Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 13, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Has it really been 10 years since Quentin Tarantino’s debut film upended the thriller genre and made the indie scene safe for excessive bloodletting? Have we really been suffering through 10 years of imitative, painfully “hip” crime dramas whose makers believe that simply having their characters discourse about old TV shows and breakfast cereals makes the dialogue cutting-edge? And how come it took a decade for a special-edition DVD (a two-disc set, in fact) honoring Dogs to come out?
No matter, because the movie holds up just fine after all this time. While a couple of the suspense scenes are less excruciating with the awareness of how they’ll end (somehow, it’s less painful watching Michael Madsen’s Mr. Blonde torturing Kirk Baltz’s cop, knowing Blonde won’t get to set him on fire), the dialogue still crackles and the acting and Tarantino’s surehanded direction still impress. In a way, Artisan’s release of this DVD (coupled with Miramax’s simultaneous SE disc releases of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown) are perfectly timed to keep the director’s fans sated as they await his next feature, Kill Bill.
There have been attacks made on Artisan’s new 2.35:1 transfer of Dogs, and it is true that the colors appear paler than on the company’s previous DVD of this title. Yet viewed on their own, the new hues all appear accurate, and the image boasts fine levels of detail and sharpness; check out the split-focus shots of the cop and Tim Roth’s Mr. Orange for a good example. A fullscreen version is also included, as it was on the first disc, though that one adds a bit more picture information on the top and bottom where the latest edition does not. You can spot the difference early on: Between the four transfers, only the initial fullscreen doesn’t crop Mr. White’s (Harvey Keitel) face off the bottom of the shot when Joe (Lawrence Tierney) gets up to pay the check in the opening scene. Reservoir Dogs is not an ambitious film in terms of its audio, and the DTS and 5.1 Surround tracks on the new disc are modest, though very clear and well-balanced.
Beyond the gimmick of being released with five different colors that allow you to buy your favorite Dog, the Reservoir package is positively swimming with extras. Chief among them are a collection of interviews and a group commentary (some of which sounds like excerpts from those interviews). With multiple points of view, the commentary is consistently varied and revealing: Cinematographer Andrzej Sekula notes technical details of the lighting and camerawork; Baltz and producer Lawrence Bender compare shooting the largely one-setting, long-take film to doing a stage play; executive producer Richard Gladstein defends Tarantino’s lifts from previous movies; another exec producer, Monte Hellman, reveals how Silent Night, Deadly Night III helped lead to Dogs’ production; editor Sally Menke recalls her agent advising her against doing the film; Chris Penn explores “Who shot Nice Guy Eddie?”; and Tarantino himself claims that the movie is fueled less by violence than “the threat of violence,” and quite rightly points out that the plot’s jumps in time are akin to literary chapters, not flashbacks (since they don’t occur from a character’s point of view).
The interviews are staged in an amusing variety of off-the-wall settings, from Penn speaking in the back of a moving truck (complete with bounces) to Madsen, who plays the movie’s most despicable character, caught at home with his kids and dogs. All of these segments shed more light on the film, and the most entertaining part is comparing Madsen and Baltz’s recollections of the day the latter asked the former to drive him around in his car trunk, just to get into character. A group of deleted scenes is also included, and while one can agree with Tarantino that the film doesn’t suffer without them, they do add further depth and color to the story—particularly when we find out what happened to the last undercover cop who infiltrated Mr. White’s gang. This section also allows two glimpses of the ear-severing effect created by KNB.
And that’s just on the first (widescreen) disc; the second (fullscreen) disc offers a wealth of analysis and trivia. Critics’ comments, played over clips of the movie, analyze the movie from different angles; the most trenchant are by Amy Taubin, who begins by addressing the “flashbacks” (guess she didn’t listen to Tarantino’s commentary) and goes on to explore the film largely from the point of view of Roth’s character, winding up by referring to Tarantino as a “white rapper” for his exploration of white-on-white violence. Peter Travers takes the more limited approach of focusing on Tarantino’s use of music and pop-culture references, while Emanuel Levy makes enthusiastic but familiar observations about the structure and character relationships.
A “K-Billy Radio” feature contains entertainingly wide-ranging audio clips—everything from a real criminal dissing on Dogs’ authenticity (“I have never seen so many lames in one place at one time…they look like a bunch of fuckin’ fudgepackers”) to Gerry Rafferty of Stealer’s Wheel recalling the origins of “Stuck in the Middle With You.” “Class of ’92” harks back to the Sundance festival of that year, where Dogs debuted; Tarantino recalls, with the humor of hindsight, the technical difficulties that plagued his movie’s screenings, while the disc graciously allows fellow filmmakers like Alex Rockwell, Chris Munch and “Katt Shae” (sic) to talk up their own work. Most interesting of all, we get to see a pair of Dogs scenes shot by Tarantino at the Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab the previous year, with Mr. White played in one by Steve Buscemi and in the other by Tarantino himself, bringing a far angrier and more manic interpretation to the role than Keitel did.
Some of the disc’s funniest bits can be found in a tribute to the late Tierney, which includes outtakes of the eccentric actor flubbing his lines (on a day when, we are told, he and Tarantino almost came to blows). In other featurettes, actor Eddie Bunker recalls his real-life criminal past, the production designer talks about location scouting (with accompanying photos), creative folks from John Boorman to Donald Westlake discuss the noir genre, the guys who created the Dogs action figures are interviewed…can a DVD set contain too much of a good thing? That depends on how much interest different elements of a film hold for you, and Artisan certainly can’t be faulted for its something-for-everyone approach here. It’s only appropriate that this is the kind of everything-including-the-kitchen-sink package that a film-obsessive like Tarantino himself would devour.
