1/8/13: I added material involving Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson.For the record: My star rating would be: Four stars.Yes, had I not been prevented from seeing it sooner because of an injury, this would have been on my year's best films list,

Schultz explains himself with the elaborate formality he will use all through the film. He has reason to believe one of the slaves might be of interest to him. This is the slave named Django (Jamie Foxx). He enters into negotiations to purchase Django, who he has reason to believe may help him in finding the Brittle brothers, for reasons involving the doctor's late wife.

And already Tarantino has us, and it's off to the races. The film offers one sensational sequence after another, all set around these two intriguing characters who seem opposites but share pragmatic, financial and personal issues. We never look back. Maybe it's just as well.

But now I must ask, before the plot hurtles ahead: Does it strike you as strange that Dr. King Schultz, in all of the vastness of the South, should have been driving his wagon through just that very deep, dark forest where Django was being led? How could he have even known about that? How odd that the path of the wagon and the slaves, which should have sailed past one another like two ships in the night, should meet head to head?

Let us leave Dr. Schultz engaging in one of his several financial transactions during the film, fueled by a generous supply of cash. Let us explain him. He is a wizard from a fairy tale, a man capable of knowing about people's lives, steering their fates, seducing them into situations in which they receive the destinies they deserve. Although there is a great deal of the realistic in "Django Unchained," including brutal violence, King Schultz is not real in the same way as the rest.

I require the term deus ex machina. I apologize to my many readers who already know it. A "deus," for those few who may not, is a person or device in a story that appears from out of the blue and has a solution to offer. I quote Wikipedia: "The Latin phrase deus ex machina comes to English usage from Horace's Ars Poetica, where he instructs poets that they must never resort to a god from the machine to solve their plots. He refers to the conventions of Greek tragedy, where a crane (mekhane) was used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage." Imagine Tarantino, his feet braced on clouds, lowering Dr. Schultz into "Django Unchained" and using him as a wonderfully useful device to guide the plot wherever it must go.