Last month it was reported that Will Smith was close to a deal to play the lead role in Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming spaghetti slave western, Django Unchained.  But shock of all shocks, it sounds like Captain Squeaky-Clean Image won’t be signing up for a movie where six of the characters are probably named the N-word. Deadline says it will be Jamie Foxx instead, who’s a better actor anyway, even if he does seem like he loves himself a whoooole lot.

Quentin Tarantino has made his choice and negotiations will begin. Tarantino’s next film will be distributed domestically by The Weinstein Company and overseas by Sony Pictures. Production begins November.
Foxx will join Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson in a Sergio Leone-style spaghetti Western that Tarantino wrote and has set in Mississippi during slavery. No deal has been made yet, but it shouldn’t take long. While the early focus had Will Smith the likely participant, Deadline told you on June 7 that those talks had gone south, and we were first to identify Foxx as a prime contender for the role along with Idris Elba and Chris Tucker.

Chris Tucker, huh?  DO YOU, UNNASTAND, THE SLAVES, THAT ARE COMIN OUTTA THE SOUFF?

The choice of Foxx is an inspired one.  Django is a slave who’s liberated by a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter and taught the tricks of the trade by his mentor. Django’s major goal in life is to recover his wife, and to do it he needs to get past the villainous ranch owner Calvin Candie (DiCaprio), who runs Candyland, a despicable club and plantation in Mississippi where female slaves are exploited as sex objects and males are pitted against each other in “mandingo”-style death matches. Candie is a slave’s worst nightmare, and that [sic] is where Django’s wife Broomhilda is an abused slave. [Deadline]

Damn, here I was, all set to make a joke about “Foxx is an inspired one”, but I think I just got skullf*cked by that synopsis.  Does… “mandingo-style death matches” mean… cockfights? …”Broomhilda?”  I have to wonder who was a greater influence on this script. QT’s coke wizard, Alan Ball’s minah birds, or the erotic feet of some as-yet-unidentified muse.  In the end it sounds awesome, so I guess I don’t really care.  (*sigh*) I simply adore that coked-up, bird-hating foot f*cker.