Sukiyaki Western Django opens in New York today; A.O. Scott at the Times calls it "a feast for genre fetishists, a loving and lurid pastiche of the spaghetti westerns that were themselves lurid pastiches of classic Hollywood cowboy pictures." The movie features a Japanese cast portraying a stylized version of the Old West, and pastiche-master himself Quentin Tarantino disemboweling a snake in the opening scene. It's also, sprach Scott, "a grindingly violent film. That the violence is often treated as sanguinary slapstick is not a problem in itself; turning mayhem into a joke is an expected feature of the self-conscious genre-blending formula." more ›