Boston Globe Critic Compares Tarantino's New 'House Negro' Character to Justice Thomas, Keyes, Cain, and Steele

One reason, I'm guessing, for still subscribing to The Boston Globe is to laugh at "self-loathing" black conservatives...even in Quentin Tarantino movie reviews. Globe film critic Wesley Morris is at is again. On NPR in May 2011, Morris hailed "The Fast and The Furious" movies as very "progressive" and "equal-opportunity shallow." When challenged on it, Morris shot darts instead at "The Blind Side."

In his Christmas Day review of the new movie "Django Unchained," Morris found "a hard mix of meticulous cartoonishness and unexpected power," especially in the "house Negro" Samuel L. Jackson, who apparently channels Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, Herman Cain, and Michael Steele:

They don’t get much higher — or lower, perhaps — than Stephen, the head servant at the Candie mansion. He gets a load of Django, turns defensive, then smells a rat. Samuel L. Jackson plays crusty, waxen Stephen as a vision of depraved loyalty and bombastic jive that cuts right past the obvious association with Uncle Tom. The movie is too modern for what Jackson is doing to be limited to 1853. He’s conjuring the house Negro, yes, but playing him as though he were Clarence Thomas or Alan Keyes or Herman Cain or Michael Steele, men whom some black people find embarrassing.

For years, Jackson has been enabling Tarantino to fancy himself this honorary negro. Jackson can deliver the n-word, and other profanities, with ketchup, mustard, and relish. It’s the same here. That word might be fired off more than any bullet. But Jackson is going for something that’s different from the sleazebag he played in Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown.” The white vileness in “Django Unchained” is one thing — it’s stock, even DiCaprio’s psychological version of it — but Jackson’s is what sticks with you. We’ve never seen as life-size a black monster as this, not even in D.W. Griffith. Jackson turns the volume way up on his entire persona to broadcast the nightmare of black self-loathing. It’s a terrifying, fearless, and easily misconstrued performance.

[Hat tip: Weasel Zippers, who identified the BosGlob as "Another liberal rag that can’t go out of business fast enough."]