Flavorwire

Django Unchained
DIRECTOR: Quentin Tarantino
CAST: Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christoph Waltz, Kurt Russell, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kerry Washington
RELEASE DATE: December 25

Okay, first, a confession: your author was not as nuts as everyone else about Tarantino’s last film, 2009′s Inglourious Basterds. It’s a good film, no one’s saying it’s not, but it’s an awfully self-indulgent one, in which we find a filmmaker too much in love with the sound of his own words (even more so, his own words translated into foreign tongues) and too interested in hearing them instead of moving a narrative forward. But the guy is still one of our most distinctive writer/directors, and the central idea of his new movie — a “Southern,” mashing up the tropes of the Western (and, presumably, the Spaghetti Western) with a slave rescue — is intriguing. Plus, get a look at that cast. Jules and Hans Landa and Stuntman Mike (and Borat?) all in the same movie — with the RZA and Omar from The Wire? Can we buy our tickets now?