The First Film

Rating: 9/10 (27 May 2019)

Quentin Tarantino is one of my favorite guilty pleasure directors. I'm not a huge fan of ultra-violent films with blood, guts, and torture, but it's just the way that Tarantino does it in his movies makes it enjoyable.
I love how the film starts, too. A bunch of tough guys sitting around a breakfast table enjoying diner food, shooting the breeze about various stuff while smoking some cigarettes and getting almost philosophical about Madonna and whether or not tipping is a smart thing to do. Plus, there's the cool title sequence set to a band that I had never heard before playing a song that just fits the scene.
Reservoir Dogs is shot very well and still holds up nicely on a good HD screen. The camera work is clever, and usually quite steady. There are some really iconic shots all over the place, especially given the fact that the majority of the film takes place in essentially a warehouse, an office, and a bathroom. I also notice that the film has a good soundtrack, like pretty much any of Tarantino's films. Tarantino's use of music like 'Stuck in the Middle with you' and 'Little Green Bag' in the scenes they are featured in is wonderful and, well, iconic. I can't think of 'Stuck in the Middle with You' without thinking of Michael Madsen dancing around with a straight razor and looking smooth and crazy.
The violence in this film is a major driving point also. The primary event of violence the film focuses on is obviously the botched diamond robbery. What's genius about it is that Tarantino doesn't ever show the robbery at all. All you know is that Mister Blonde went nuts and shot a lot of people. With just a few choice sentences, though, and a little overactive imagination, you can imagine a whole bloodbath. Much of the raw violence of the film takes place, if I am correct, in the last half-hour with the flashbacks involving how Mister Orange gets shot and, of course, the Mexican standoff between three of the characters at the end that looks right out of Sergio Leone's films. It's sort of like Jordan Peele's 'Get Out', a slow build-up to a violent climax. However, there is one scene that still is hard to watch in terms of violence and that is the scene with Michael Madsen torturing the uniformed cop. It's harder to watch for me, since I respect the cops a lot.
Acting-wise, this film is pretty cool. Of course, you can see the usual Tarantino regulars like Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, and Tim Roth (and personally, I wouldn't have been surprised if the role of the black cop would have gone to Samuel L. Jackson if this film had been made today), but also a few actors I had never seen in a Tarantino film. Steve Buscemi is okay, but doesn't do too much in the film. Keitel and Roth have great camaraderie as a sort of master-apprentice style relationship and personally, I would have loved to learn more about Keitel's character than just that one flashback, since he seems like a just interesting character. Tim Roth, who I know of from watching Pulp Fiction and Marvel's The Incredible Hulk, is pretty young and slick. I should probably look into a few more of his films, since I find his performance in Reservoir Dogs not too shabby. Chris Penn plays a good gangster who kind of reminds me of a smarter Santino Corleone with a much cooler temper, too. Same with Laurence Tierney. On the other hand, Michael Madsen, whoa. This guy plays a real nasty psychopath and does it with gusto. If they had actually filmed the Robbery sequence, I think he would give me nightmares with his thirst for blood. The torture sequence he partakes in is, as previously mentioned, really simplistic yet at the same time, messed up. Eddie Bunker and the man himself, Quentin Tarantino, are, like Buscemi, woefully underused also as they play a couple of interesting characters who, like Keitel's Mister White, are characters I want to learn more about.
Like I said, this film is a good film. I don't know if it is Tarantino's best, since I've still got a few of his to watch and since each film builds off each other, it's hard to label it. Nevertheless, a good film to watch if you got some free time and want to start watching Tarantino's style of cinema.