Django Unchained (DVD REVIEW)
Django Unchained
DVD Review
by Kam Williams
Oscar-Winning Spaghetti Western Arrives on DVD
There’s a sensible reason why nobody
ever wanted to be an Indian whenever we played Cowboys and Indians as kids.
That’s because the white man was invariably the hero of the Westerns on which
we’d been weaned, while the red man had always been presented as a wild savage
dismissed by the dehumanizing affirmation that, “The only good Injun is a dead
Injun.”
Sure, a few films, such as Apaches
(1973), The Sons of Great Bear (1966) and Chingachgook: The Great Snake (1967),
flipped the script by portraying Native Americans as the good guys and the
European settlers as the bad guys. But those productions were few and far
between.
Hollywood has also promoted a set of
stereotypes when it comes to the depictions of black-white race relations
during slavery, with classics like The Birth of the Nation (1915) and Gone with
the Wind (1939) setting the tone. Consequently, most movies have by-and-large
suggested that it was a benign institution under which docile African-Americans
were well-treated by kindly masters, at least as long as they remained
submissive and knew their place.
Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to put
a fresh spin on the genre, much as he did in the World War II flick Inglourious
Basterds (2009). With Django Unchained, which landed Academy Awards in the
Original Screenplay (Tarantino) and Supporting Actor (Christoph Waltz)
categories, the iconoclastic director again rattles the cinematic cage by
virtue of an irreverent adventure that audaciously turns the conventional
thinking on its head.
Set in the South in 1858, the
picture is visually reminiscent of the Spaghetti Westerns popularized in the
Sixties by Italian director Sergio Leone, being replete with both big sky
panoramas and cartoonish, one-note villains who are the embodiment of evil. But
instead of cattle rustlers, it’s inveterate racists being slowly tortured or
blown away to the delight of the audience.
The movie stars Jamie Foxx in the
title role as a slave lucky enough to be
liberated by a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter (Waltz). Abolitionist Dr.
Schultz altruistically takes Django on as an apprentice, and proceeds to teach
him how to ride a horse and handle a gun.
The
grisly business of tracking down outlaws “Wanted Dead-or-Alive” conveniently
affords the revenge-minded freedman many an opportunity to even the score with
folks responsible for his misery, from the scars on his back, to the “R” for “Runaway”
branded on his cheek, to being separated from his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry
Washington). As you might guess, the action gets pretty gruesome, as is par for
the course for any Tarantino vehicle.
Slavery
reimagined as a messy splatterfest where massa
gets exactly what he deserves, and then some!
Excellent
(4 stars)
Rated R for profanity, nudity, ethnic slurs and graphic violence
Running time: 165 minutes
Distributor: The
Weinstein Company/Anchor Bay
Blu-ray/DVD Combo
Pack Extras: Remembering J. Michael Riva; Reimagining the Spaghetti Western; The
Costume Designs of Sharen Davis; The Stunts of Django Unchained; and more.
To see a trailer for Django Unchained, visit:
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