At the end of 2012, maverick director Quentin Tarantino brought his latest ultra-violent and over-the-top exploitation film to cinemas, raking in more than $400m in worldwide box office. Now, Django Unchained is available on DVD and Blu-ray. While King Schultz and Django Freeman travel through the American South, collecting bounties, you can relax and enjoy their ride with an ice cold beverage of your choice. Let the offensive language slide and get into the tribute to spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation cinema. Just don’t take that language with you when you shut the movie off, regardless of how many drinks you’ve had.

  It won’t officially be the 20th anniversary of Dazed and Confused until this fall, but last Thursday the film was honored at the annual Texas Hall of Fame Awards, where it received the Star of Texas Award from presenter Quentin Tarantino. In person to accept were writer-director Richard Linklater and members of the cast, including Wiley Wiggins, Anthony Rapp and Joey Lauren Adams. To continue the film’s recognition, it seemed fitting to devote this week’s Scenes We Love to the 1993 high school movie classic. Dazed is not the sort of feature that is easily broken up by scenes. There are many memorable moments, a lot of quotable lines, but as far as individual scenes are concerned there aren’t many that can be bracketed and labeled so cleanly. There are definable acts marked by location, such as the school act, the Emporium act and the beer bust/moon tower act. Are the many distinct pieces of each of these sections qualifiable as scenes? Obviously I’m thinking too much about it. I feel like this is a conversation for Tony, Mike and Cynthia to have while cruising around. Clearly those geeks were the ones I most identified with when the movie came out during my junior year. As usual feel free to name your own favorite scenes or those you think are the “best.” You can find six scenes I love and the personal reasons why after the jump.

Tired of animation that makes you happy and stupid? Then return that ticket for Escape From Planet Earth and spend that $10 on a new, comeback effort by Ralph Bakshi, famed animator behind Fritz the Cat, Wizards and the 1978 version of The Lord of the Rings. It’s been more than 20 years since his last feature, the hybrid Cool World, but a new series of shorts in the works could wind up leading to another. The series is titled Last Days of Coney Island, a noir-ish political toon set on that edge of New York City during the ’60s. The $10 you could put towards the crowdfunding campaign will get you an pre-release look at the result online. That’s if the first installment is fully financed. And with less than half the goal reached at the half-way point, that might not happen (the deadline is March 3). It does seem that $165,000 is a pretty steep amount for a seven-minute product, but this isn’t just anyone’s project. Bakshi is a legend. I’ll admit, I’m not a big fan of his work, but I love that he exists. And I want to see his animation continue to exist because it’s bold and different and, as he implies, we need artistic entertainment that might bring us down and should make us think, especially about ourselves. Is it weird to want to put money into something I don’t like? Why not, I pay my taxes every year…

This weekend, Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects opened to better-than-okay reviews and less-than-okay box office. With Soderbergh’s prolific output, this release would be altogether unremarkable, yet another strong if not entirely memorable entry by a director who would likely release another film six months later. However, Side Effects is notable as a quiet swan song, the proposed last theatrical film by a director who has reportedly done all he’d like to do in filmmaking. But Soderbergh is simply the latest (and on the younger side) of a group of directors that have made unofficial pronouncements towards making an exit of sorts from the business in which they made their name. George Lucas is currently in the process of overseeing the path of Star Wars’ cinematic future at Disney before officially going into retirement. This is monumental. A filmmaker known for keeping very tight reigns on his creative property is now fully embracing the potential of other directors’ and corporations’ visions toward his subject matter for film. There’s a dynamic shift here that doesn’t end with Lucas or Soderbergh either.

One of the big surprises of the 2013 Golden Globe Awards involved a sort of “Argo-f**kyourself” to the Academy Awards, as Oscar-snubbed Ben Affleck was named Best Director of the year. His film, Argo, also ended up winning Best Picture in the drama category. Early in the night, in a brilliantly hilarious monologue by co-hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the ceremony offered some foreshadowing with subtle jabs at the Oscars with immediate shout outs to Affleck and fellow Academy snubs in the director category, Kathryn Bigelow and Quentin Tarantino. They even fit in a joke directed at Anne Hathaway about her 2011 Academy Awards ceremony co-hosting gig with James Franco. Hathaway expectantly wound up winning for Best Supporting Actress, though, and her film, Les Miserables won Best Picture – Comedy or Musical. Co-star Hugh Jackman was a bit of s surprise as Best Actor – Comedy or Musical. More than who won and what didn’t, people will be talking about the somewhat cryptic speech by Cecil B. DeMille Award winner Jodie Foster and the appearance by Bill Clinton to present Best Picture nominee Lincoln. Speaking of Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis surprised nobody by winning Best Actor – Drama. But at least I ended up surprised that he did a comedy 25 years ago called Stars and Bars, which I need to see immediately. My Golden Globes live-blog co-host, Daniel Walber, alerted me to that. And if you didn’t follow us during the ceremony, which we found far more enjoyable than

The 70th Golden Globe Awards will be held tomorrow night, and I invite you to join myself and FSR’s awards guru, Daniel Walber, for live-blog commentary during the ceremony. We’ll try to keep it smart, avoid too much snark and will likely be obeying the rules of the drinking game that co-hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have devised. It will also hopefully be more conversational than remarks we could have just tweeted, in order that I can turn the discussion around as a more readable post-event recap of the night. In case you’re too busy paying attention to your TV to also read our words simultaneously. Anyway, you can’t head into a big awards telecast viewing without predictions for what you think will win. Daniel and I seem to agree on exactly half of the movie categories. So, maybe it won’t be such a predicable night. Check out our choices after the break and give us your own predictions in the comments. If you do better than either of us, we commend you in advance (and maybe at the end of our GG coverage too).

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Broken Projector! This week, hosts Scott Beggs and Geoff LaTulippe ask you to vote for which historical wrong Quentin Tarantino should right next and Rob Hunter reviews Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad. And in the main event, Scott takes The Last Crusade while HitFix‘s Drew McWeeny take Temple of Doom in a debate over the best Indiana Jones sequel. Download Episode #1

Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Django Unchained (and all of Tarantino’s other films). With Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino has taken a decisive shift in his approach to storytelling. Abandoning the non-linear, present-set depictions of an organized criminal underworld in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and the Kill Bill films, Tarantino has not only transitioned to more conventional linear storytelling (with the exception of the requisite flashback), but chooses familiar historical contexts in which to tell these stories. With the WWII-set Inglourious Basterds and now with the pre-Civil War-era Western Django, Tarantino has made a habit of mixing the historical with the inventively anachronistic, and has turned recent modern histories of racial and ethnic oppression, dehumanization, and extermination into ostensibly cathartic fantasies of revenge against vast systemic structures of power.

Due to the holiday, the past week has been lacking in movie news and light on posting in general compared to normal. So, if you were worried that all your family time and present opening cut into the hours you could have been reading FSR, don’t be. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been slacking on the features, either. You do have a lot to catch up with if you’ve been away from the site the past seven days, but it’s an organized pile of reading material for you, because most of the necessary content from the week is part of our Year in Review. And hopefully you got an iPad for whichever holiday you celebrate, so you can very easily read all the goods in our special tablet format (and check out the best downloads and apps for movie lovers). Before you get to the lists, take a look at our reviews of the movies that opened this week, including Django Unchained, Promised Land and West of Memphis (we also posted a late take on The Guilt Trip) and our interview with Promised Land director Gus Van Sant. Now, check out our biggest and best stories and original content from the past week after the break.

Emerging from a nitrate fire in 1963, Quentin Tarantino was fed only exploitation films, spaghetti Westerns and actual spaghetti until he was old enough to thirst for blood. He found his way into the film industry as a PA on a Dolph Lundgren workout video, as a store clerk at Video Archives and by getting encouragement to write a screenplay by the very man who would make a name for himself producing Tarantino’s films. Peter Bogdanovich (and probably many others) think of him as the most influential director of his generation, and he’s got the legendary story to back it up — not to mention line-busting movies like Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained under his belt. He’s also the kind of name that makes introductions like this useless. So here’s a bit of free film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from a guy who really loves Hi Diddle Diddle and plans to keep 35mm alive as long as he’s rich enough to do it.

Quentin Tarantino has very quickly, but not so quietly, found a new niche for his filmmaking talents as a teller of tall tales with a historical bent. He’s less interested in historical accuracy than he is historical tomfoolery, but that never lessens the sheer entertainment he finds in mankind’s relatively recent foibles and misdeeds. From Inglourious Basterds‘ band of World War II Nazi-killers to his latest film’s vengeful slave turned bounty hunter, Tarantino has shown a knack for fitting his charismatic and electric characters into unexpected historical contexts with entertaining as hell results. It’s 1858 in America, and Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) is a dentist on a mission. It’s light on tooth decay, heavy on bloodshed and utterly unrelated to the field of dentistry. He’s a bounty hunter whose latest targets, The Brittle Brothers, present a challenge in that he has no idea what they look like. Undeterred, Schultz acquires, apprentices and befriends a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) who can identify the brothers. In exchange the ex-dentist will help the newly freed Django reunite with his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who currently belongs to a cruel but undeniably charming plantation owner named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). What follows is a tale that would have made American History class a hell of a lot more memorable as Schultz and Django cut a bloody swath across the post-Civil War South through racists, enforcers and recognizable TV actors (Tom Wopat! Lee Horsley!) from decades past. The cinematic violence is paired with

If there’s one thing Spike Lee is known for, it’s complaining about racism. Turns out he’s also a sometimes movie director, which I hadn’t realized, what with him being mostly in the news for being an asshole or calling Clint Eastwood a racist. This time he has his sights set on Quentin Tarantino and the upcoming Django Unchained.  Lee blew up Twitter (or at least my Twitter), criticizing the film and his perception that it makes light of slavery and uses it for laughs and entertainment rather than being Amistad 2. Lee said the film was “disrespectful to his ancestors” and called slavery a holocaust via Twitter. His exact words: “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.” Wow, seeing Django Unchained must have really gotten under Lee’s skin – or I guess it would have, if he had actually seen it. Yeah, Spike’s diatribe against the film comes from his perception of it, not him having, you know, actually seen it.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s the coolest movie column of the year. Most nights, at least. Coolest Person of the Year – It’s a fascinating thing, for Time’s Joel Stein to name someone like Lena Dunham as the “Coolest Person of the Year” for 2012. Here on the Internet, she’s been the subject of much derision. Her creation, the HBO series Girls, has been the subject of heated discussion. Is it terrible? Is it a gift from a place where more is expected from comedy? Or is it just awkward? No matter your take, it is interesting. And her bold sensibilities combined with the network shield of Judd Apatow has created something culturally relevant. She even lost her virginity to President Obama, or something like that. Either way, TIME is right. She is pretty cool.

According to an interview with We Got This Covered, Quentin Tarantino is expressing the unlikelihood that he’ll ever direct Kill Bill Vol. 3 and the certainty that he’ll never dive into the world of James Bond. Meanwhile, Danny Boyle is also politely passing on Bond speculation, claiming that he’s “not very good with huge amounts of money.” Frankly, not getting a third Kill Bill is an excellent situation because it leaves Tarantino free to work on other fresh projects that don’t already exist as a complete story. Surely there’s another historical wrong that he can correct through film besides the Holocaust and American slavery. Still, if Casino Royale was the only chance we had to see Tarantino join MI6, it would be nice to visit an alternate universe where he launched Daniel Craig into a tuxedo. And wouldn’t it be awesome to see Boyle take on Bond? Give it some energy? Skyfall was a fantastic slow burn, but it’s time Bond kicked it back into high gear. His forthcoming film Trance – starring James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson — sees theaters in March 2013, but he hasn’t publicly committed to a follow-up. The same goes for Tarantino, who has a lot of projects to choose from (just counting from the ones he’s mentioned over the years that haven’t yet come to fruition). Other than these denials, there’s no word yet on what they’ll be focused on in the coming year. Hopefully we’ll find out soon.

Editor’s Note: Landon is participating in a top secret experiment this week, so he’s invited colleague Joshua Coonrod to fill in for him. Your usual Culture Warrior and I teach at the same university (Indiana U – home of Breaking Away and the Hoosiers) in the same communications program. Amongst the most interesting things about teaching media studies at a major university is the sense you get of what young film students are interested in, what (few) films drive them into theaters, and how they understand the constantly shifting mediascape around them. While you obviously don’t have to be an academic to watch film, love it, study it and critique it (re: the title of this site), it is intriguing to consider how upcoming film students – who make a decision to invest copious amounts of time, energy, and money into the study of film – approach the medium. With all the end-of-year discussions of 2012’s best films, what have those students been heralding? From my experience – barely anything. I feel like there’s a lot of assumptions as to the answer to that question, though. Film students? They like foreign films, right? Really arty, cerebral shit? Don’t they want to prove themselves by knowing the most obscure, hard-to-find films? My semester began with a student introducing himself in (just about) the following way: “My favorite filmmaker is this director Quentin Tarantino. He made this film Inglourious Basterds. Everyone should really check it out.” People nodded. The student looked proud of himself. I stared blankly, wondering

A prominent theater owner once told me a story about two production assistants hustling it out for little pay on a Dolph Lundgren workout video. Part of the video involved Lundgren running down a sandy hill, so when they needed to do more takes, the PAs had to smooth out the footprints in the sand (of which, yes, there was only one set). The two PAs threw themselves into the task with such gusto that the director was awe-struck. They rolled on their sides down the hill, happily did any other task necessary and even grabbed a dog turd bare-handed to get it out of a shot on a sidewalk. The director talked about them to everyone, claiming they were the best PAs he’d ever seen in his career. One of them was apparently Quentin Tarantino. It’s a bit of a myth that he learned about movies exclusively by working at a video store, and even if this story isn’t true, it’s fun to believe it — if only to imagine Tarantino furiously doing menial tasks and ripping dog shit off the ground without question. However, Movies.com has a relic of his early career with a big more proof to it: an excellent video where Richard Gladstein recounts Harvey Weinstein‘s reaction to reading the script for Pulp Fiction for the first time.

With the year winding to a close, the last great hopes of the 2012 movie-going public are left resting on the final films set to roll out in the coming weeks. Let’s be frank – 2012 has had some real disappointments in various ways (we’re still wincing from Prometheus, and plenty of people didn’t find what they were looking for in The Dark Knight Rises), but there’s still time for certain productions to deliver on their promise. Certain productions like Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained, for instance. While we’ll have to wait until next month to see the film (one that Tarantino is probably still cutting together as we type this), we can certainly have a good time with the project’s latest batch of marketing materials. Months from now, they may be all we have to look back on fondly, should Django follow in other disappointing footsteps (however, we pray it won’t). The film’s official website has recently rolled out and, in addition to being just damn fun to explore, it also features some fun takeaway bits, like these new wallpapers that focus on seven specific Django characters (and Tarantino himself, of course). It looks like all the wallpapers are also available as Facebook cover images, if you’re into that sort of thing. Just go Django-crazy, okay? Check out the eight new wallpapers after the break. Doesn’t your computer deserve a flashy, anachronistic treat today?

We all know what time it is, people – it’s time for our daily Star Wars: Episode VII rumor! While this week’s other rumors have centered on people possibly wanting to get involved with the project (namely, that director Colin Trevorrow might helm the project and that screenwriter Michael Arndt is probably a lock to script it), today’s is all about people who are not interested in signing their lives away to Disney’s latest endeavor. And, man, are some of these people being harsh about it. To wit, the project’s “maybe-director” list has been rumored to include names like Trevorrow, Brad Bird, Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Matthew Vaughn, and many more, but at least three possible helmers have now taken various opportunities to talk about how not interested they are in the project. Who’s out? Let’s find out.

Quentin Tarantino has never shied away from the debt he owes to foreign cinema when it comes to his own films, and whether they’re called homages or ripoffs the bottom line remains that certain movies from overseas inspired some of his most well known features. Reservoir Dogs is a blatant lift of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, Inglourious Basterds found inspiration from Enzo Castellari’s The Inglorious Bastards and Tarantino’s two-part, female led revenge thriller Kill Bill? You need look no further than Toshiya Fujita‘s 1973 classic, Lady Snowblood. Japan, 1874, and the cries of a newborn baby can be heard echoing in the cells of a women’s prison. Deemed a “child of the netherworld” upon her birth we next see Yuki Kashima (Meiko Kaji) twenty years later as an adult walking a secluded and snowy road. A group of men approach carting their gang boss leader in a rickshaw, and when they attempt to forcibly move Kashima she slices and dices her way through them like blood filled bags of butter, painting the snow red as she goes. As the gang leader falls beneath her blade he asks who sent her, and he dies knowing only that it was revenge.

A movie like The Man With The Iron Fists, with the tagline of “They put the F.U. in Kung Fu,” can really go either way. While such a tagline promises some cool fight scenes and much bad-assery, do the goods stop there? Also, can RZA from The Wu-Tang Clan direct? Hell yes, RZA can direct! While the film does lag at around the three-quarter mark, not only are its fight scenes awesome and bloody, but they are creatively shot and have great cinematography. This, in combine with a gleefully clever and referential script co-written by RZA and Eli Roth, make for a fun film that fits nicely within the film’s “presentor,” Quentin Tarantino’s, postmodernist pantheon. After all, there’s even a cameo from Pam Grier.