Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
"When people ask me if I went to film
school, I tell them, 'No, I went to films.’"
n Quetin Tarintino
Quentin Tarintino is very
much a Hollywood Fairy Tale. Born in Tennessee of a broken family, his writing
talent cruel mocked by his mother at the tender age of fourteen, and a High
School drop-out, he migrated to California to chase a dream. His early work in
the Sunshine State included prestigious gigs like being an Usher in a Porn
Theatre and a Clerk in a Video store, two things that don’t even exist in the
USA economy anymore.
He did engage in a few
Writing/Acting/Directing/Producing projects that were either never completed or
destroyed. He had notable guest appearance on the TV show “The Golden Girls”
(first aired 1985, he appeared in 1988), but was still working in video store
when he wrote the script for this film, and seemed to have only one significant
Industry contact, a Producer and aspiring Actor Lawerance Bender, who was Tarantino’s
co-Writer here.
Bender had some success
but at this point, the early 1990s, it was just at the beginning of what would
be an illustrious career. Bender showed the script to his Acting Teacher, it
passed through a couple more hands, and finally Actor Harvey Keitel read it.
What was planned to be a micro-budget ($30 thousand) B&W film with a
no-name cast became respectable low-budget ($1.5-3 million) with a truly
remarkable cast that mixed recognizable faces with talented no-names, and for
both groups, this would provide career-defining roles for most.
It was first shown in 1992
at Cannes, and during its initial journey through the Festival Circuit, it was
like a bomb going off. Critic Jami Bernard, who saw it at Sundance, "I
don't think people were ready. They didn't know what to make of it. It's like
the first silent movie when audiences saw the train coming toward the camera
and scattered." He’s referring to “L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La
Ciotat” (1895), the very first piece of cinema to get a theatrical release.
A Critical darling, it
was snatched up by Miramax for distribution, doing good business despite its
limited distribution, then there was a second theatrical release because delays
in getting it to video, then becoming a best-seller when it finally reached
video stores in 1995. In 1995 Tarantino was 32-years-old and already had two
more theatrical hits, including “Pulp Fiction” (1994) considered by many to be his
masterpiece.
Tarantino’s style was forceful
and distinctive. His films were funny, cynical, violence and profanity-laden.
They were typically non-linear in plot (Tarantino likes to call his
story-telling style “Answers first”), and obsessed with pop-culture (there’s effectively
no score, but a cornucopia of samplings of 1970s pop-songs). Tarantino proved
himself to be a remarkably imaginative Writer even though he wore his references
to earlier cinema on his sleeve; here he borrowed most heavily from Director
Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing” (1956) for structure and Ringo Lam’s “City of
Fire” (1987) for plot-points.
Tarantino also shows a deft
hand of distributing the roles so that each part, even the smallest ones, show
each Actor is truly showcased. He created a wholly new style of dialogue, where
much is revealed through the completely mundane and seemingly beside-the-point,
and then to play these mundanities up against aggressive and visceral violent
sequences.
I think the key to
Tarantino’s esthetic is a new take on drawing from the Author’s own Autobiography,
not his life experiences or life lessons, but his experience of watching film,
the same movie, over and over, in fragments, on late night TV, found it while
channel surfing, so you don’t get to watch the scenes in intended order; the
mental gymnastics the viewer must make because essential connective scenes were
cut to make room for commercials, and talking with your friends during the
commercials as being part of the experience. He recognized that Exploitation,
not Art, dominates the industries output, because Exploitation provides a much
shorter path to emotional response and digs deeper into the memory, and, when
the Audience is honestly interested, Exploitation proves tremendously
imaginative.
The fact the we were
about to see something very new was obvious in the very first scene, where
eight male criminals in a coffee shop argue over the true meaning of Pop-singer
Madonna's song "Like a Virgin" (1984), unequal pay for women in the
American workforce, and the morality of tipping the Waitress. It’s long,
extremely vulgar, and very funny. It’s also entirely familiar to anyone who
ever sat around a table shooting the shit with their friends, and yet like
nothing we’d ever seen in a movie before. Then they get up, walk outside, and
are filmed strolling down the street in a shot that mimics Director Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969) and
then, suddenly, things jarringly accelerate. Though don’t know what the plot
is, from that point on, we’re in the middle of an extended climax that
stretches out the entire length of the rest of the movie. Our disorientation is
only slowly relieved by a series of deft flashbacks, shorter and more
intelligently placed than that device is generally applied.
True, Tarantino is a
panderer, as all Exploitation Filmmakers are, but an incredibly insightful one.
As Critic Owen Gleiberman wrote, “What makes these characters seem so
tantalizingly alive and true? Perhaps it's simply this: In a civilized world,
where people have to watch their tongues on the job, in the classroom, even,
perhaps, when speaking to their loved ones, there's something primal and
liberating about characters who can let it all hang out, whose ids come
bursting forth in white-hot chunks of verbal shrapnel.” And that’s just the
curse words, has there ever been a film maker who could as successfully Race-Bait
without being called Racist than Tarantino?
Tarantino could not have hoped for a better
cast … well, except maybe for Lawrence
Tierney,
who is quite good in the film, but was so difficult to work with Tarantino
because convinced he was mentally ill, “All the other actors and the crew can’t stand him. And all of a
sudden, he yells at me, does something disrespectful and so, I fired him at the
breakfast table. The crew breaks into applause.” The ensemble was
flawless, but without doubt, Michael Madsen towered above them all. He created
a menacing character that was unusually believable and uncomfortably likable.
He was already a veteran at this point, but this was his biggest role to-date,
and the torture scene, made him a star and got this film featured on at least
two “100 Scariest Scene” lists despite belonging in the Crime, not Horror, Genre.
During a screening at a film festival in Barcelona, fifteen people walked out
during the torture scene, including Horror film director Wes Craven and FX
Make-Up Artist Rick Baker. Baker told Tarantino he should take it as a
compliment.
Trailer:
Reservoir
Dogs (1992) Official Trailer #1 - Quentin Tarantino Movie
Part of the coffee shop
scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-qV9wVGb38
The torture scene:
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