Django Unchained (2012)

Best Quentin Tarantino movie yet! This over-the-top story of a freed-slave-turned-bounty-hunter recovering his wife from her new owner has plenty of the signature QT grisly violence, but plenty of humor and cartoonishness to temper it. I had to put my hands between my eyes and the screen about five times. Her mother's daughter, Amy chose this as our Christmas day movie. I saw friends in the packed room before it started and asked, "Ready for a feel bad movie?" Rhonda said, "It's a love story!" and Judy's son Geof added, "It's about retribution and vengeance." They're both right.

With a cast listed on imdb of just over 100 you will see familiar faces and not recognize others whose names might ring a bell, but you will recognize the auteur himself (director/writer Tarantino is profiled in my post on Inglourious Basterds) with a silly Australian accent in the second act. Christoph Waltz (last in the blog in Carnage, he won the Oscar for Inglourious Basterds) brings back his Austrian accent to play Django's mentor, an articulate German dentist/successful bounty hunter named King Schultz. And his articulateness can be credited entirely to Tarantino, who wrote the part just for Waltz. Jamie Foxx (covered in The Soloist) may not have been the director's first choice for the title character, but he is riveting, even when the joke is on him (there's a great gag about wardrobe). Leonardo DiCaprio (most recently blogged in J. Edgar) and Samuel L. Jackson (last in The Avengers) have also been getting good reviews for their parts as ruthless plantation owner Calvin Candie and his trusted manservant (or house n-word) Stephen. Foxx told Craig Ferguson a few weeks ago that DiCaprio was so upset about having to use the n-word that Foxx had to calm him down.

Film student that he is, Tarantino references many masterworks, e.g. naming Kerry Washington's (profiled in Mother and Child) character Broomhilda von Shaft, hoping we will guess that she and Django are supposed to be the ancestors of John Shaft of the movie Shaft, played by Richard Roundtree on screens big and small in the 1970s and by Jackson in the 2000 remake. Perhaps I was the only one watching the movie thinking of the comic strip Broom-Hilda, even as Schultz pronounces it the German way, Brünnhilde. Here are some other references.

QT fans won't be surprised that there's a terrific soundtrack, available everywhere, featuring, among others, "spaghetti western" style songs by Ennio Morricone. I did notice that the iTunes version includes a bonus track of rapper/actor/director RZA's song from the end credit sequence. This link includes videos of some of the tracks in their entirety. One song that was omitted from the soundtrack that I definitely heard onscreen Tuesday is Richie Havens' Freedom, even though another song by that name is included.

Right now, 12:30am on Friday, after 3 days, this movie has grossed over $25 million. And it's 2:45 long. Rottentomatoes' current rating is 88% critics/92 audiences. You know who you are if you'll like it. If you've never heard of any of this, skip it.