Quentino Tarantino's hotly anticipated flick Django Unchained set for December 2012 release photo: Slackerwood
The background
Journalists at the Cannes Film Festival have had an exclusive viewing of footage of Quentin Tarantino’s new film Django Unchained. The story of a slave teaming up with a bounty hunter in the pre-Civil War Southern states, the movie stars Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L Jackson.
Harvey Weinstein unveiled the footage as part of a teaser event for Django, alongside Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and David O Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook. The official Django trailer has yet to be released, provoking intense speculation and some YouTube parodies.
So what have we learnt?
Humour and gunplay
“The first look at Django began with a chain gang of slaves trudging through a Western landscape,” wrote Greg Kilday in The Hollywood Reporter; Christoph Waltz’s traveling dentist/bounty hunter then appears and arrange for Jamie Foxx’s Django to be released, sparking off a revenge plot. “There also appears to be plenty of humor, lots of fast-draw gunplay and liberal use of the n-word throughout,” Kilday said.
Django looking good
“Mood-wise and lensing-wise (he’s shooting anamorphic on 35mm), Tarantino is clearly looking to deliver epic,” said Total Film, pointing to DiCaprio’s performance as an oily plantation owner as one to watch. Cinema-goers can expect plenty of vintage Tarantino violence and an intriguing relationship between the central characters: “From the clips we saw it’s clear this relationship grows into a bond that could make it one of cinema’s greatest buddy movies.”
Not a lot to go on
“Inevitably, these batches of ‘footage’ were in fact extended and glorified trailers,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “The footage looks good – of course it would – but it’s impossible to tell what the movie is going to be like.” Tarantino fans will just have to wait until the film’s Christmas 2012 release to get the full picture.
