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Movie Reviews, & Film Industry Commentary
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1992 – R – 100 min.
Director: Quentin Tarintino
Primary Cast: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Michael Madsen, Randy Brooks, Kirk Baltz, Eddie Bunker, Voice of Stephen Wright
Stars **** (of 5)
Popcorn **** 1/2 (of 5)
Film Type(s): Drama, Gangster, Heist, Urban
Synopsis: The plan was to commit the perfect diamond heist. Then it all went wrong. Joe (Tierney) and his son Nice Guy Eddie (Penn) brought in a bunch of low-lifes that don’t know each other and use aliases with each of them to do the job. The only problem is that after the heist professional Mr. Pink (Buscemi) thinks there’s a cop among their number and no one disagrees. Is it Mr. White (Keitel), who is an old friend of Joe’s? Or the psychopathic Mr. Blond (Madsen) who did time for Joe and Eddie? Could it be Mr. Orange (Roth), who is slowly bleeding to death from a gunshot wound on the floor of the warehouse? Or is it someone else listening to radio station “K-Billy Supersounds of the 70s”? The first film Written and Directed by Quentin Tarintino. Harvey Keitel also Co-Produced.
Review: A Sundance film festival darling (but non-winner) back in 1992, this film wasn’t Tarintino’s best, but it was the first of a new brand of independent film. It changed how people saw film at the time (when ‘independent film’ was synonymous with ‘Direct to Video’), with a non-linear story and editing style that hadn’t been seen up to that point. We never see the heist itself in the film, all we know is that something went wrong. We learn only bits and pieces about both the heist and the characters as we go through the scenes that take place before the heist (Tarintino doesn’t call them ‘flashbacks’, choosing instead to see the film as a whole “like a novel. You can have a chapter in a novel take place 30 years before hand and people don’t call that a ‘flashback’, it’s just another chapter in the story.” Unlike Pulp Fiction, where only the acts are non-linear, this film has multiple scenes that are non-linear.). Even then, we know little else about anyone other than Mr. Blond, Mr. White, and Mr. Orange. With Roth in particular, we can almost see his Mr. Orange becoming a Travis Bickle-like (Taxi Driver) hero simply by the way he interacts with Mr. White, but we see him struggle to beat away the darkness. With a stylized masculinity and sense of complicity in watching the events unfold in the stage-like warehouse, we can see how Tarintino is influenced by Directors Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch in particular) and Alfred Hitchcock. Though the torture scenes are among the most infamous from this film, we almost never see the dark violence (an ear being cut off, shots to the head, spurting blood), but rather it is implied to us and Tarintino lets us use our imaginations (always more dangerous). In fact, after seeing this film you’ll never hear Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” the same way again. This film also set up the ‘Tarintino Style’ of the 1990’s with the imitators using ‘70’s music and pop references to try to sell their films, not always understanding how this also works with how Tarintino sees Martin Scorsese’s influence. Like Scorsese, Tarintino always used the music and the violence as a way of building up and always serving his characters. In Tarintino’s case, he also uses pop references not only as a way that he sees those characters as talking (as “real people”) but as a way in which those characters bond with one another. This is also the start of Tarintino having his characters populate ALL of his films, not just one. Mr. Blond’s brother is Vincent (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction, Mr. White’s ex-partner is Alabama (Rosanna Arquette) in True Romance, and Blond’s parole officer is Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore) in Natural Born Killers. Also showing his morbid sense of humor, Penn’s former sister-in-law is Madonna and Buschemi played a waiter in Pulp Fiction (please refer to the opening scene for this to make you laugh). Who shot Nice Guy Eddie?
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