Thoughts on Reservoir Dogs?

Still love it, still holds up much better than anything else he made except PF and is deeply emotional too - the Keitel-Roth storyline is heartbreaking stuff. I think the movie is like his hero DePalma's Scarface remembered somewhat wrongly nowadays because people state the obvious about it at the expense of what was so weirdly unique about it (then and now).

First the way that movie played with the narrative and what you see and when was way, way ahead of the curve - nothing coming out of Hollywood looked or felt like that except maybe Jacob's Ladder which was a different thing anyway. Everything in narrative films was straightforward boredom, it could all have been one hour TV shows.

The dialog was so ripped off (ineptly) subsequently by others, you forget how staggeringly perfect and ambitious it was. In a relatively short film, that amount of quotable material is insane. In the opening scene there are at least 4 riotous, concurrent dialog passages - tipping in restaurants, Who's Toby?, Madonna, the K-Billy Supersounds of the 70s stuff - all floating around the actual discussion bubbling underneath. It's quite daring in its writing - even in people copycatting it, never get that trick of that many plates being juggled at once.

That screenplay is just a marvel (and we're living in an age where screenplays are awful now too).