Brew Views: Reservoir Dogs

Kool thing.

RESERVOIR DOGS
By Matthew Korfhage

Reservoir Dogs is a shut-in child's mescaline dream of criminal cool. It is also the film that launched Quentin Tarantino's brilliantly infantile oeuvre. The 20-year-old Reservoir is, on one hand, a simple claustrophobic tale about a bunch of lowlifes and a caper gone south. But the plot's not the point. Reservoir is an ebulliently talky exercise in style by a permanent teenager whose mother does not understand him, a stew of '70s exploitation, French New Wave nonlinear narration, épater-le-bourgeois racism and David Lynchian mixes of the brightly banal and grimly violent. It is a movie desperate to be cool, and it is.

  1. Showing at: Hollywood Theatre.
  2. Best paired with: Miller High Life.
  3. Also screening: Night of the Creeps (Laurelhurst), Jurassic Park (Academy).

WWeek 2015

Matthew Korfhage

Matthew Korfhage

Matthew Korfhage has lived in St. Louis, Chicago, Munich and Bordeaux, but comes from Portland, where he makes guides to the city and writes about food, booze and books. He likes the Oxford comma but can't use it in the newspaper.

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office.

Help us dig deeper.

Support