This "Django" is most definitely "Unchained"!

Rating: 10/10 (1 September 2014)

Quentin Tarantino.
If that name means nothing to you, just move on.
10 years ago, in 2004, I had the great pleasure to watch Tarantino's epic revenge fantasy "Kill Bill" (2003-2004) (yes, it is one film, split into two parts). I proclaimed "Kill Bill" to be Tarantino's best work as a director (yes, even better than "Pulp Fiction" - his most famous film to date). (I've always considered Quentin Tarantino to be a far better screenwriter than a director, hence why the 1993 Tony Scott-directed action film "True Romance" - which Tarantino wrote the screenplay for but DID NOT direct - is my all-time favorite movie, and the single best piece of cinema that Tarantino has ever been involved with. There, I said it - "True Romance" is Tarantino's greatest work to date.)
I saw "Kill Bill" as his best work because it represented a celebration of film - the very thing Tarantino loves to death and is, after all, the industry that employs him - a cinematic culmination of thousands of hours of late-night grind-house cinema outings when Tarantino was a highly impressionable teenager growing up during the 1970s. If you have a thing for martial arts movies, "spaghetti" Westerns, Japanese and Italian horror films, Japanese animation (Anime') and virtually every single revenge movie ever made, you were in heaven. I know I was, which is why I loved it as much as I did.
It's been a while since Tarantino has made another film that I was really interested in watching, that was until I finally saw "Django Unchained," which he wrote and directed and was released in 2012. I missed my chance to see it in the theaters, but fate allowed me to buy the movie on DVD and I just completed watching it this morning.
In short, "Django Unchained" is yet another celebration of film from Tarantino. Combining the "spaghetti" Western (made most famous by the late Italian director Sergio Leone and his "Dollars" trilogy which featured a young-ish Clint Eastwood in the leads) and the blaxploitation and soul flicks of the '70s, "Django Unchained" is the type of film I've been yearning for a LONG time: a Western film with a blaxploitation attitude. Anyone who knows Tarantino, knows that he has a deep affection, and appreciation for, black culture and black cinema, so why else would he make a movie featuring a black-American protagonist leading an insurrection in the years leading up to the American Civil War?
Now here is where we get personal for this viewer. As a person of color (black-American), I got a perverse pleasure from watching "Django Unchained." This movie caused quite a bit of controversy at the time of its release, namely because of its repetitive use of the word "ni**er," much to the consternation of fellow filmmaker Spike Lee (even though he admitted he had not yet seen the film). I fully understand Lee's point and can understand his frustration, but from watching the movie I KNOW that Tarantino detests slavery as much as anyone else (as much as anyone with even the slightest bit of common sense), which is why he doesn't shy away from the brutal reality of the times (the film's opening sequence featuring black slaves force-marched through Texas proves this point). But like typical Tarantino, he also finds a sense of perverse humor in mocking the pathetic conventional racial wisdom of the times and even in displaying the full-on horrors of slavery, is still able to solicit many, many well-placed laughs (take for instance, a hilarious sequence featuring the Ku Klux Klan - the KKK).
Tarantino's perverse humor and sudden, explosive sequences of lurid, highly stylized bloodshed are right at home here. In 1858, two years before the official start of the American Civil War, German bounty hunter - and former dentist - Dr. King Schultz (Academy Award-Winner for Best Supporting Actor Christoph Waltz) stumbles upon and frees hardened slave Django (Jamie Foxx). Now here is where we get personal again: in Foxx's Django, I found myself the unlikely - yet fully willing, and committed - target member of Tarantino's audience, and Foxx's Django acting out a wild wish-fulfillment fantasy in a former slave-turned-gun-slinging-insurrectionist. In short, I wished I could be Django, the former slave who's a cross between Nat Turner and Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" (from Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy, remember).
Schultz needs assistance in collecting a hefty bounty and lucky for him, Django - who is much wiser than he appears - can help him to positively locate and identify the men he's looking for. In exchange, Schultz will also help Django in locating his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who works as a servant for Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), an uber-wealthy Mississippi plantation owner who is as vile for his treatment of his slaves as he is lovable for his Southern charm, hospitality, and business ethics. The big joke here, of course, and in true Tarantino fashion, is Candie's house servant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson, under some pretty heavy prosthetics to appear considerably aged), who quickly catches on to Django and Schultz's scheme.
Now here is a movie that truly, totally, won over this viewer - "Django Unchained." In true Tarantino fashion, he's having a ball here, with his rich and over-sized characters and dialogue, and when pushed into a corner he retreats to his favorite - a bloodbath (one that's straight out of "The Wild Bunch"!) - toward the end. But unlike his previous shoot-outs, you get a great sense of satisfaction from the blood and carnage, one that makes you realize that fully deserving foes have been truly vanquished and that good has triumphed over a great evil and injustice. In short, "Django" has become "Unchained," a symbol of a time of insurrection BEFORE a time of an even Greater Insurrection (the Civil Rights Movement, which would take place a full century after this film's historically revised events).
10/10