Don't get me wrong; good read, certainly not a bad script, but I don't think it's what his next film should be. It's a very small, minor piece of writing in a way and that surprised me the more and more that I read. His last couple films have gone very large, so seeing him scale back down isn't inherently a bad idea.

The issue with scaling down is that he's scaled down into a story he's already told. A bunch of violent people, many of whom are using fake names, are locked up in one location together through the majority of the movie. They all debate who they can trust and who, if anyone, is not who they say they are. There is a big reveal at the end of the second act ("I poisoned the stew!"), which leads us into a flashback that explains who most everyone really is and what their real motivation is. When the story comes back from the flashback, everyone is finally clear on who each other is, a shootout, everyone dies, the end. Does this sound familiar to anyone who may have happened to see a little movie called Reservoir Dogs?

I'd like to repeat that the script itself isn't bad, only upon reflecting on his entire career does it feel repetitive. Plus it will only give more ammunition to detractors who accuse him of never doing anything original ("Now he's ripping himself off! Which originally was a rip off of City of Fire!") or growing much from film to film.

I do take issue with some of the script. As I said, it's a relatively minor piece, aimed more at being a stage play style than a grand western epic. But I have to admit I also found this element disappointing, just because of the ways Tarantino has talked about the script being a "real western" and how he wanted to utilize the skills he learned on Django. I'm not sure what great stuff he planned on staging that we haven't seen him already accomplish in multiple films already (the film basically plays like an extended version of the tavern sequence in Bastards.)

I also, I'm sorry, have to take major issue with his use of the word *beep* throughout the script. I'm white, it doesn't offend me, it's not about that, it's about Tarantino being creatively stuck and feeling frustrated with his inability to move past things.

I totally understand it's use in Django, even defend it in Jackie Brown and the couple times it's used in his first two films, but here it felt uselessly crude. I get that people can cite "historical accuracy" and say that that is how people would have talked to a black character back then, but that's disingenuous at the end of the day as well. Nothing else about this (or Django) takes place in the "real world." Tarantino hasn't been driving at any kind of realism in a long time. His worlds and characters are all very stylized, very author-driven. It's absolutely his choice to put the word in there as much as it is. And the fact that it's used as often as it is in sections of Django only makes me shake my head. It's not needed to make the story better or add anything to it, it's creatively redundant of him at this point, and really draws into question just how much of it over the years is him enjoying using the word. He's not Faulker, he's not Twain, he's not writing when those guys wrote, it's not as if he doesn't know what buttons he's pushing, and at this point I'm a little tired of it.

Those are just my thoughts on the script. I could get into more details about what I thought worked and what I thought didn't.

Tarantino should just retire now and stop making a career of ripping off other movies and calling it original.

i would also love to see it as a stage play.

John Ruth: Michael Parks
Maj. Warren: Samuel Jackson
Chris Mannix: Tim Roth
Oswaldo: Christoph Waltz (he was described as British, but I swear I heard Waltz's voice in my head whenever Oswaldo was speaking)
Bob: Jean Dujardin
The General: Bruce Dern
Jody: Michael Madsen. He seemed much more natural to that part than to John Ruth. And it would open the door for, say, *Virginia Madsen* to play Daisy.