With his seventh feature, Inglourious Basterds, due out from The Weinstein Company on August 21, this seemed like a good time to genuflect on the films of writer/director Quentin Tarantino. From humble beginnings as a video store clerk in Los Angeles, Tarantino developed into one of the more influential filmmakers of the past two decades, his name becoming synonymous with a style that features violence, black humor, and pop culture references in abundance.

His oeuvre of past films are all interesting, even if some weren’t as big commercial successes as others, and they frequently pay homage to obscure or forgotten genres—among them, blaxploitation, kung fu and samurai films, and B-grade slasher movies. This has fueled debate for years over whether Tarantino is a true artist who practices appropriating, or is merely a copycat.

Either way, I would argue that every film he has made is noteworthy in some way, and the following retrospective points out how.

I also try to touch on the more controversial elements — mainly, the level of violence in his pictures — that has followed Tarantino on each step of his career, which started with a modestly-budgeted 1992 crime movie called Reservoir Dogs.

 
Reservoir Dogs
A landmark of American independent cinema, it actually acquired most of its early acclaim in Great Britain. There were accusations Reservoir Dogs borrows a little too much from the 1987 Hong Kong flick City on Fire. The plot about an undercover cop who infiltrates a gang planning a jewelry heist is the same, but City on Fire is told in a linear fashion, and focuses more on the budding friendship between the officer and one of the thieves. Nevertheless, Tarantino puts his own stamp on the material through the telling: he frequently cuts away from the main action to flashbacks that shed light on the film’s protagonists. In this way, Reservoir Dogs unfolds like a novel, with characters popping up in different scenes in much different frames of mind.

Through the use of non-linear structure, which would come to play in all his later directorial efforts, Tarantino gave his film a different energy from a linear narrative. Indeed, when an audience watches City on Fire, they know early on that the main protagonist is an undercover officer, so the suspense is from whether he’s successful in his mission. Dogs, on the other hand, drops you in with the thieves after the heist has already gone bad, and neither they nor the viewer knows exactly who tipped off the cops. Alternating points of view from one character to the next, the movie becomes like a guessing game of who’s not what they claim to be. Since the point of view jumps so much, it becomes Tarantino’s almost by default, and he does a good job playing his cards close to the vest, not showing his hand until the audience is least expecting it.

This sense of playfulness earned Reservoir Dogs kudos from film critics, particularly Kenneth Turan of the LA Times. But others criticized the movie’s violence — in particular, the famous ear-slicing sequence — and overall use of profanity; as far as the number of f-bombs, Dogs may have out-sworn any movie that decade until Tarantino’s own Pulp Fiction, which was considerably longer. When the movie was making the rounds, Tarantino observed that there’s always somebody who leaves a screening early due to the foul language or blood and guts. For his part, he seemed comfortable with how the violence unnerved audiences, noting that it proved his film has the power to affect people.

But if the sight of Mr. Blonde torturing a police hostage or Mr. Orange lying in a pool of his own insides made viewers want to squirm and run away, Tarantino’s non-linear narrative style managed to imbue a sense of depth, even humanity, onto Reservoir Dogs' skuzzy protagonists. And the dialogue, at the very least, elicited chuckles. Who can forget the opening sequence in a diner where the conversation swings back and forth in real-time between big man Joe Cabot’s reading from an old address book he re-discovered in his coat, and Mr. Brown’s interpretation of Madonna’s "Like a Virgin" and "True Blue"? Things eventually settle on why Mr. Pink refuses to tip and why Mr. White thinks he should, and both individuals' reasons are as intelligent as they are needlessly profane.

Watching and listening to these men in their matching dark suits laughing and shooting the sh*t, one can’t help liking them a little. It’s a feeling that never goes away completely, even after all the gunplay and knife-work starts up: Yeah, these are evil bastards, but they’re cool evil bastards.