What’s Aged the Best?
The opening credits sequence; young Madsen; the ironic juxtaposition of music and violence; the who's-the-mole device; Steven Wright as the radio host; the L.A. setting
In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 00:49:53Read transcript
- The opening credit sequence is fun to watch after Swingers blatantly ripped it off four years later with the slow-motion strut out of a diner, while joking that everyone was ripping off Tarantino; the Swingers characters are exactly the guys whose lives were never the same after Reservoir Dogs.
- The shot remains influential: The Farewell, an immigrant story out this year, has a slow-motion group walk that reads as meaningful; the hosts joke about filming themselves walking the Sunset Gower lot, which one once did with Jalen, walking away from an exploding car.
- Young Madsen is another: a top-five lottery pick who became a whatever-happened-to like Tom Gugliotta, with a bit of Newman and Dean Martin, tall, black-haired and calm; he has had a complicated life, and a college friend loved even bad Michael Madsen movies.
- Madsen is likened to Kenny Anderson and may have market-corrected himself; it is telling he is not in Pulp Fiction, though the long-term plan was a Vega Brothers movie with Travolta, and he returned in Kill Bill and The Hateful Eight.
- Species is one of the great cable movies with no Oscars; Madsen then went down the road of Man with a Gun and Donnie Brasco and became the Skinamax lord, and his once olive-oil voice now sounds like gargled concrete, hard to understand in The Hateful Eight.
- The juxtaposition of music against what it scores, easy-listening soft rock during the ear cutting, was mind-blowing and has been copied so often it is now undetectable; who's-the-mole plots remain a favorite device, as in The Loudest Voice.
- Steven Wright as the radio host sets the scene; it is a good L.A. movie, with the warehouse in Eagle Rock, Tarantino living in Glendale, and his first three films being L.A. movies set in different parts of the city, like the True Romance hotel on Sunset.
- The closing personal pick is the opening credits sequence.