Monday, July 8, 2019

Reservoir Dogs: It's a metaphor for big dicks



Me and my mates are all 18 or 19 when we watch Reservoir Dogs on a Saturday afternoon in early 1993, in a movie theatre that will be torn down after the Christchurch earthquakes, and it blows our fucking minds out the back of the cinema.

We've never seen anything like this before. It's slick and smart and super fucking cool and has high-level film dork credentials. We know that he has named his production company after a Godard film, but we'd only seen Alphaville, so all those cinematic tricks and games, and the story within a story within a story within a story, and the sheer fucking style and life of the thing were all new to us.

We go home and make a spoof version called Catchment Puppies on the Walker family's camcorder, and make special round trips that take hundreds of kilometres to go to the ubiquitous midnight screenings over the next year. We went to any movie with a connection to the director, and sometimes that paid off and you got something brilliant like True Romance, and sometimes it didn't, and you got Destiny on the Radio. And sometimes you get something like From Dusk Till Dawn and some drunk bastard's confusion over the film's tone is the best experience you can have at the movies.

There is barely an internet at the time, so we share articles that we find in monster magazines, and record late night news items about Tarantino and his crew tearing up the scene at Cannes. But that just helped fuel everything, and set us all up for Quentin Taratino's long and fascinating film career. All that brilliance might not match the raw excitement of that Saturday afternoon in 1993, but what ever could?

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