Django UnchainedDirector Quentin Tarantino's bold and bloody Western Django Unchained – new to DVD and Blu-ray – is not for the faint of heart.
Django has the overall shape of a classic spaghetti Western, but inside those lines Tarantino is playing by different rules entirely. It's a grim but deliberate and artful film that wields its scenes of graphic violence with purpose.
It goes like this: In the antebellum American South, German bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) teams with liberated slave Django (Jamie Foxx) to hunt down outlaws and collect reward money from the U.S. Marshall's office.
Schultz and Django form an unlikely friendship and set out to rescue Django's enslaved wife (Kerry Washington) from a psychotic Mississippi plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). Things get messy.
There are scenes of appalling cruelty and brutality in Django Unchained, and the film has generated the usual Tarantino-related controversy for its use of racially charged language and explicit violence. It also rubs some people the wrong way that Tarantino frames his story of slavery – America's great shame – in the tropes of b-movies and exploitation films.
It's all very much by design. Django is a film assembled from the ground up to provoke. Tarantino specializes in stories of righteous vengeance and cinematic catharsis. He took aim at Hitler and the Nazis with 2009's Inglourious Basterds, and Django uses similar storytelling strategies.
So is it a good home movie investment? Oh, without a doubt. Django was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It won for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Waltz). I suspect future film historians will be citing Django for years to come. It's a movie you'll want on the shelf.
If nothing else, Django Unchained delivers that particular strain of movie adrenalin for which Tarantino is famed. Scenes of delicious dialogue alternate with sequences of harrowing action and unexpected humor. Waltz gives another great performance, his over-articulated style of speech bouncing perfectly off Foxx's stoic, straight-ahead charisma. DiCaprio is startlingly effective as the villain and Samuel L. Jackson handles the film's trickiest role with smoldering intensity.
If you didn't catch it in theaters, Django Unchained is one of this year's absolute must-see movies on DVD/Blu-ray. So long as you know what you're getting into.
Extras: I'd have liked to seen more in this department, but the bonus materials in Django are fine as far as they go. "Remembering J. Michael Riva: The Production Design of Django Unchained" is a 15-minute mini-doc and homage to Riva, who died during production of the film. Two more featurettes focus on the film's stunts and costumes.
Also New :
The chilling feature documentary Into The Cold details a harrowing two-man expedition to the North Pole to mark the centennial of Robert E. Peary’s successful April 1909 expedition. Explorer, photographer and environmental activist Sebastian Copeland delivers some never-before-seen footage in startling HD, with on-the-ground observations on global warming. Interesting stat: About 3,000 people have summited Mt. Everest in the last 100 years. Around 150 have made it to the North Pole on foot.
The charming indie Save The Date stars nascent movie star Lizzy Caplan as an L.A. hipster on the rebound from a failed romance.
Sequel to the underrated 2009 horror movie, The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia seems to have a location confusion issue and gets my vote for the year's most unintentionally funny title.
The Criterion Collection has reissued director Alex Cox's 1980s punk-cinema classic Repo Man, starring Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez.
Plus:
China Beach: The Complete Collection
Dragon
Note: This was written by Glenn McDonald, a Digital Crave contributor.