movies

[JL21]

http://www.paramountguilds.com/transfor ... /consider/

[33anda3rd]

Think we had a thread about acclaimed and or big movies we havent seen.
My list is long.
Notably Boogie Nights, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction just to name 3 off top my head

I loved Reservoir Dogs when I was in college. LOVED. IT. Someone in the house I lived in in '94 had a bootleg copy on VHS so we didn't have to go rent it and we could watch it like 4X/week. We obsessed about it, and about Pulp Fiction, then we went and saw Pulp Fiction twice on opening night.

I can still watch Pulp Fiction once a month and love and admire it.

Reservoir Dogs I didn't see for like 10 years, then my wife says she's never seen it. I'm like what's his name in High Fidelity. What? You've never seen Reservoir Dogs? So we rent it. And I hate it. Like, actively hate it while we're watching it. Like, am embarrassed that I insisted my wife watch this and that I loved it as much as I did at 20. It's just a bunch of guys wagging their peckers at each other for 2 hours. It has no meaning. People who look for meaning in movies can say "hey, loyalty among thieves" and yeah that is just rationalization because there's nothing below the surface of Reservoir Dogs. It's a bunch of cool music and cool guys in cool suits cursing and being macho with each other. It kinda sucks. It has its virtues. The camerawork is good, the soundtrack is good, Harvey Keitel does that thing where he screams desperately, there are some funny lines. But it still kinda sucks.

[The Third Man]

It's funny how your complaints about Reservoir Dogs more or less mirror mine about Hard Eight, especially given that they're the debuts of the two biggest film-whiz-kid-turned-master directors around. I still dig Reservoir Dogs, but I'd likewise peg it as his weakest. I like Death Proof more than most, though, particularly because of my affinity for strong female characters. That movie gave us, like, eight of them in one go. (Though it does have that one bizarrely uncomfortable rape joke aimed at Mary Elizabeth Winstead.)

[JL21]

The groundbreaking* thing about Reservoir Dogs was the postmodern thing, which is old hat now of course. And it's especially Tarantino's world. Taking a barrage of genres and influences and squishing them into something new and exciting. Hell, its popularity (and Pulp Fiction) paved the way for stuff like Boogie Nights.

*I say groundbreaking but I don't mean to overdo it. It was being done all the way back with Star Wars and Scorsese. But QT does it with stuff that's been left in history's dustpan, stuff that's not historically very popular. And I totally hear what you're saying about a lot of it.

[The Third Man]

Pulp Fiction...I have a huge soft spot for that movie. Saw it when I was like fifteen and it got to the point I was watching it daily for a time. Could still probably quote it front-to-back with 90% accuracy or better. But I've probably seen it enough for one lifetime, and don't have any great urge to ever revisit it. Plus, it's kind of shocking how much better-shot all Tarantino's subsequent films are. Watching Inglourious Basterds or Kill Bill - my two favorites - and then switching on Pulp Fiction makes it look terribly drab. He's always been an A++ screenwriter, but he's really come into his own as a stylist.

[33anda3rd]

One film that's more groundbreaking (or at least more original) than Reservoir Dogs is Ringo Lam's City On Fire

[The Third Man]

I watched that movie a couple years ago; it was okay, but the idea that Tarantino copped from it in any significant way is nonsense, especially given that City on Fire is absolutely not a terribly unique film. If you paint it in the broadest strokes, sure, but at that point it's totally meaningless. It'd be like accusing, say, Halloween of ripping off Alien. (Not the greatest analogy, but work with me.) It doesn't even merit being called a remix, they're wildly different films besides a couple of elements.

[The Third Man]

Best trailer for a blockbuster I've seen in...man, I don't even know.

[Schlich]

Damn.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

From Manohla Dargis' "best of 2014":

That’s too bad, because watching people fall in love is surely as interesting as watching them kill one another.

More interesting actually. I've seen enough death.