After another round of edits, the film may have another shot in China, however. From the Guardian:

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Deadline first reported the news, which caught Sony Pictures off-guard:

The studio which is releasing the blockbuster film internationally was caught by surprise, prompting studio spokesman Steve Elzer to tell me tonight: “We regret that Django Unchained has been removed from theaters and are working with the Chinese authorities to determine whether the film can be rescheduled.” In some cinemas, screenings were stopped after one minute of footage was shown “because of technical reasons … for the time being,” according to a notice distributed to cinema companies. It quoted unnamed industry insiders as saying that nudity prompted the sudden cancellations despite its official pre-release review.

Despite the nudity, the cancellation has puzzled executives since it comes after the movie had been edited to comply with notoriously stringent Chinese censorship regulations.

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Of course it’s standard operating procedure for someone in my position (or yours, for that matter!) to mock the Oscars for all kinds of reasons: The terrible musical numbers, the doomed attempts to seem hip and relevant, the amazing empty stretches in the middle of the evening occupied only by technical awards no one outside the film industry understands and commercials for “financial products.” In a year when the most famous awards ceremony in the history of show business changes its name in a last-minute branding panic, that’s all way too easy. It wasn't clear that the Oscars had any further to fall after the legendary James Franco-Anne Hathaway debacle of two years ago and the emergency Billy Crystal early-'90s flashback of last year -- and indeed I suspect this year wasn't worse -- just cruder, stranger and more detached from the Oscars' alleged and theoretical purpose.

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ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Bradley Cooper, "Silver Linings Playbook"
WINNER: Daniel Day-Lewis, "Lincoln"
Hugh Jackman, "Les Misérables"
Joaquin Phoenix, "The Master"
Denzel Washington, "Flight"

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Alan Arkin, "Argo"
Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook"
Philip Seymour Hoffman, "The Master"
Tommy Lee Jones, "Lincoln"
WINNER: Christoph Waltz, "Django Unchained"

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Jessica Chastain, "Zero Dark Thirty"
WINNER: Jennifer Lawrence, "Silver Linings Playbook"
Emmanuelle Riva, "Amour"
Quvenzhané Wallis, "Beasts of the Southern Wild"
Naomi Watts, "The Impossible"

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Amy Adams, "The Master"
Sally Field, "Lincoln"
WINNER: Anne Hathaway, "Les Misérables"
Helen Hunt, "The Sessions"
Jacki Weaver, "Silver Linings Playbook"

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If you've been to the movies in the last half-century, you know the White Savior genre well. It's the catalog of films that features white people single-handedly rescuing people of color from their plight. These story lines insinuate that people of color have no ability to rescue themselves. This both makes white audiences feel good about themselves by portraying them as benevolent messiahs (rather than hegemonic conquerors), and also depicts people of color as helpless weaklings -- all while wrapping such tripe in the cinematic argot of liberation.

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My mea culpa goes out to anyone who had to behold the shameless spectacle that involved button-pushing comic Lisa Lampanelli using the word “nigga” in a tweet, then arguing against a torrent of condemnation from the Twitterverse that it was socially acceptable.

You see, I have argued in print for years that people are too precious about avoiding the word “nigger” when the subject is at hand. When the NAACP held a funeral for the word, I wrote a column praising its intentions but opposing its actions.

A word should never be banned out of context, I argued. Especially a word with such conflicted and confusing history for those of us who are darker than blue.

When Spike Lee and other well-known cultural commentators began to pile on Quentin Tarantino for his liberal use of the N-word in his blaxploitation western masterpiece "Django Unchained," I wrote a story for this very outlet insisting that Tarantino had tapped a proud history in creating modern Hollywood’s first black superhero.

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Known more for fart jokes than they are for decapitations, the cast of "SNL" went for a Tarantino level of gory authenticity in their biblical revenge flick, "Djesus UnCrossed."

Starring Waltz as the son of God himself and featuring Taran Killam doing a a delightfully spot-on Brad Pitt (going after Ro-mans, naturally), the overall effect is pretty darn convincing.

Though you should be warned: It might be a little early to see a head get split in half, so maybe put your breakfast down while you watch.

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While "Django Unchained," for instance, received an Oscar nomination for best picture, Weinstein takes the fall for Quentin Tarantino's absence in the best director category. "We tried to show it to people in theaters, not on DVD," he said, noting that the film's "screeners" sent to voters went out later than is typical. "It’s an epic movie and that man put his whole life and heart into this. It’s his most important movie, his most important subject matter, and the idea of DVDs stopped me cold. And I stopped them. I wouldn’t do it." Ah, well!

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Listings for the dolls “were removed as they were in violation of our Offensive Materials policy”, an eBay representative tells Deadline. EBay forbids offensive products “that graphically portray graphic violence or victims of violence, unless they have substantial social, artistic, or political value” including “racially or ethnically offensive language, historical items, reproductions, and works of art and media”.

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Boy, does he love to give his characters the chance to say that one. Think Dennis Hopper's coolly manipulative speech about Sicilians in "True Romance."  The dead body storage problem in "Pulp Fiction." Steve Buscemi's attempt to break up a fight in "Reservoir Dogs." And boy does it reliably tick people off. So fond is Tarantino of the word that it's a wonder it took him so long to figure out that if he made a movie set in the plantation-era South, he could deploy the word all the time, because, you know, history. So it should have come as zero surprise to anyone that after winning a Golden Globe Sunday evening for his epithet-laced "Django Unchained" screenplay, he would then use the word to talk about the controversy about using the word.

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In many stories, the author, like a magician, tries to hide his or her hand. But Bakhtin's ideas prove especially helpful in talking about stories where the author's presence comes through strong – like the movies of Quentin Tarantino.

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Those are pretty much the last factual statements you’re getting from me today, because we now enter the netherworld of opinion, contested research, prejudice and prevarication surrounding the issue of media violence, in which nobody knows anything and every utterance should be treated as dubious ass-covering.

Thursday’s White House meeting was one in a series of gatherings Biden is hosting as chair of a post-Newtown presidential task force on gun violence. Others may or may not have involved substantive discussion, but this one was evidently designed to placate people who are concerned about the effects of violent entertainment without actually broaching the topic. To go by the joint statement issued afterward by the showbiz bigwigs, it may have been the most guarded and noncommittal conversation in Washington history:

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Black abolitionists. Black outlaws. Black gunslingers of the west, south, east or north. These are the three groups of people that truly scare white Americans. And they rarely, if ever, appear on a Hollywood screen. They don't appear in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, either.

So what do we get? A violently entertaining, rugged individualist and shallow "abolitionist" by the name of Django, a bounty hunter whose killing spree is sanctioned by the U.S. government. That would be the same government which, in 1858, maintains "the peculiar institution" of slavery as a legal entity in many states. The same government that in most circumstances would have considered Django as bounty to be captured, not the bounty hunter. But this is Tarantino's playground.

Watch Tarantino in interviews. He's rather cocky about the history he thinks he's relating to Americans (which is sad, actually), so while Django is not a documentary, it's not "just a movie," either. Unfortunately, much critical history is lost or completely skewed in Tarantino's telling, even when totally unnecessary. This is a major flaw in a film that is supposed to be about a black superhero turning the tables on history. The problem is, you have to know the history first.

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In an interview for Britain's Channel 4 News, the "Django Unchained" director got heated after Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked, "Why are you so sure that there's no link between enjoying movie violence and enjoying real violence?"

Tarantino did not like that question one bit, and he was quick to say as much.

"Don't ask me a question like that -- I'm not biting ... I refuse your question ... It's none of your damn business what I think about that!" he shot back.

He went on to say that after answering the same question for 20 years, he's simply tired of talking about it. "The reason I don't want to talk about it is because I've said everything I have to say about it," he explained.

And perhaps the best part?

"I haven't changed my opinion one iota ... and I am shutting your butt down."

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How’s that for sneaking two Oscar contenders into an article about a January VOD release that will never be nominated for any awards by anybody? In all seriousness, I’m not sure whether to recommend “The Baytown Outlaws” as a guns ‘n’ glory time-waster or warn you off it as a piece of mendacious trash. So I’ll do both. A superficial and stylish redneck-sploitation spree, “Baytown Outlaws” has no real reason to exist beyond the quest for cash. Its appealing B-plus supporting cast, including Billy Bob Thornton, Eva Longoria and Andre Braugher, almost elevate it to the level of mainstream mediocrity – but then again, that was never the goal.

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First and foremost, the film dares to break a major taboo. Specifically, as the New York Times critic A.O. Scott put it, "Django" dares to show "regenerative violence visited by black against white instead of the reverse" -- a narrative that "has been almost literally unthinkable" in American life, much less in big-budget pop culture productions.

Second, the film does that in the immediate aftermath of a racially charged election that saw a black man reelected to the White House with the most diverse (read: non-white) coalition in presidential history.

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