Reservoir Dogs - 10/8, Film Forum

The drama in Reservoir Dogs is intense, it has classic heist figures (and heists Classic figures: the lit prof dad of my first girlfriend once remarked that it was the film most resembling "The Greek Tragedies" he'd ever seen), and by label at least it's also an action movie. For these reasons it has been and will continue to be very popular. The self-conscious artistry with which it's made calls attention to itself in such a way that it's become one of those movies that inspires teenager after teenager to take films more seriously. This may sound absurd to some Tarantino detractors, but I can attest for one that it offered me a serious step in this direction, the direction that currently dominates my life and mind (for good or ill) (.....).

I assumed I'd seen it too many times already, but since it was playing on a double bill with Kansas City Confidential (one of about a dozen films plundered by Dogs for core motifs, this one providing the 'team of men who are kept strangers assembled for a heist by a mastermind who knows them all' concept) I decided to stay for the sake of experiencing it on the big screen. Even though I was practically reciting the dialogue along with the characters, I enjoyed every minute of it. Scenes I'd thought were amateurishly melodramatic I read this time as intentionally funny. The male bonding through violence I'd thought was just corny I now see as a kind of close-reading of this certain type of relationship that we see so often in "guy" films (gangster/western/action/etc.), exploring more overtly (yet not totally overt! not at all, in fact, to my 13-year-old self) the homosexuality implicit therein. I hadn't quite realized that the men the movie is about are all so lame, so weak, so behind the times, such pathetic wind-up toys struggling to perform the jobs they once chose. Despite the strength of this satire (which becomes almost an indictment), the hipness and charm that became the focus of so-called "independent" films in the '90s is slightly stronger.

Also present in embryonic form is Tarantino's reverence for his dreamland characters, obviously an extension of his great love for (or obsession with) movies. A short time later this reverence combined with his developing smart-kitschy-chic to muscle out all aspects of intelligent satire in his following films, until it returned in a rather more bombastic form in Inglourious Basterds (which also shares with Dogs the trait of a perplexing title). Although in terms of cinematic art I'd rate Jackie Brown higher, Reservoir Dogs may have a bit more to chew, and it's still remarkable to me that 17 years' worth of copycats have not dulled its sickly glamor.