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Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous
For the rest of his flicks i don't have a single problem but Reservoir Dogs feels gratuitous and not in anyway related or relevant to the plot or story. In flicks like Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown they "make sense" within the plot and who the characters are..
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I see it a little differently. I think with Reservoir Dogs part of the point was to turn a fairly simple story on its ear. It's a pretty generic story, but it's written and executed with the artistry of an excellent ensemble stage drama. Others have mentioned how every scene was something new and unexpected, and I think the language factored into that. In 1993, there were racial issues that people just didn't touch. Not if they wanted to be successful. I think the language was a deliberate way to unsettle the audience and create a dialogue about the characters and the film, just as the "torture" scene did, and just as so many Tarantino films do.
I could be wrong though. But I saw it as another broken rule, and damned if it wasn't pretty fucking realistic. Not that I spend time with gangsters, but I've been around a lot of small town white guys, and they're at roughly the same level of intellectual development and cultural sensitivity.
Regarding DJANGO, one of the things I love about that film that I never heard anyone really talk about was the fact that the Christopher Waltz character could barely bring himself to use the word "nigger" even when he was in the midst of a long con to gain the trust of ruthless plantation owner types.
I mean, it was palpable. You could see it on his face... And he was the major moral compass of the film. The Yoda, the Gandalf, the Commissioner Gordon (sorry)... So it carried a lot of wait to see a white man who was almost physically pained by saying that word. A man who hated and loathed racism so much that he was willing to throw everything away just to avoid shaking the hand of the reprehensible Mr. Candy.
I think that was a deliberate move on Tarantino's part, to make not only the jeep but the true conscience of the film reject racism so completely, and at such a catastrophic cost. (Really, from the perspective of Django and his wife, it was kind of a dick move...) But it was "right" and it seemed to speak volumes about Tarantino's own racial conscience. In a way I think he was trying to make amends for his past "questionable" use of racial slurs.