Tarantino Rewrites the genre

Rating: 8/10 (11 January 2013)

Quentin Tarantino is known for taking a typical film story and turning it on its head in such a way that the story teller himself is the actual star of the film. If you think back to films like Pulp Fiction, Foxy Brown, Kill Bill or Reservoir Dogs, there isn't a single event in any of these stories that film goers are not familiar with; yet, like Cohen Brother's films, we go to see just how Tarantino will tell the tale. Django is one of those films which is so bizarre that I predict most people who see it, will see it more than once to make sure they actually saw what they thought they saw. The difference with Django is that it is the truth that is more bizarre than anything the storyteller does with the story.
The main character is a freed slave, traveling to the deep south to rescue his slave wife. What is bizarre is the true accounts of inhumanity of slave-holding America. As the character goes deeper south, man's mistreatment of his fellow man gets sicker. I find myself asking Did people really treat each other in such ways? The answer is yes, of course. In this one film, full of chains, shackles, whips, bills of sale, human branding, and slaves forced to fight to the death for entertainment, the director doesn't have to invent bizarre scenes because they were all parts of American history that was too bizarre to be believed. As the vengeance killings increase in cruelty, the viewer is forced to realized that this is what you come to a Tarantino film for, so how much better are we than those characters in the film being entertained by it. This director has made a career out of borrowing from obscure Japanese cinema styles and bringing them to the American audience. With Django, he takes the Spaghetti Western and adds the harsh truth; the one thing missing from the genre that turns it on its head.