great_badir
Posts: 4172
Joined: 6/10/2005
From: A breaking rope bridge in the middle of the jungle
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I haven't decided which suits it better...
Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino (1992)
Were it not for the fact I love Pulp Fiction, think that Jackie Brown and parts of Kill Bill Volume 1 are watchable, and Kurt Russell’s plate of nachos in Death Proof looks like the greatest plate of nachos that ever existed, I could almost make this entry Quentin Tarantino’s entire career – as a writer he almost always ruins the material he’s given (his contributions to the otherwise brilliant Crimson Tide stick out like the very obvious moment where the budget runs out in Jack Sholder's Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies), as an actor he is excruciatingly bad (although, perversely, my favourite sequence in Pulp Fiction is The Bonnie Situation) and as an auteur he doesn’t have a single original bone in his body, whilst frequently over writing and over directing to various annoying degrees without much reason (Kill Bill 2 – please, please, please, enough about the Hanso sword already). But I can’t do that, because I would be doing the few good films a disservice. Also, I haven’t yet seen Inglorious Basterds. These days, it’s okay to dislike Quentin Tarantino and/or a Quentin Tarantino film. He has as many detractors as he does followers, possibly even more. But back in 1992, when Reservoir Dogs was released to endless praise and just a touch of controversy, he was untouchable. An enthusiastic and talented young video store clerk who had struck it lucky and come up with this “completely original” story whilst still renting out rubbish straight to vid Disney films and hardcore gay porn to the Manhattan Beach locals.
Reservoir Dogs’ opening in the US, whilst not exactly disappointing for a low budget debut, was not quite the barn storming fanfare people now assume it to have been. But mainland Western Europe and the UK welcomed it with open arms, worrying the BBFC (though, contrary to popular belief, it was never actually banned or cut by them) and forcing the US to reconsider, where it then became a favourite of cool kids everywhere. Despite some critics mentioning a passing similarity to Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, they were otherwise full of praise. Tarantino remained tight lipped and played dumb about the film’s lineage, just saying that he was a video store clerk and a film geek who’d seen a lot of films. Otherwise, as far as he was concerned, it was a 100% original story which he had bashed away at for a couple of years. Reviews were almost unanimously positive – congratulatory and we’re-not-worthy at best, “slim on characterisation, but otherwise an excellent debut from a talented young writer-director” at worst. It took a rare, perhaps even unique, negative guest-writer article in one of the UK broadsheets by stand-up comedian/TV presenter/VH-1 VJ/writer Bob Mills (AKA the hardest working TV personality of the 90s – for a few years in the late 90s he could be found, during the same period, sometimes at the same time of day, on prime time BBC1, prime time Sky 1, prime time AND late night ITV, channel 4, and all hours VH-1), who was a big fan of Hong Kong crime thrillers, to take some shine off Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs’ coat. Without going as far as using the word “plagiarism”, Mills noted that not only was Dogs similar to The Killing, but in terms of style and execution it also borrowed very heavily from Ringo Lam’s City on Fire and John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow 2 (remember this was in the days when Hong Kong cinema to most people was Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and nothing else and, at £15-17 for VHS and £29.99 for laserdisc, the Hong Kong films that were available were at the most expensive end of the market – the audience was very limited indeed). Following that article, I seem to remember a huge chunk of an episode of Mills’ excellent proto TV Offal/Screenwipe/TV Burp late night show In Bed With Medinner (at least I think it was In Bed With Medinner) devoted to Tarantino and, specifically, Reservoir Dogs, where Mills cynically ran through all the films that the “definitely totally original” Dogs was “not at all like” – cue clips of The Killing, City on Fire, A Better Tomorrow 2, The Taking of Pelham 123 etc. At the end of the segment, Mills then accused Tarantino of outright plagiarism and sarcastically challenged him to a Petrocelli style court match. Obviously Tarantino didn’t take Mills up on that but, mysteriously, Tarantino started to change tune in interviews and said that Dogs was his homage and pastiche to all of his favourite films. Of course, it’s unlikely that Tarantino ever saw In Bed With Medinner, but Mills’ original newspaper article opened up the floodgates and soon every film geek was calling Tarantino up on how unoriginal Dogs was (I’m sure I also heard a radio interview with well known celeb film buff Les Dennis where he said he liked Dogs, but couldn’t understand its popularity given it ripped off a million other much better films - go Les Dennis!). So too some of the critics began to change their tune and, when it came round to its much delayed VHS release, the mediocre and negative reviews multiplied greatly. Oh, it still had its fans and supporters, but at least the reality of the film was now known to the public and, with the advent of DVD, so all the films that Dogs ripped off became available to the average Joe.
I appreciate that nothing is really original any more and is like something else in one way or another, so perhaps being this harsh about it is unfair. But it’s not just homage or pastiche, because Tarantino (and Reservoir Dogs) is the very definition of plagiarist, it’s just harder to spot with QT because he mines so many different films and genres for the bits he likes best (all told, Kill Bills 1 and 2 are a “homaged” mish-mash of at least a dozen films and at least five or six different genres). Otherwise, it’s exactly the same as when Dennis Leary started using Bill Hicks material and passed it off as his own. I also further appreciate that, by loving Pulp Fiction, I’m perhaps being a bit hypocritical given that Pulp Fiction arguably rips off even more films than Reservoir Dogs. Silly me. But at least Tarantino admitted it and even listed the films he was nodding his head to with each section of the film, some obvious some not so. Tarantino fans would argue that any criticism of him as a director, or of his films, is unfounded because, even if he does little more than homage/pastiche, he does it so stylishly that he often improves on what he’s ripping off. I’m not entirely convinced by that argument…
But it’s not just the fact that it’s a complete rip off. It’s also the Tarantino schtick that I don’t like. The thing that ruins Crimson Tide. The thing that courses through the veins of True Romance. Remember that CSI episode that he wrote and directed? The one where he pretty much completely changes the characters so they become typical QT prototypes, much removed from their usual selves? Yeah, that one. Schtick runs through 90% of Reservoir Dogs – endless pointless bits of dialogue which do not propel the story, develop character or have any relevance to anything else going on. Whole sequences that do nothing and go nowhere. All just so the characters can look and sound cool for the sake of it. And Reservoir Dogs is, by far, the worst example of that schtick in the whole Tarantino canon. So suck it.
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