Hounds Of Love

Rating: 7/10 (16 January 2020)

As if I've not started enough stupid internal lists to I've decided that we're going to run through Quentin Tarantino's career and reappraise how I feel about it. So naturally, we started at the beginning.
When a jewellery heist goes violently out of hand, a group of career criminals return to base and try to determine what went wrong. Though they've taken precautions and are using codenames, the remaining members of the group begin to believe that one of them may be a police informant.
So. This is an Iconic movie in my life. I had the poster on the wall of my University dorm room, and a framed picture of Tarantino at other points. We even, at my insistence, recreated the final third of the movie for one of my friend's art projects. The point is, I was really (embarrassingly) into this film a few decades ago. Now.... I feel it's got some undeniably iconic scenes but I'm a little underwhelmed by some of the other aspects of it.
It's a lot more awkward than I remember. He's one of my favourite actors, but Steve Buscemi trips over his lines a lot. You could argue that is creating a realistic style but if that's the case, he's the only one doing it, as Harvey Keitel is all about the style of his lines. "You shoot this man, you die next. I repeat. You shoot this man you die next". A few of the aspects of the back stories aren't up to that much. Particularly the ten minutes devoted to Mr Orange's anecdote, which isn't particularly funny. The pop culture discussions though are excellent and were along with "Clerks" revolutionary at the time.
Visually it's dynamic, with the camera chasing the crooks down the street, for example. But there's some odd choices, such as a combined focus two shot that has a distinct and obvious line down the middle of the screen.
Generally I still feel like "Reservoir Dogs" is a good film, a great film even . . but perhaps not the all-time classic I used to think it was.