Let's try and figure out who the bad guy is, all right?
Twenty years ago today, Quentin Tarantino's audacious debut Reservoir Dogs premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and it's fair to say that independent filmmaking hasn't been the same since. Of course, I wasn't at Sundance in 1992 (nor have I been there any year, for that matter), and I didn't even see Reservoir Dogs when it came to the Ritz Theaters that fall, but when I finally caught up with it on video I was quick to join the ranks of the Tarantino faithful. It is no exaggeration to say that I had never seen anything like it before and wouldn't see anything like it again until, well, Tarantino's next film. By that time, of course, everybody had caught on and the knockoffs were starting to come out of the woodwork, but until that fateful day in Park City, when audiences first saw criminals bantering about the possible meanings of Madonna songs and the merits of tipping, nobody knew there was woodwork to come out of.
Considering how much of a game-changer Reservoir Dogs was, I'm not going to worry about recounting its plot, which is fairly airtight as these things go. This is, of course, not to say that it's a perfect film. There are too many fluffed lines, off-kilter reads and bouts of forced laughter for that to be the case. One place where it all comes together, though, is the Commode Story, which has stories within stories and layers upon layers of fiction built into the writing, performing, shooting and editing. As far as I'm concerned, that scene is the quintessence of Quentin, an entire Tarantino film in miniature. More than the highlights that everyone else raves about and quotes endlessly, the Commode Story is the scene that perfectly encapsulates why he went from being a video store clerk who dreams about making movies to actually making the movies that video store clerks recommend to their customers. So happy 20th, Reservoir Dogs. Holy shit, I'm old.