Django Unchained opens at the Wellesley this week. Nominated for five Oscars and tipped to sweep the board at the ceremony on Sunday night, the film is widely regarded as Quentin Tarantino’s finest since Pulp Fiction almost 20 years ago.
The key members of the cast such as Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L Jackson and Christopher Waltz as the German-born bounty hunter are acting out of their skins. Certainly it’s a violent film, horribly so at some points, but as always with Tarantino there’s a cartoonish surreal element which saves it becoming titillating or even pornographic.
Whilst the movie doesn’t preach, it’s impossible to watch this film without feeling revolted at the inhumanity of American slavery and disgusted by the Southern “aristocracy” who defended it with a stubborn stupidity that ended in the Civil War.
As if one needed another reason for seeing Django – do say jango, the D is silent as Foxx reminds us – the soundtrack is spectacularly good and it just won’t sound the same on your laptop.