Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what I’ve seen over the past week either in film or television. On the film side, if I have written a full length review already, I will post a link to that review. Otherwise, I’ll give a brief snippet of my thoughts on the film with a full review to follow at some point later. For television shows, seasons and what not, I’ll post individual comments here about each of them as I see fit.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Django Unchained

You know what you’re getting when you step into a Quentin Tarantino movie. Django Unchained fits perfectly within his cinematic mold and marks his second outing positioning his films as historical commentaries.

With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino used his hyper-stylized filmmaking techniques to explore World War II by giving the power of vengeance to Jewish characters. Going to a period right before the Civil War, Tarantino has again put revenge into his character’s minds and into the hands of an ex-slave. Django (Jamie Foxx) secretly married a fellow slave before their attempt to flee was thwarted and the pair was sold to separate buyers. When a German-American bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) releases him to help him locate a trio of wanted men, the pair set out on an adventure to rescue his beloved Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from a wealthy plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Tarantino once again uses cartoonish violence to tell his revenge saga with a peppering of original songs and old material that form a musical tableau we’ve become accustomed to. Although he isn’t the first filmmaker to use contradictory musical styles to highlight his action (think back to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), he has become arguably the best at it. The design work of the film is exceptional and Tarantino’s band of actors put in some solid effort. Waltz and DiCaprio are handily the best of the bunch, but his cadre of competent character actors make for a compelling creation.