Django Unchained vs. Mag 7

I was not a fan of Django simply for the ending (and I thought Jamie Fox didn't bring his best game to the project). Otherwise I thought it was a solid attempt to put a revisionist view of the 1800's onto the big screen. Christopher Waltz nailed the white window dressing perfectly, being just slick and tough enough to not make the film seem like a white-apologist piece of propaganda, and DiCaprio and Don Johnson gave a range to backward thinking whites that audience members of every color were glad to see get some justice. Even Sam Jackson added to the sense of even-keeled writing by perfectly nailing the black co-conspirator "house n i g g er " that both black and white audiences could fear and despise.

But Magnificent 7 had nothing along the lines of that kind of honesty. A western can be both brutal and thoughtful, and the only thing I came away with after watching Mag 7 is that the writers had one thing on their mind: putting a rainbow on the screen. The credibility of the story is ridiculous. Every white person at large is a bigot. There is not one single shred of moral ambiguity in the universe of this film. Every white person who colors the environment is a racist hick, the only exceptions being the tag along's in the rainbow gang, and the rube's they have to protect.

If there was any ambiguity to this film at all, it lay in the attempt to both play the "bad ass woman" angle using platitudes like referencing her abundant "balls" and shocking us with her prowess with a rifle, but at the same time peddling her cleavage with costume choices that wouldn't have held up her goodies in the Moulon Rouge let alone on the Western trail.

And could they have at least been just a little realistic with the lead villain. It's one thing to have Ming the Merciless show up on another planet in the future, or working on 20th century Wall Street. But if one were going to place an extreme pro-wealth, anti-God, humanity devaluing individual in the 1800s, the arc-type has already been developed beautifully in Daniel Plainview. Sure Mag 7 is a good-guy vs. bad guy cowboy movie (a shame since the original Seven Samurai was nothing of the sort), but why insult the audience by leading them around by the nose until it hurts. From all the singularly evil western masterminds to be found across the canvass of film, from Liberty Valence (a proxy for "big ranchers") to Coy LaHood (big mining) to Henry Delarue (big oil), there has never been such a ridiculously unbelievable villan as Bartholomew Bogue. Why not just come out and call him "Bad Bard"? This movie would still be a stinker without his transparent 21st century inspired monologues about capitalism, but at least those with a brain in their heads wouldn't have been yearning for the return of our admission dollars quite so early in the film.

By the end of this film, I was not only wishing I had decided to spend the price of admission (and by that, I mean the $1 price of Redbox admission) on something more fruitful, like a stick of gum, but I wanted the two hours of my life I just wasted back.