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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Omak Darkleaf" data-source="post: 9394189" data-attributes="member: 7045897">I enjoy Tarantino’s films and think he’s had a greater impact on pop culture than any other director of his generation. I know nothing about film criticism and I’m not a Tarantino aficionado—two of these films I’ve seen only seen once and two I’ve seen a disproportionate amount of times—but, of his films that I have seen, these are my personal favorites, presented without explanation, justification, or apology. Infer from my rankings what you may about my defective character.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />8 Jackie Brown7 Kill Bill I & II6 Django Unchained5 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood4 The Hateful Eight3 Inglourious Basterds2 Pulp Fiction 1 Reservoir DogsWhat I admire most about Tarantino isn't his stories or his characters but his craft, the genius of which is on display from the start of his oeuvre. Reservoir Dogs is a lean film and a tight one too, not just despite its talkative characters but because of them. It is a heist film with little action. Instead of action, the bulk of the film’s tension is generated by dialogue—dialogue that the characters use to tell stories to each other. What may be its most impressively crafted sequence is a ten-minute meditation on the nature of narrative itself.After Mister Orange empties a clip into Mister Blonde to save Marvin Nash from immolation, we enter the titled “Mr. Orange” flashback. Just as there have already been titled flashbacks for Misters White and Blonde that show their relationships with Joe Cabot, Mister Orange’s will too; but Orange’s begins not with him and Cabot in Cabot's office but with Orange and Holdaway in a diner. Orange tells Holdaway that he’s gained Cabot’s trust and has been recruited for a robbery. Holdaway congratulates Orange and asks him if he used the “commode story.”The flashback flashes back farther in time to when Holdaway first gave Orange the script to the commode story—a fictitious anecdote intended to inspire trust in its listener—and Holdaway advises Orange to focus on details and make the story his own—to treat it as if he were telling a joke.We leave this flashback and flash forward, but not farther than the meeting in the diner that began the flashback proper. Orange paces in his apartment, rehearsing the story, molding it. We jump forward in time again, and now Orange is performing for Holdaway, the story morphing further, and, once again, we jump forward to see Orange selling the story to Cabot, White, and Nice Guy Eddie in a nightclub.We know that Orange has already won Cabot’s trust. Winning it is not the source of the driving tension. What we don’t know is how the fictional commode story will end. The next flashback takes us all the way back to the imagined 1986 of the commode narrative when Orange—transporting a brick of weed—walks into a train station men’s room and finds four sheriff’s deputies and a German Shepherd. The silent deputies all stare at Orange and the dog barks.The film cuts back and forth between the men’s room and the nightclub while Orange narrates his internal panic, reinforcing that this is just a story even while the tension builds. The metanarrative finally subsumes the actual narrative as Orange, in the men’s room, begins to narrate the story directly to the sheriff’s deputies: Tarantino's story has become that of Mister Orange telling a tale not just to his fellow characters, but to characters of Mister Orange's own creation.Orange talks himself through his fear and moves to a urinal, his metadiscourse with the deputies over. While Orange relieves himself, the first deputy spins a tale for his fellows. He tells a story about warning a driver at a traffic stop to stop reaching for the glove box or be shot in the face. The casual menace of the deputy—which is lost on the driver in the deputy’s story—is lost neither on Orange nor the audience. The climax of the commode story comes when Orange defuses the tension by hitting the button of the hand dryer, silencing the deputy's story with the dryer's white note, punctuating the end of the commode story like a punchline caps a joke, and winning over his audience.Exposition is generally best limited if not entirely avoided in narrative because it more often than not grinds the pace of the story to a halt. Flashbacks are a common device used to circumvent exposition because it puts backstory in scene. Instead of being told something about the character(s) in question, the audience can see it in scene and infer meaning through active viewing. But Tarantino doesn’t use Orange’s flashback to convey action: instead, we have two guys in a diner talking about a story about a story about a story. For ten minutes, nothing drives the forward action but for the telling of these embedded narratives. In the hands of most writers and directors, breathing pathos into this type of material would be nigh impossible. In only his first film, Tarantino makes it look effortless.</blockquote>

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