so to speak: the starlette played by Diane Krueger and Til Shweiger's Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz. And the German soldier who had heard of Stiglitz was pretty tough and honorable in a way: