Reservoir Dogs - a question for those who were around when it was released

refocusedmedia

refocusedmedia

Veteran
I watched this film for the first time about 7 years ago or so. I didn't much care for it, to be honest. I had seen most of Tarantino's other films, and preferred them. Add to that the fact that I went in with high expectations and it should be easy enough to see why I came away disappointed. I mean, it was "ok" but nothing special.

Anyway, I decided to revisit it last night for some reason and I came away genuinely impressed. Maybe it's the fact that I've embraced my dream & desire to become a filmmaker since I last saw the film, so I appreciate it more. I'm not sure, but whatever the reason I definitely enjoyed the experience and am glad I gave it another chance. I can easily understand why it made such an impact on American filmmaking.

Which leads me to my question... I'm curious if the impact of its release was felt rather immediately or if it took awhile to propagate? From what I understand, it didn't really receive much acclaim & attention until after Pulp Fiction came out and everyone wanted to see Tarantino's previous work. Anyway, I'm just curious what if any its effects were on those of you who were filmmakers at the time.

Thanks
 
refocusedmedia said:
Which leads me to my question... I'm curious if the impact of its release was felt rather immediately or if it took awhile to propagate? From what I understand, it didn't really receive much acclaim & attention until after Pulp Fiction came out and everyone wanted to see Tarantino's previous work. Anyway, I'm just curious what if any its effects were on those of you who were filmmakers at the time.

Thanks
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The film was given a limited release. So, being in So. Cal., I had more of an opportunity to 'see it' than perhaps most of the country outside of So. Cal, and the usual large metropolitan suspects...

The Wife had gotten her BA in media with some amount of 'filmmaking' classes, and so we were pretty 'up' at the time on new things. At the time there were very few rental stores that had the 'art films' that say the Landmark theaters carried. The one we used the most happened to be next door to a Landmark theater...

In an earlier age, the film "Billy Jack" had a wyrd release pattern as well... the 'first' release 1971, where Tom Laughlin 4-walled the film himself, was dismal... the second release 1973, total success... but the seeds of that first release sprouted, and in the "Trial of Billy Jack"(1974), Laughlin used methods that have become industry standard, that is wide, heavy media saturation, and 'blockbuster' boxoffice performance...

The problem with 'outsider' things, one never knows if one is watching a 'cultural shift' movie... or just yetanotherwhackfilm that goes nowhere.

I mean... "Alice in Wonderland: The X-rated Musical"(1976) did not engender a long line of musicals with X-rated sex scenes... well there is "Misty Beethoven: The Musical"(2004)... nearly 30 years of non-musical porn...
 
I saw it in a cinema in Ireland when it was released; it was quite popular there in fact.

I distinctly remember growing increasingly uneasy during the opening credits when the voice of (I can't remember his name, but the guy who was shot in the back of the car) started fading up as he was screaming over the music - you hadn't even seen him yet but you just knew something gruesome was about to be shown. Everyone in the cinema was impacted by that I seem to remember, specially after the light pre credit sequence.

It was probably the most violent movie I had ever seen in a cinema up to that point; realistically violent I mean (there was a lot of bloody movies in the 80's but the tones didn't seem as real as Reservoir Dogs was). The torture scene was particularly gruesome, and I remember a couple of people walked out at that point.

I know the movie had a lot more impact in the cinema than repeated viewings on video had; probably the volume had something to do with it; the gunshots and screams were LOUD!
 
I saw it in the theater, I was living in Melbourne at the time. There was a lot of word of mouth and that was how I found out about it.
I really enjoyed it but later felt letdown once I learned the entire film is a rip off of the last 20 minute's of Ringo Lam's City on Fire.

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even the circular dolly conversation shot at the start which is a fantastic way of not crossing the line is borrowed. I've seen Brian de Palma do that in some of his older films
 
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My sense is the impact was pretty immediate. I remember when it screened at the Toronto Film Festival people went apesh*t. Tarantino was getting write-ups and interviews in national (Canadian), mainstream publications and radio, strange for an unknown first time director. I was a bit young and cloistered in the suburbs and didn't even really know what a film festival was, but snuck into a theatre a few months later to see it on its general release. It blew everyone's face off. It was an arthouse movie, but nothing like "Like Water For Chocolate" or Merchant-Ivory. For a couple of years, every cool guy type would have the poster on his wall and would be really evangelical about it. It introduced me, my friends, and probably a whole bunch of young (at the time) people to a kind of cinema we didn't really know about, Peckinpah, Woo, Melville et al. Comparables would be maybe when Nevermind came out on the high end and The Raid Redemption on the low? Hard to remember just how new and revelatory it seemed after all these years...
 
Reservoir Dogs was the same year as Man Bites Dog - I remember the buzz. If you were cool you were talking about Reservoir Dogs. If you were uber cool you were talking about Man Bites Dog. Man Bites dog blows reservoir away in originality
 
Man Bites Dog! You're so right about that. Funny to think about how hard it was to find out about things in the pre-internet days.

I will admit that when it first came out, I thought Reservoir Dogs was so so original. But that of course was 100% due to not having a clue about film history...now of course its obvious that its all pastiche and homage, and that every element in it was straight lifted from somewhere else haha!
 
But Reservoir Dogs was original in its own way. It seemed to be the start of the whole postmodern, ultra-violent, wave of new-brutalist self-referential movies that were spawned in the 90's. Yes, Tarantino borrowed elements from everywhere and twisted it all to his own media hoover aesthetic - but that was what was original about it. If he had really just outright copied other movies he would have been long forgotten as a plagiarist or a hack. That wasn't the case. Reservoir Dogs was famous for its violence but even more famous for its dialogue scenes than anything else, and that wasn't copied from any other movie.
 
There's a little known Australian film called Romper Stomper featuring Russell Crowe in his break out role. It had super realistic violence just like Reservoir and I saw it within weeks of Reservoir as the two films came out the same time. So I don;t think Tarantino was alone in his creative direction nor would I give him sole credit for influencing subsequent films. There was a lot going on in theater. I remember thinking at the time that the realism of this violence seemed a logical step after T2, Goodfellas and Silence of the Lambs all of which were big budget hollywood violence (as opposed to low budget gritty violence) and they had just played that year. What Reservoir did that no other film did was put the violence to music - I'll give it that.
 
But its interesting that you bring up A Clockwork Orange - after Reservoir Dogs came out a number of newspapers started bringing that movie up saying that Reservoir Dogs was a return to the 1970's style of violence (hence new-bruatlist for Reservoir while Clockwork was part of the original brutalist scene). Clockwork was pretty straightforward for the most part; Reservoir brought the whole post-modern self-referential tone to the table; and that kind of set the tone for a lot of movies that followed in the 90's.

Romper Stomper was pretty good; it was also fairly big in the video rentals at the time (don't remember it been widely released in cinema).
 
….if the impact of its release was felt rather immediately or if it took awhile to propagate?
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I'm not bringing much to the conversation, but this thread brings up fond memories of renting Resevoir Dogs from the Price Chopper in Poughkeepsie, NY when it came out on VHS…. (Before Red Box, many supermarkets featured their own "video stores" inside the joint)

Romper Stomper: Yes! That was a good one, forgot about it.
 
I enjoyed it when it came out but never understood the adulation that went with it. It had tight dialogue, Tim Roth and Harvey Keitel and other cool actors. It was somewhat fresh-ish in terms of style but I never felt like I'd seen something innovative. And of course I hadn't because I'd seen most of his references whether or not I picked them. I'd seen it all before, in some cases turns out, exactly the same.

Same with Pulp Fiction. It is his most enjoyable film for me but again, the godlike status that those around me bestowed on him was lost on me. The main thing I remember about that movie was the inane conversations concerning what was in the briefcase (as if it mattered, never even asked the question myself) and people using the word 'metaphor' for the first time in their lives as though it was a part of their regular vocab. I reckon at least half of the box office takings would have been from people who just wanted to join the conversation at the watercooler.

Tarantino has always been a difficult one for me. I have enjoyed all his movies on some level. Maybe it's his hardcore admirers that put me off. His personal quirks, fetishes and general sleaze factor don't bother me. Judge the art, not the artist. Interestingly I also haven't seen a film he was involved in (cameo/writer/collaborator) that I didn't like and wasn't better for his involvement. He is a true champion of genre and has helped promote film cultures that otherwise may never have found purchase in the mainstream western market. Not an innovator so much as a filter. His sense of style so often praised I think is a little more wobbly than usually accredited, only Pulp Fiction struck the perfect balance (and that's got as much to do with being the right movie at the right time - 1995 was the curtain call of an era). His other talent, music selection. The downside to that being that some songs are now so indelibly linked to his movies that they have been ruined for me in isolation.

Reservoir Dogs was and is a slick, well made caper film. It was very easy to pigeonhole and is built on a legacy. If any of the stories are true regarding how he got Keitel on board and the film greenlighted then kudos to him, he deserves to be where he is today. Others have mentioned Man Bites Dog from about the same time. That one captured my imagination far more. And the year before, Delicatessen blew me away.

Perhaps it's importance is not so much the reaction to it from the public but from the industry. As one of several small movies achieving big success a lot of risk was being taken in the early to mid-nineties to find the next thing, and the audiences were particularly open to something different. That is before gen-y started getting jobs and refusing to move out, the industry closed ranks and determined that only comic book adaptions be made for 10 years in order to get their hands on that cash. :)
 
I don't know if this answers your question but it is what I remember. It was a slam-dunk hit with audiences.

I saw the Reservoir Dogs at Telluride Film Festival in 1992, only its second public outing. It had premiered at Sundance and in the meantime Miramax had acquired the distribution rights. From what I recall the audience were uncomfortable about the violence but the film was compelling and when the festival fog had cleared Reservoir Dogs remained, for me, the film of the festival.

Telluride was, at that time, focused on introducing International and Independent films to US audience and buyers. I had already seen many of the International films so Reservoir Dogs and El Mariachi were new to me. I didn't see Reservoir Dogs going on to become the massive box office hit but I knew it would be an arthouse hit and find a cult audience.

When it was released in Dublin it was an instant hit - I can't remember if it got a big release but it was the film people were talking about and quoting. Tarantino's talent was immediately recognized.

For the next few years it was massive influence on the indie films that came after it. This can sometimes be very detrimental to how a film is perceived a few years later - it is marred by the countless copies and reinterpretation of the style. It becomes denuded of its originality. I think both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction suffered this fate. They were so fresh when they came out but I saw Pulp Fiction a couple of years later by which time it had been robbed of its magic by the wave of mediocre homage it inspired.
 
mccannondsl@eircom.net said:
For the next few years it was massive influence on the indie films that came after it. This can sometimes be very detrimental to how a film is perceived a few years later - it is marred by the countless copies and reinterpretation of the style. It becomes denuded of its originality. I think both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction suffered this fate. They were so fresh when they came out but I saw Pulp Fiction a couple of years later by which time it had been robbed of its magic by the wave of mediocre homage it inspired.
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Very true, and well said. I would imagine that it will be rediscovered a couple of decades after its release (and once its copies have faded into obscurity), and be appreciated again the way it was upon its release.

I watched some of Sergio Leones classic westerns recently; I just watched "Once Upon a time in the west" tonight. In the 80's all those movies were kind of looked down upon because there had been so many copies; so much pastiche of the genre that the originals looked kind of silly. Going back to a 'Fistful of Dollars' now is like a breath of fresh air; its so sharp and witty, the camerawork is so brilliant. But it was easy to forget that when the genre was so overdone.
 
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