Spring 2015 #4: Reservoir Dogs (1992) - Quentin Tarantino

I went to write this review and then read Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino, and Pulp Fiction’s entire Wikipedia pages instead.

Honestly I typed the heading to this article 45 minutes ago.

So now I’m here, wondering why I’m not the next great American film writer/director. And the fact of the matter is Quentin Tarantino has staked out a place for himself among the best filmmakers of all time. He consistently churns out movies that amaze, horrify, and move his audience, and he could probably go on doing this forever, because he is so in touch with his visual style and voice.

Just no more cameos please.

Reservoir Dogs is the film that is named as having revolutionized independent film (along with Tarantino’s second film, Pulp Fiction). Tarantino, working in his little video store in Manhattan Beach, had the idea to make a heist movie with his friends on 16-mm black-and-white film for $30,000. Harvey Keitel got ahold of the script and helped him raise $1.2 million. After a few screenings at Sundance, Cannes, and Toronto film festivals, the film was later distributed by Miramax and totaled $2.8 million in just 61 theaters. This doesn’t count the £6.5 million original run gross in the UK, and then millions later in VHS distribution. HIS FIRST FILM. NO STUDIO. I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T. 

I can’t even right now. Okay so basically Tarantino tells the story of a diamond heist gone terribly wrong, and has stated that the film overall is a montage to Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 film noir, The Killing. He also has mentioned the title came from when he recommended the film Au revoir les enfants at his video store and a customer thought he had said “Reservoir Dogs.” Who knows.

Look at this cool-ass gif someone made! This is from the first scene in the film, where the main characters get breakfast before the heist. Basically, six criminals are hired for the job, and are all given codenames of different colors.

Cut to, Tim Roth bleeding to death in the back of a car!

The heist went… not as planned, and characters meet at the designated hideout to find out if there was a police informant in their group.

And the control that the criminals have over the situation just devolves from there. The film seems to give more importance to the way the story is told than what its actually telling, as Tarantino plays around with different pop culture references, homages, and gruesome violence.

I always thought the trunk shot was Scorsese’s thing, as he uses it in the 1990 film Goodfellas, but apparently it was Tarantino kind of made it his “thing.”

What I found interesting about the film is the way it gives attention to the most mundane dialogue as if it were as important as the relevant plot details. Pulp Fiction does this as well, it’s sort of a messing with the audience, since dialogue in film is normally so deliberate and minimalist.

Also the film is so bro-y and racist at points that I think I looked away almost as much from that as I did from the graphic violence.

Speaking of which! The film is so graphic, that many moviegoers, including Wes Craven, the director of A Nightmare of Elm Street and Scream, walked out of the theater in shock. Tarantino takes this a success, saying, “That’s OK. It’s not their cup of tea. But I am affecting them. I wanted that scene to be disturbing.”

I won’t tell you the scene. But I will tell you that I did NOT expect it to drag on for so long, teasing the viewer by refusing to turn the camera somewhere else.

And it’s not that I haven’t seen more violent films. I definitely have. But I think that’s the key to Reservoir Dogs, that it’s disturbing nature is so deliberate and affecting. I’ve seen slasher movies that felt less fucked-up. 

Anyway the film has earned its place as a true classic of American cinema. It’s #76 on the IMDb Top 250, and has a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not bad for a directorial DEBUT.

Fall 2014 #12: Manhattan (1979) - Woody Allen

Final stretch! Down to the last five movies on the list. I know this is my Fall 2014 Movie Bucketlist but it’s never too late to immerse yourself in classic cinema!

So I’m starting to learn what makes a good well-rounded Moviecation List. Each one needs a Hitchcock film, a Studio Ghibli film, maybe a Coen brothers or a Tarantino, a silent film, a horror movie, a Best Picture winner. And of course a Woody Allen film. I chose Manhattan because it was on Netflix when I made the list but as fate would have it, it got deleted before I got to it.

Also it has 19 Academy Award Nominee Meryl Fucking Streep!

I actually assumed this movie would be an Annie Hall-style love story with Woody Allen and Meryl Streep. Turns out Meryl plays his bisexual (or possibly lesbian) ex-wife and Manhattan is a love story between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton… or so we think.

Of course it starts with him dating a 17-year-old high schooler so the whole film is shrouded in a kind of uncomfortable feeling, similar to the one you get when you see Woody Allen promoting monogamy.

Anyway so the film has that sort of “Here’s real, complicated people living their real, complicated lives, so screw conventional storytelling” that I actually love and think very few writers are able to pull off. It’s bordering on satire while also portraying authentic situations. The only person I think who is pulling that off today is Lena Dunham.

Feel like a line from Girls? It’s because we’re the protagonists of our own stories! A lot of people hate that “Here are some deeply flawed characters who are aimlessly navigating their sometimes boring lives.” I don’t care, I love it.

So the film is objectively no Annie Hall. It doesn’t have the complicated timeline that makes for one of the coolest love stories in cinema. But Manhattan is full of messed-up people trying to figure out what they want.

One major difference I did notice from Annie Hall is Manhattan’s reliance on music, as well as sequences of driving. I want to say the music made the film a little more sappy, with the repetition of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue elevating the story to capture the majesty of New York City. Even the black and white sort of seemed to be a reference to a period of higher culture, acknowledging a city in decline.

The driving I took to be an understanding of the characters constantly being in motion, sometimes stuck, but always navigating the complicated network of roads in the largest city in America.

The film had its boring moments as well as its poignant moments, about love and growing old, and I definitely enjoyed watching it.

Fall 2014 #1: Kill Bill Volume 1 - Quentin Tarantino

Alright so I think it’s safe to say I failed miserably at my Summer 2014 Movie Bucketlist reviews. While I saw all 16 movies, I reviewed the first 3 and never made time to review the rest.

Now I have a new rule for my Fall 2014 Movie Bucketlist, and it’s that I can’t watch the next movie on the list until I review the previous one. So my first film on the list was Kill Bill Volume 1. 

This is my fourth Tarantino film, since I saw Django Unchained two winters ago, Pulp Fiction for my first Movie Bucketlist from January 2014, and Inglorious Basterds somewhere in between. After Pulp Fiction, I would say this is probably the one that comes up most in conversation. I always knew it as “That movie with Uma Thurman in the yellow suit where whenever she sees an enemy a really high pitched tone plays and the screen turns red.” I can probably thank Date Movie (2006) for that. 

But in all honesty, the movie really impressed me. I loved how it revived old spaghetti western motifs, and fused them with Japanese samurai movies to create this imaginative tale about kick ass women. I think anyone who has something bad to say about this movie, especially women, should probably be paying less attention to the violence and more attention to how a white male director has portrayed women as totally in control of their own lives and as complete badasses who don’t take shit from anyone. I mean… Deadly Viper Assassin Squad? DVAS? DIVAS!?

The film follows the Bride (Uma Thurman) after she wakes up from a four year coma caused by her team of elite female assassins betraying her at her wedding and killing all of her guests as well as her unborn child. She swears revenge on the women (and their leader, Bill), who wronged her and who were dumb enough not to kill her.

What the film does that makes it so impressive is that it juggles tons of fourth-wall breaking illusions, such as physically impossible amounts of blood and gravity-defying fight scenes, with the simplicity of a revenge story. Not to mention slightly off-chronological storytelling, which reiterates the idea that this is a movie and not real life.

Not to mention, the film includes a five minute short animated film to explain a specific character’s (played by Lucy Liu) backstory.

For a film that features more violence than almost any film I’ve ever seen, it’s also an incredibly well-written, well-acted piece of feminist cinema that should be looked at as pretty damn awesome. I said it. The F-word.

The film is split into two volumes because Tarantino filmed for 155 days and cut the film down to 4 hours before deciding it had to be released as two separate films. I will be watching the Volume 2 shortly (even though it’s not on my Fall Bucketlist). Currently Kill Bill Volume 1 is #166 on the IMDb Top 250.

Day 10: January 12th, 2014: Pulp Fiction (1994) - Quentin Tarantino

I just realized that I watched the two films from 1994 back to back, which was unintentional but shows just how massively different two critically acclaimed movies from the same year can be.

Okay I guess I’ll get to the point. Every time in my life where I have heard Pulp Fiction come up in conversation, my immediate thought afterwards is always “Okay, I guess this is a movie I really need to watch.” That is because, 20 years later (yes, 1994 was 20 years ago), Pulp Fiction still has a lasting impression on pop culture. And now that I’ve seen it, I can finally understand why.

There’s no point in trying to explain the plot, so I won’t. Pulp Fiction is the product of decades of film history, all compiled by Quentin Tarantino and revealed to us in a colorful and violent display of humor and wit.

Okay very violent. But there’s an interesting quote I found on the Wikipedia page that I think is one of the best ways of explaining Pulp Fiction. Ken Dancyger says that Pulp Fiction represents “a new phenomenon, the movie whose style is created from the context of movie life rather than real life. The consequence is twofold—the presumption of deep knowledge on the part of the audience of those forms such as the gangster films or Westerns, horror films or adventure films. And that the parody or alteration of that film creates a new form, a different experience for the audience.”

Pulp Fiction is one of the most critically acclaimed postmodern films of all time. It is self-referential in that it looks and acts like a highly stylized reference to the gangster films of the past, but it still manages to make fun of those tropes in the process.

Here Tarantino plays a random man, a friend of Samuel L. Jackson’s character, and he is calling his own two main characters, Jackson and John Travolta, dorks. That’s about as self-referential as it gets.

The film also includes a random cameo from Christopher Walken, as well as a supporting role played by Bruce Willis. This storyline hardly relates to the main storyline that the film begins and ends with, and yet its characters intersect with the other world only in that Willis plays a boxer who is paid by Travolta and Jackson’s boss to lose a fight.

This seemingly random storyline told right in the middle of an almost completely unrelated tale (following Jackson and Travolta, two gangsters) is what makes Pulp Fiction so enthralling to watch. Not to mention the absurdity of Uma Thurman’s character, the wife of Travolta and Jackson’s boss.

Everything that happens is so flashy and stylized, and yet all of the characters get their own quiet moment where they reveal their view on how the world works. It’s a twisted world of gang members, petty thieves, rapists, and a crackhead wife, but they all have a perspective to offer the audience about this messed up world. And the film kind of just laughs at itself, stares at the audience, and says

Pulp Fiction is the first independent film to ever gross over $100 million. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and also the Oscar for Best Screenplay. It ranks #4 on the IMDb Top 250, but #94 on the AFI Top 100.

Django Unchained (2012) - Quentin Tarantino

After putting it off for months, I finally decided to sit down and watch my first Quentin Tarantino film ever, Django Unchained. Tarantino, the polarizing director behind Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Inglorious Basterds, has received a massive amount of critical acclaim for his revivals of classic American genres, like the crime film and the western. Here he is doing a fist bump.

Django Unchained, which is ranked as #46 in the IMDb Top 250, is a self-proclaimed “spaghetti western” a sub-genre of the Western created by the Italians. Normally, a hero stumbles into a town of two opposing gangs, and plays them both through deception and guile in order to protect a family caught in the middle. The namesake of Django Unchained, a 1966 Italian filmed called Django, tells the story of a man who decimates two feuding gangs, one for killing his wife and the other for attempting to kill him. The star of the film, France Nero, has a cameo in Django Unchained as “Big Daddy,” a rich plantation owner.

Another staple of the spaghetti Western is an insane amount of violence. Django in 1966 was considered one of the most violent movies of all time, and Django Unchained certainly pays tribute to that era by using a special effect where bullet wounds look more like grenades going off inside the victims body than just shots. I found it bizarre at sometimes, and hilarious at others. 

So the story takes place in 1858, and follows Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave who has just been purchased by Dr. King Shultz (Christophe Waltz), a bounty hunter. Shultz has purchased Django because he somehow knows that Django knows the three wanted criminals that Shultz is after. We later find out that the three criminals aggressively whipped Django’s long lost wife when the two tried to escape their former plantation, therefore making her unfit for indoor servant work. In the above gif, Django (who has dressed himself for the first time in his life, hence the Austin Powers outfit), kills the man who beat his wife and references the line he used when Django pleaded with him, “I like the way you beg, boy." 

Christoph Waltz is the lovable German bounty hunter who hates slavery and sees Django as a friend, so he decides to make him his full time partner while the two go looking for Django’s wife. He intelligently talks himself out of any messy situation, but also can shoot a gun faster than anyone else in the film (that is, until he teaches Django how to shoot). The two learn that Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) is a slave on Calvin Candie’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) plantation, and they decide to go there disguised as mandingo buyers (the term used for a contest where slaves would fight to the death and their owners would bet on them). Then Dr. Shultz would talk his way into purchasing Broomhilda, and the two would escape the plantation before ever having to buy a ridiculously priced male slave.

Probably my favorite part about the film is the way the camera shot Leo, making everything he did overdramatic and hilarious. His acting was great (I definitely felt the Oscar snub there), and I thought he carried that entire portion of the film. Between his overexpressive face and his intense mannerisms, Leo turned the villain of Calvin Candie into a lovable bipolar, twisted plantation owner, making it even harder to root for Dr. Shultz and Django. I think the point when Django and his wife Broomhilda reunited saved me from jumping to rooting for Leo.

Also this gif perfectly describes how I felt during every violent scene. Basically the last hour or so is a whole mess of shenanigans, giant bloody battles, and trickery that I think made up for the first two hours of overhyped lack of action. Everything came together, and I don’t think I would have liked it if it ended any other way. Jamie Foxx also did a fantastic job as the cool newly freed slave trying to pass for a conman who was trying to pass for a mandingo expert. 

All in all I did appreciate the film and I understand why it got a nomination. Also Tarantino won for Best Original Screenplay and Waltz won for Best Supporting Actor (he also won for Inglorious Basterds). However, I don’t think it cracks my top three 2013 Best Picture nominees (Life of Pi, Les Misérables, and Silver Linings Playbook). Now just Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Zero Dark Thirty, and I’ll have seen all nine! A totally useless accomplishment now that the Oscars are months behind us!