Saturday, April 3, 2010

Rewatching: Reservoir Dogs (1992), Quentin Tarantino.

Is this the longest death scene in film history?

Could be a play!  Has this ever been done?  You just need buckets of blood, a 70s funk tape and a warehouse.  Parts of this are pointedly 90s, like the slightly slow fade on the white font and the two-handed shooting.  But it's a smart package, intelligently written (if completely a dude movie).  There's just one woman character: she gets her car jacked and flashes across the screen in about 3 seconds.  And of course, we have one of my favourite plot mechanisms, the psychopathic wild card character.  (Is Vic Vega not the coolest character name to date?  C'mon).  I felt slightly cheated not seeing a jewelry store interior scene:  what happened exactly?  What kind of loot were they after?  Instead, Tarantino has the characters talk it out, describing how Vic Vega went apeshit.  OK, I admit it:  I did not remember how the torture scene ended and started to get nauseous.  That plus Tim Roth slipping around in his own guck for 99 minutes: is it all too much?  What about the neverending birth in A Cock and Bull Story (2005), is that the female equivalent? 

A far worthier tribute to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three than literal, brain-dead remake done last year.  Wonder where they got the elephant tusks from.  Are those things for real?

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