@14

Thanks for clarifying. I thought you meant that Django was more cartoonish than Basterds (which I also thought was a better film). None of us ever saw the pre-war South, of course, but I think I found that even if the South and the portrayal of white manhood were exaggerated, they felt accurate. Don Johnson and Leonardo DiCaprio were both fantastic in playing what may have appeared as caricatures, but when you think of people like Haley Barbour and Lindsay Graham, the movie characters were different only in their open use of racial epithets.

What I didn't like about Django, even though the plot of rescuing the princess was laid out by the Walz character early on, was that it was also simply a story of how to rescue the threatened, passive princess. There were no strong female characters in the film, and unless you want to count Candie's sister getting mad at him at the dinner table when he exposed Hilda's back, I don't think women were show to be assertive in any way.

Anyway, I saw it just a week before you did, and I'm obviously fascinated by it, too.