Name: Has Reservoir Dogs Aged Well?
Uploaded: 2026-03-17T16:59:37.000Z
Duration: 9 min 9 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

So in the very first sentence of the New York Times review of Reservoir Dogs, critic Vincent Canby wrote, it's been an unusually good year for the discovery of first rate new American film directors, then goes on to list four films that you've never seen by four directors that you've never heard of, none of whom lasted more than a decade making movies before continuing.

Now add to that list the name of Quentin Tarantino.

I guess when one out of five ain't bad, be okay, you're going to be okay.

25 years after that review, Tarantino is probably the most popular living, working director in the world after maybe Spielberg and Scorsese.

His eight films have grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide, and

writing about his work could fill a small library.

The quarter century milestone is a good opportunity to look back at how Tarantino's first film has age, a slight obsession with firsts, with how things begin.

And the first shot of Reservoir Dogs is probably the first that I think about the most.

Okay, yeah, obviously I know this is not technically the first shot of the movie, but

I've always sort of viewed the diner scene that precedes the opening credits as a kind of overture to Tarantino's entire filmography.

Traditionally, overtures are mood setters, a little bit of music that sets the tone for what's about to follow.

It's only natural that in Tarantino land, the Overture is a 7 minute conversation about Madonna songs and the merits of.

But no, society says, don't tip these guys over here, but tip these guys over here.

So the first shot of the story proper is this.

And it's one of the most electrifying openings in film history.

Like the first notes in the first Led Zeppelin album.

Before you have a chance to blink, you're involved.

Your mind fans forward and backward through time.

It's usual in film for actions to have consequences, but here, consequences have actions.

Actions, you begin to imagine the heist gone wrong.

And just like you're in the past, you're also in the future, calculating how long this guy has left to live and what could be done to save him.

Orange bleeding out, you can't escape the present either, because that's what pain is, a brutal and specific attention to the present moment.

It's that pain, that panicked feeling of time running out that separates this film from others that begin in media res.

Whenever I create anything, I always hold it up against the opening of Reservoir Dogs is the beginning as attention capturing as this, does it have the same kinetic energy launching you into the narrative?

It's here too, of course, that we're introduced to the technique that made Tarantino famous, the non linear structure of his storytelling.

In interviews, Tarantino compared the byzantine tracks of his early films to novel writing.

Novelists have always had just a complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit.

But while I think the comparison to fiction is apt, I also think that there is a relationship here, again with music.

One of the things that I think helped Reservoir Dogs age so well is Tarantino's instinctive sense for narrative momentum.

To me, the ordering of the movie is a lot like an under examined aspect of popular music, the sequencing of albums.

One of the reasons I love Abbey Road, for example, one of the reasons I've listened to it so many times all the way through, is because the song sequence carries me through.

Even in the first half where there's no medley, the arrangement has thrust.

I mean, just imagine the change in feeling if the album began with say, Maxwell Silver Hammer.

Now imagine the change in feeling if Reservoir Dogs began here.

Say hello to a motherfucker who's inside cab is doing a job and take a big fat guess who wants on a team.

The sequencing in Reservoir Dogs has the same natural rhythm as an album cycle does, offering a variety in tempo, from intense to reflective and back, while linking corresponding scenes together.

All Tarantino's films are constructed this way, like albums.

More like albums, I think, than novels, even the ones with more straightforward narratives.

And part of my thing, when I'm coming up with an idea is to go through that record room and go through those records and to kind of find the music or the personality of a given movie.

It's like I'm looking for the rhythm that this movie needs to play in.

I'm looking for the spirit and the rhythm that this movie needs to play in.

The other thing that Tarantino is most known for is his dialogue.

And of course, some of the references in Reservoir Dogs haven't aged so well.

You know, she looked like she looked like Christy Love.

Nobody today remembers the show Get Christy Love.

But what's more important here is the concept.

Entertainment is still a common language between strangers taking genre characters and genre situations, alright, and

giving them a Real life spin, have them sound like real people, like, you know, me and my friends and just other people, and

Reservoir dogs translates into 2017 because the humanity and the comedy that Tarantino breathed into genre films is still felt all over Hollywood.

And in it, a great hero named Kevin Bacon teaches an entire city full of people with sticks up their butts that dancing is the greatest thing there is.

I think the only context in which Reservoir Dogs hasn't aged so well is within Tarantino's own filmography.

For all the purchase it has on film culture and popular culture, it's still very clearly his most amateur movie.

It's impossible to say how it would be received today if it was released, because so much of cinema in the past 25 years is influenced by this style.

But I think Siskel and Ebert got pretty close in their original reviews.

I had the same reaction, Roger, that it was a lot of an exercise in style.

I mean, I understand what he's trying to do here, which is to show things in crime movies that crime movies don't show.

The missing piece to Reservoir Dogs is the deeper character studies and exploration of big ideas that you get in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained.

However, I do think that there is one point in Reservoir Dogs where Tarantino does reach for something.

All of Tarantino's work comments on the nature of storytelling itself, but the part when Mr.

Orange, an undercover cop, learns a fake story to sell the criminals on his credibility is one of the best instances of this in all his movies.

Orange learning the scene, Orange rehearsing the scene, Orange performing the story for an audience, then finally the story coming alive.

It's an elegant illustration of how words can transform into stories and stories into reality or into movies.

And it's a nice touch that the only thing that keeps the cops from noticing the drugs is the same similar storytelling situation, because stories can keep us from seeing reality too.

Buddy, I'm gonna shoot you in the face if you don't put your hands on the fucking dash.

As an exercise in genre and style, Reservoir Dogs is superb, one of the best in film.

And if it falls just short of the transcendent heights that Tarantino would later go on to reach.

That's not really a criticism because, I mean, let's see you try to reach just short of transcendent with your first movie.

I think a good rule of thumb for how well films have aged is simply whether or not we keep watching them.

25 years on, I'm still watching Reservoir Dogs, and

I'll bet that'll still be true 25 years and more from now.

What they do, they start em in your face.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching this episode was brought to you by VRV Verve.

Verve is a service that pulls together a lot of great content channels like Rooster Teeth, Mondo Tested, Cartoon Hangover, Crunchyroll, and

It's cool to have those two in the same place.

You can download the VRV app on Xbox, PlayStation, iOS or Android.

And if you get the VRV combo pack at this link you can get a seven day free trial.

Once you get that combo pack, I'd recommend that you watch a show called March Comes Like a Lion on Crunchyroll.

It's a show about a 70 year old shogi player.

Shogi is a Japanese form variation on chess.