Sometimes I can be a very generous soul. More often when I’m employed than not, but even I can’t skip the holiday season completely. So Vivian and I gave a good buddy this film on DVD today and after lunch we watched it together.
Reservoir Dogs was Quentin Tarantino’s debut as a writer and director, released ten years ago, and boy what a blast it is. Five career criminals who only know each other by color nicknames (Mr. White, Mr. Brown, and so forth) given to them by the old crime boss who’s planned the job and brought them together.
The acting is terrific and for awhile I wondered how Tarantino scored such recognizable names for his small movie but then I realized that anyone reading the script would understand the quality and want to be in it. Harvery Keitel (Mr. White) and Tim Roth (Mr. Orange) have the biggest roles but Steve Buscemi (Mr. Pink and don’t think he didn’t chafe at that assignment), Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde), Lawrence Tierney as the old hand who organizes the smash and grab, and Chris Penn as Tierney’s son Nice Guy Eddie all hit their marks.
One thing that most people (certainly me) on realize after repeated watchings, and then go “damn that was so obvious but so smart,” is that even though this film is all about the events leading up to and after a jewelry store robbery, the robbery itself (and the inside of the jewelry store too) is never shown. This is such a smart, and unHollywood-like choice, but really characterizes the kind of movie Tarantino made. Why show the job? It would hardly add anything to the film except time, be expensive, and this way the dialog can create visions of mystery and violence in the viewer’s mind. Another scene uses a similar technique on a smaller scale: when Madsen’s Blonde is left alone with the beat cop he’s kidnapped, the camera focuses away from the gruesome act itself but we hear the actors instead. The DVD shows two alternate takes where the explicit action was filmed but in editing they realized that nothing onscreen could match what would be generated in the mind.
Tarantino also plays serious games in sequencing the scenes and the flow of time, much as he would in Pulp Fiction. The first scene is the whole crew talking over breakfast before the job and the second is an abrupt jump to Roth and Keitel driving away from the robbery, Roth bleeding from a bullet in his belly all over the back seat, screaming and crying, Keitel trying to calm him down. We aren’t shown until much later, nearly at the end, how Roth was shot. We get to see how some of the characters (Madsen, Keitel, Roth) are brought into the job but not the others and these scenes are also scattered, in a manner almost random yet clearly calculated.
Bloody but amazing. Still my favorite QT movie. And I did like Jackie Brown even though almost everyone else didn’t.
Highly recommended but not for those who shun violence and blood
BillSaysThis 