Has Quentin Tarentino won any big mainstream awards since he won the best screenplay Academy Award for Pulp Fiction? So what’s going to be his next big winner? He was nominated for best director for Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds. I think Jackie Brown is one of the best and coolest retro films ever made. His Kill Bill series and Grind House films I could probably take or leave.
What about Leonardo DiCaprio? He has garnered Academy Award nominations for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Aviator and Blood Diamond. He won a Golden Globe Award for The Aviator. But no Oscar yet?
Inglourious Basterds was an incredible, bloody violent Dirty Dozen meets Guns of Navarone World War II epic, bizarre, parallel history (?) action film (the one where Brad Pitt leads a group of American soldiers scalping Nazis). The standout performance was Christoph Waltz as the most vile Nazi fiction character in movie history, maybe second only to Ralph Fiennes’ performance as a similar real-life villain in Schindler’s List. But where Fiennes didn’t win the Oscar, Waltz walked away with one for Inglourious Basterds, and rightly so. So it is awesome he will be co-star of the new film Django Unchained, along with Jamie Foxx, best actor Oscar winner for playing Ray Charles brilliantly in the movie Ray.
At Comic-Con this year, writer Jason McClain shared with me that the Django Unchained promotion booth offsite was informing people if you found one of the “Django girls” in red shirts throughout San Diego and you recited the key phrase “the D is silent” you’d get a coin that you could exchange for a free T-shirt. We each ended up with two coins, thanks to Jason’s scanning of the crowds. As Jason says, T-shirts are top-level swag. For future reference, here are the shirts given away, and if you got one hold onto it, as I think Django Unchained may actually be a big Christmas release hit film this year.
I have a seen a few trailers for Django Unchained, but this is the first trailer that confirmed I will see this movie. It clearly lays out what the film is about (rare for trailers these days): A Civil War era bounty hunter (Waltz) frees a slave named Django (Foxx) who can help him track down his bounty in exchange for Django’s freedom and freeing Django’s wife, apparently sold to a rich Rhett Butler type, played by DiCaprio. Starting with Johnny Cash singing over a slave driver… An unexpected highwayman confrontation… Bounty hunters? A western with 1970s soundtrack that sounds like the theme to Shaft? Think Quentin Tarentino and it all makes sense.
Enjoy this really, really good trailer for Django Unchained…
This one is certain to get Oscar nominations in the spring and maybe land a few wins for Foxx, DiCaprio and Tarentino.
C.J. Bunce
Editor
borg.com
