From the Cowboys & Indians magazine website
By Joe Leydon
The Cannes Film Festival — currently in full swing in the south of France — traditionally attracts the most important film critics and journalists from throughout the world. Which is why The Weinstein Company thought the fest would be a swell place to show off some footage from Django Unchained, the eagerly anticipated “Spaghetti Western” pastiche director Quentin Tarantino currently is filming on location in Louisiana and other locales.
Veteran film industry observer Anne Thompson covered the presentation for IndieWire.com — and was wowed by what she saw. “Tarantino is taking the revenge western to a whole new level as the two bounty hunters [played by Oscar winners Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz] shoot their way through the unsuspecting South. It looks like the first Leone-esque section of Inglourious Basterds, and it’s about fighting injustice, except that this time it’s not Brad Pitt against the Nazis in World War II — it’s an angry black man getting his own back from racist white Southerners before the Civil War.”
Thompson describes the preview footage thusly: “We see a sophisticated German, Dr. King Schultz (Inglourious Basterds star Christoph Waltz), approach a chain gang and attempt to buy one of the slaves. When the guards don’t go along with this idea, he shoots them both and literally releases Django from his chains. He is now a free man. While Schultz poses as a dentist, with a big molar swaying on top of his horse and buggy, he’s actually a bounty hunter. He needs Django to identify some pretty nasty slave drivers he knows only too well, and Django is eager to help him. Don Johnson plays plantation owner Big Daddy; watching Django stalk across the grounds to shoot one of the men who abused him is chilling. He whips another to death. He also wants to find his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who is owned by another piece of work, plantation owner Candie (a beefy Leonardo Di Caprio, with long greasy hair).
“Schultz, appalled by southern America’s racist ways, tries to protect Django, who blooms under his tutelage and turns out to be a pretty good shot. ”
Django Unchained is set to open Dec. 25, 2012, in theaters across North America. But Thompson notes that Tarantino still has 62 days of shooting left to finish, and cautions: “I will not be surprised if the movie gets pushed back out of 2012.”