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I'm Stephen Matt Kath, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest Plotting Recitative Edition.

It's Thursday, January 3, 2013. On today's show, the new Quentin Tarantino movie, Django Unchained. We'll talk about it with Slate's

own Aisha Harris. And then we talk about the epic musical Les Miserables. It's finally come to the big

screen. And finally, Quora, the question and answer website founded by former Facebook employees.

Joining me today is Slate's film critic, Dana Stevens. Happy New Year, Stephen.

Hey, happy New Year, Dana.

And later in the show, we'll be joined by Julia Turner, coming in by phone. But first, let's get into Django Unchained. Django Unchained is the new movie from director Quentin Tarantino, obviously, as we all know, director of Pulp Fiction and more recently in Glorious Basterds. and we're joined for our segment by Aisha Harris, who is the Aisha.

What would your title be?

You're the assistant to the browbeat blog? Exactly. Yes, that would be my title. Fantastic. It's a Blacksploitation Western starring Christoph Valtz as Dr. Schultz, the bounty hunter, who frees and then teams up with the title character, Django,

who's played marvelously, in my opinion, by Jamie Fox. Very quickly, before we get into the discussion about it, I want to add that the film features, Dana, I think, just truly one of the remarkable

performances of Samuel L. Jackson's career as a house slave named Stephen. And I knew very little about the movie going in. I didn't realize that the man who had played the gloriously menacing Nazi from Inglorious Bastards was going to be the lead, the male lead opposite Jamie Fox in the film, Christoph Fultz, and that's, I think, a remarkable performance.

But anyway, Dana, I'm dying to know what you think about this movie.

But first, why don't we take a listen to a clip from it?

What's your name, boy?

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