Quentin's First Kiss

Rating: Null/10 (26 December 2000)

Reservoir Dogs is the first kiss in the trilogy of "pure" QT films. Pulp Fiction can be seen as a date and Jackie Brown as a marriage.
Reservoir Dogs is the brief, sweet first kiss that leaves you exhilarated, a little unsure of yourself and finds you walking away with images in your head and blood pumping in your ears. I like this film.
The editing is concise and flows as effortlessly as the dialogue, with the flashback structure providing a foundation for the actual "real-time" scene in the warehouse, it actually works better than I expected when I first saw this movie.
The cast is as uniformly magnificent as the blacksuits the professionals wear with a stand-up performance from Steve Buscemi as the misanthropic Mr Pink ( who, by the way, DOESN'T tip) a menace to coffee shop waitresses everywhere.
This film has faced charges from critics that it is nihilistic and misogynistic, neither of which holds any weight.
It is a modern moral story, with traditional themes of the gangster film; success, failure, loyalty and betrayal. As one line on the British VHS box states "the best case for going straight".
Women have no real place in this film, they don't belong. Add a woman and the film changes dramatically. The professionals are lonely men who feel that the women circle outside their zone of existence. This is seen in the number of references to them in the film. For a misogynistic film they sure talk about women a lot.
There is not a great deal of violence in this film, but the violence is REAL, something cinema goers are not used to. The violence is slow, loud, painful and with consequences that the characters have to deal with.
Reservoir Dogs is not film noir, nor is it neo-film noir. It is postmodern film noir, edgy, slick, controversial and very subjective. Watch this film once and you will enjoy it, watch this film more than once more than once and you will see things you didn't see before. Go on... Kiss Tarantino