Reservoir Dogs
It’s a bit surreal to think that Quentin Tarantino has been making films for 20+ years now. At the same time, it’s hard to remember before Tarantino was in my moviewatching life. That happened in 1994 when I watched “Pulp Fiction” for the first time, but by the time I backtracked to watch “Reservoir Dogs,” it goes without saying that I would be a Tarantino fan for the rest of my life, although I’ll admit that when “Four Rooms” came out in ’95, some faith was shaken a bit (although Tarantino’s segment WAS the best of that bunch).
“Reservoir Dogs” was his opening salvo, and damn, it’s an explosive one. The thriller is about the aftermath about a jewelery heist gone very wrong, but the story is secondary to the style Tarantino accomplishes. First, there’s the dialogue, starting with the famous diner scene where Mr. Brown (Tarantino himself) goes into a soliloquy about the real meaning behind Madonna’s song, “Like a Virgin.” Even when we see Mrs White (Harvey Keitel), Pink (Steve Buscemi), and Blonde (Michael Madsen) going back and forth at the warehouse as they try to sort out what happened, and why it happened, the dialogue by QT is music to our ears. He has an uncanny knack for language that defines character, which helps since most of the characters are anonymous to us, since the ringleader (Joe, played by the burly, bullying Lawrence Tierney) has assigned them colors to hide their identities. A good thing, too, since they have an undercover cop (Mr. Orange, played by Tim Roth) in their midst, although he’s shot when they’re trying to escape, and spends most of the time bleeding in the warehouse, begging to be taken to a doctor. Mr. White is compassionate, but Pink is sure of a setup. It’s not until an hour in that we know the truth for sure.
The other part of that quintessential “Tarantino vibe” is the music. His ear for what works in his films has introduced me to several songs and scores I never would have been exposed to otherwise. QT uses existing songs, and musical cues, the way Spielberg relies on John Williams, or Hitchcock did Bernard Herrmann, and it gives his films a feel that no other filmmaker has. “Little Green Bag,” “Stuck in the Middle With You,” “I Gotcha,” and “Coconut” are just a few of the songs that last in our memory by the time this film ends. Like any great soundtrack, even when we listen to the tracks after the fact, we remember exactly what was going on in the film when we first heard them. There’s that classic, slow-motion opening sequence that has “Little Green Bag” in the background; the brutal torture of a cop by Mr. Blonde as he dances to “Stuck in the Middle With You”; and the odd melancholy you feel as “Coconut” plays at the end, and everyone’s dead.
Like every other Tarantino film, “Dogs” is great entertainment, even if QT’s sense of purpose has deepened with each successive film. This film is the only one (save for “Death Proof,” his double-bill entry on “Grindhouse”) that is pure genre, without a buried thematic agenda. The only agenda Tarantino had in this film is to take us on a wild cinematic ride that was terrific entertainment. And man, does this film get the job done; from the opening scene in the diner to a bravura monologue by Roth’s Orange telling an anecdote about a drug deal to a scene of Pink trying to get Tierney’s Joe to let him change his color “name” to the tense exchanges in the warehouse, Tarantino displays the technical skill and writer’s genius that will grow into one of the most distinctive, original, and boldly enjoyable series of films in movie history.
