Reservoir Dogs DVD > Reviews > "Hey, what's going on? Can you hear that...?"

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Loved it
Story	Outstanding
Characters / Performances	Outstanding
Special Effects	Good
Soundtrack	Outstanding

Advantages:	Consistent and intelligent script, memorable performances .
Disadvantages:	??? !

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Je suis malade.

Last night… 4.30am… Something is wrong with me, I can’t sleep. Tired I am, of trying… With a sudden jump I get out of bed, just to, dizzy, fall straight on the floor. Tripping on myself I manage to stumble to the bathroom and wash my face, and it was then that I realize something is definitely very wrong with me!

I’m not one of those people with an illness addiction, very rarely I get out of my natural physical condition, so, what’s happening to me today…? Deeply staring at myself in the mirror, I remembered a soundtrack that would certainly help me get through this… “Lookin’ back on the track for a little green bag, Got to find just the kind or I’m losin’ my mind”: I’m losing my mind! – Voices wouldn’t stop calling me… “Lookin’ for some happiness, But there is only loneliness to find, Jump to the left, turn to the right, Lookin’ upstairs, lookin’ behind…”

I’m sick.

I can’t walk. The floor is always cold and I, standing there, admiring that climatic stability – “my life is not lost, it isn’t…!” I thought in calling for someone, but it’s too early… this lack of communication makes me feel like that old man without ink left to write uses his own blood to finish the script… My body wants to give up; I don’t have too many minutes left… On a last effort I hold myself to the sofa and turn the TV on… No images though, I turn off the antenna tired of the public TV crap(!), only my movies can save me now, and there it was… smiling for my disgrace, like the eternity could be of any interest for me, and dumb I whispered… “Au revoir, les enfants…”

1992. When everyone’s attention was upon “A Few Good Men”, “Scent of a Woman” and especially “Unforgiven”, “Mr. Brown” was trying to finally finish a movie after the failed attempt with “My Best Friend’s Birthday” (1987). Considered by a considerable number of movie enthusiasts as the “coolest” cinema director ever (I personally think that he is a lot more than just that…), Master Quentin Tarantino had in “Reservoir Dogs” his second directing work, (by many labelled as his debut feature film as a director), and the opportunity to show to the world that a “gangsters” movie doesn’t need an exorbitant budget to be simultaneously a great success in the box office and a classic among its genre.

Inspired by Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” (1971) and “the Reservoir movie” as Master Quentin would prefer to call “Au Revoir, Les Enfants” (1987), (he couldn’t pronounce it anyway), Tarantino combines both titles to get “Reservoir Dogs”… His first masterpiece…

Released on the theatres two years earlier than “Pulp Fiction” this movie reveals the geniality of Tarantino as screenwriter and director. When the movie starts, with the pop hymn “Like a Virgin”, sounding like an interpretation of the Ancient and the New Testament, it’s easy to understand that popular culture will be all around the film. Master Quentin is not an erudite and he doesn’t pretend to be one. He deals with the undeniable aptitude of the images, figures, colours, narratives, and sensations that the XX century’s urban culture “cooked”; The “funky” vibration and that “cool” attitude so oblivious to the gravity of the world, and at the same time so close of what is believable and presumptuous.

With the music of the 70’s he draws a tune and a rhythm to the movie, and with references to Lee Marvin or Charles Bronson, tough among the toughs, he creates a game of mirrors for his own characters, he puts up a plaque as a tribute and typifies their iconophile – where you can fit as well, the film noir, the spaghetti western, the oriental cinema or the comics. Master Quentin loves to tell stories, you’ll pick that straight away in this first movie and you will understand it even better if you take a look to all the other ones or to any interview with the director. The art to narrate is not something simple, is not a democratic faculty. If not a privilege is a vocation. Tarantino, a natural cinephile, shows us he knows quite well that some of his cinema’s historic strength comes from his capacity to create illusions, manipulate expectations, surprise or confuse (the references to Corman or Godard are, in general, an exact illustration of it).

Anyway, six men are hired by a mob boss and his son to carry out an armed robbery to a diamante’s warehouse. However, nothing goes as plan and the six colour-coded men (Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker) and Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino) are taken by despair and possessed by madness. Not knowing each other the heist should have been perfect, but there’s someone in the “gang” that’s not quite what he looks like…

Intrinsic to the best fiction are always the artificial and the demagogy: the lying truth. And Tarantino knows that more than comfort, the spectator loves the provocation. “Reservoir Dogs” is a movie with a provocative narrative. Recurring to a non-linear style (not flashbacks!), he makes the story go backwards and slow down so he doesn’t push us straight to the abysm. The story starts by the middle and ends up on the right moment: one, two, three, four gunshots and a black screen, echoing the sadness, the pain and the betrayal…

You will soon notice that the characters in this movie talk a lot. They scream, ironize, complain, revindicate, and compromise themselves. It’s not a polished language; it’s a “gang” language, from the streets, from the underground. It even gets to be laughable and sometimes irritant. A dialogue can be a circus number or a texture study, the timber, the speech’s rhythm. The characters fire words with the same aptitude – masculine, heroic and nostalgic – that they pull their guns. They tell stories, loads of them, none really pedagogic though, some even getting very close of the absurd. And realising this you will easily understand how much Tarantino loves the language games. There are people like this, using the verb as a trampoline…

These characters live from their virility, from the ceremonial (just pay attention to the shooting scenes), but I wouldn’t say that the movie transmits an anti-feminist feeling. Maybe it is there, involuntarily, unconsciously, it’s hard to know. There are no feminine characters that I can tell you. But as James Brown would say “this is a man’s world”. Not an insensible one though, otherwise there wouldn’t be the affection, the betrayal, the “dead-end”, the tragedy, that after all is the moral key of the movie. There are several models of the man, and something that unifies them – maybe the honour, the link that shortens any human gathering, as we know from other stories of cops, gangsters or the army. Here, one life may not be worth more than one bullet, but one death may symbolize the integrity of justice – as you will know by the end.

“Reservoir Dogs” is a violent movie without any doubt. Not during or after the movie is it easy to relax. Just focusing on the well-known ear-cutting scene, the violence here is of an intolerable domain, unacceptable really. You will prefer to be blind, to look around, to force the ignorance just to protect yourself; and even knowing that you will not be able to really see it in detail as Tarantino hides it, the image of violence stays, engraved in your mind in a way you can’t claim against...

Among other things, engraved in your memory one more thing will stay: the (photo)graphic elegance of the movie. The contrast between the black suits and the red of the blood; the reference, on the final scene, to a figurative stereotype of the occidental imaginary: Mr. Orange in the arms of Mr. White, emulating pieta; It’s the dramatic density achieved in these long shots that, through real time, allow us to absorb the most subtle detail of every movement or expression; the virtuosity of a phenomenal cast; More than enough to make “Reservoir Dogs” a cult and of Master Quentin a genius of the cinematography.

A final word for the sensational soundtrack, a superb mixture of dialogues and songs from George Baker’s entertaining rock n’ roll in “Little Green Bag” to Joe Tex’s “I Gotcha”. Another special mention to “Stuck in the Middle With You” originally from Bob Dylan, here on a (just) famous version by the Stealers Wheel, and to Bedlam’s killing version of “Magic Carpet Ride” (Steppenwolf) entitled this time “Harvest Moon”. Closing the movie with a golden key there’s Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut”, and by the way, I’m not dying anymore…

© pimentelteixeira2007 

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Reservoir Dogs.