UPDATE II: And it’s back!

UPDATE: Well, it looks like the leaked trailer was yanked and so we will have to wait for the official one. I’ll re-post it below once it’s available. In the meantime, enjoy my thoughts on a trailer you can’t watch.

Original Post:

Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” has a trailer and I am not even going to bother finishing this introductory sentence, because: TRAILER.

Well, this is going to be all kinds of exploitative, isn’t it? But we already knew that. The plot, if you are as of yet unaware, revolves around Django (Jamie Foxx), who teams up with a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) and winds up fighting a monstrous plantation owner named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). And it’s Quentin Tarantino, so there will be all sorts of gratuitous violence and unnecessarily long stretches of dialogue and a few standoffs.

I have a renewed interest in Tarantino following “Inglourious Basterds,” so I’m very curious to see what he has in store with this movie. The DiCaprio elements are particularly interesting to me. Unlike Will Smith, a fellow movie star who declined to make this film (he was the first choice for Django), DiCaprio is continuing to show a surprising fearlessness in his choice of material and roles. This looks like a departure from his characters of late (haunted, grim men), and I’m very curious to see how he and Foxx thrive in Tarantino’s weird, weird world.

“Django Unchained” drops on Dec. 25.