Mainstream Tarantino

Rating: 8/10 (25 July 2015)

Tarantino is a great director, no doubt about that. Every movie he makes its a truly pleasure to watch, in every detail, from the music, to the camera shots, the dialogs, the acting, everything. Django Unchained is no exception. It is fun, enjoyable, and though long, it never gets boring.
What I did miss, however, was some of the more intricate plot lines of other Tarantino movies such as Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, or Inglorious Bastards. Tarantino does seem to enjoy making Westerns, judging by the fact he is now doing another one. And the genre definitely allows for the spectacular bloodshed he so enjoys filming. But the story of Django misses the dramatic unraveling of events that is so enjoyable about Tarantino, it is quite straightforward and the good and bad guys are very easy to identify, and sometimes the plot line gets very predictable (even though Tarantino has the talent to make even a predictable storyline to be enjoyable to watch; the devil is in the details)
When the movie had just come out, there was a lot of fuss about the use of the n-word. Even for me, that I am not American, it gets pretty disturbing and uncomfortable. I don't have anything to say about the race issues with this movie that has not been said before, but I can totally understand how people got mad about it. Race and slavery are such sensitive issues, that a white person must be very careful to not make it a racist movie, even if the intentions are completely the opposite, as it is clear here. There is virtually no white American who is a white guy in this movie, and it is clear that Tarantino himself is not a racist. But once again, the devil is in the details.
All of this criticism should not make it seem like it is a bad movie. At all. It is definitely something you don't see everyday in Cinemas. Tarantino is definitely one of the best American directors alive, and chances are that whatever other movie you find on cable one night, will probably be worse than Django Unchained.