Django Unchained is Quentin Tarantino’s newest, most visceral film that explores American history and deserves endless praise. Django. The D is silent.
Swashbuckling cinematographer Quentin Tarantino’s post-Inglourious Basterds masterwork has finally arrived. Django Unchained debuted last night in NYC at the Ziegfeld Theatre to a private, celebrity-studded audience (i-D online was there) and is set to be unleashed worldwide on Christmas day. Brace yourself.
Tarantino’s endlessly enticing piece is designed to blow your gaskets and provoke your knowledge of antebellum American history. It’s a cinematic wallop, 2 hours and 40 minutes long, gorgeously edgy, seriously race-y and physically funny, about love, revenge, justice, race relations, and death. Lots of death.
In cahoots with Weinstein Co. and Columbia Pictures, Tarantino delivers a break-neck ‘southern’ genre film that swells with action and takes violent vengeance to a whole new level. Maverick actor (and Oscar-winner) Christoph Waltz plays Dr. Schultz, a German bounty-hunter who has no compunctions about killing anything with a pulse; Leonardo DiCaprio is the slave-driving Francophile Calvin Candie (who drops the N-word incessantly) and inspires much rancor amongst his slaves, most notably Django (played by Jamie Foxx), who is freed but must slaughter his way through the pre-Civil War South in order to emancipate his wife, Broomhilda (played by Kerry Washington).
You’ll die laughing when you witness Foxx’s character shooting-up racist red-necks and paving a path of sensational Shadenfreude, glorious ultra-violence and killer collateral damage. Your eyes will pop out of your sockets when you peep Don Johnson dressed as Colonel Sanders (‘Big Daddy’ Bennett) and Samuel L. Jackson as Calvin Candie’s sycophantic house servant, Stephen. And you’ll get a pithy catchphrase that will linger in your mind from a cooler-than-now Foxx, when he’s asked to pronounce his name: “Django. The D is silent.”
In short, the acting is brilliant, the plot is well developed and the background music (ranging from classic Johnny Cash and James Brown to 50 Cent and John Legend) is stellar. Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-cool, albeit controversial narrative brings to form a complex set of powerful feelings, memories, historiography and genius cinematography. Well played sir.
Django Unchained is released 25th December 2012.
Text: Cody Ross
