My Best Friend's Birthday

Well I finally saw Quentin Tarantino's "film school", which is what's left of his 70 minutes long debut, never officially released (saw it on a bootleg DVD), film My Best Friend's Birthday (35 minutes). This worth watching stuff that is just for fans of Tarantino; for me QT delivers here, not quite because of his direction, not quite because of his cast but just because of his dialog and his participation as the main character, radio disc jokey rockabilly Clarence Pool (the birthday of the title is the one of Clarence's best friend). Basically Clarence Pool is the best thing of the 35 minutes, and Tarantino doesn't deliver a truly fantastic performance but his character has pretty much the best dialog, he is fun. The 35 minutes are very fragmented: we have first Clarence at work, we have stuff at the K-BILLY radio station and we have three other characters (two K-BILLY workers and the guest of Clarence's show). It's both very funny and not quite funny, for instance is hilarious when Clarence recalls certain reaction that he had when he was a 3 year old kid but is not quite all the stuff with the other two dudes, except when one gives cocaine to Clarence (and Clarence sniffs, not hesitating because of his guest)…it's poorly made but nevertheless fun! The other fragments mainly involves Clarence's best friend Mickey (played by Craig Hamann, who also wrote the film together with QT), the girl that supposedly will give Mickey a truly great birthday and that began doing her current job thanks to Nancy Allen in Brian De Palma's 1980 film Dressed to Kill (Misty is her name, played by Crystal Shaw) and Clarence's girl. Aside of a sort of funny fight with Misty's black pimp the scenes with Mickey are uninteresting just as the scenes involving Clarence's girl, even the very last fragment with Clarence and Misty is mostly not good (yet there are some cool lines and for QT fans may be interesting hearing from Clarence that he "has a food fetish"), well basically after the first fragment at the radio station the stuff I really liked comes from Tarantino's character: a really nice talk with a clerk about Elvis, Marlon Brando, Chaplin's swan song, The Beatles, Colonel Parker and stuff ("you see the same cake?", that was hilarious!). My Best Friend's Birthday is not a Tarantino thing that I would like to see a lot, basically once is good enough, funny bits, some memorable lines, let's re-watch True Romance

Based upon seeing what little footage remains of this movie, I don't think that the full-length version would have been a great movie. What's seen here is a jumble of different scenes that each advance the story very little. Tarantino clearly didn't yet have a full grasp of more proper ways to plot and execute a story. Still, despite this (and the very primative production values and acting), the footage is a fascinating cinematic document of sorts. The movie is full of ideas (and dialogue) that Tarantino later polished up and reused in other movies (primarily TRUE ROMANCE.) So while this is mostly amateur hour as a *movie*, it is very entertaining as a cinematic notebook.

QT's "first" film is a glimpse of what was to come from a very talented writer/director; rich banter with an entertaining and skewed look at life. Shot in black and white, on a very small budget, the film has many shortcomings compared to the director's other films. However, it is still part of Tarantino's body of work.

In the mid 80's there were not many ways a filmmaker could get a film made - short of getting a film camera and making one with their buddies - and a quick look at the production credits for "My Best Friend's Birthday" suggest this to be the case.

I heard this film was unwatchable, but it is actually quite instructional for all hard-core Tarantino fans. Many have stated that this film was QT's film school; so be it. Cream rises because it is less dense than the milk it is found within and eventually makes its way to the top.

However, until someone takes a spoon and scoops the cream off the milk, it's stuck there. The Reservoir Dogs producer (Lawrence Bender) skimmed QT from the vat and we are the happy recipients of some rich delicious ice cream due to such.

I mean no disrespect to any of the other commentators of this movie, but I never would have expected to hear someone say this is, would have, or could have been QT's best. In fact, I think Tarantino himself would have a good laugh at that notion. He might even take offense to it.

If you've ever seen the time Tarantino was on Charlie Rose, he talks a bit about this movie (without ever mentioning the title) and I can see and completely agree with everything he said about it. It's really an awful movie - largely due to the horrendous acting... but what are you gonna do; it's essentially a student film for a man who was never a film student.

In case you haven't seen the interview I mentioned, here's basically what he said: He admitted that the movie was really bad, but if you watched it, you could tell that he did it (very true). He also said this movie, while a complete failure, was his film school. He learned about film-making during the process of making this film; it really amounted to an experiment. In another interview he mentioned that, when he was in negotiations for Reservoir Dogs, when asked by a studio exec if they could see his previous work, he said no.

There are a few moments that are very much Tarantino, and a couple of them show up in evolved forms in his later movies. This is the reason referred to in the summary line of this review. QT is, without a shadow of a doubt, my all-time favorite filmmaker, so it's an interesting look back in time to see what a completely inexperienced, unprepared Tarantino with no budget whatsoever could do.

I realize I haven't quite specified what was so bad about this movie, but it's pretty much everything. It's not well thought out, it's disjointed, the sound and picture are horrible (don't worry, I'm not really counting against it for that - it's to be expected for such a low budget film), the dialogue is not up to par, and I reiterate that the acting is truly awful (with the exception of QT himself).

However, it is undeniably a Tarantino movie, and for that reason and that reason alone I can see fit to give it 5/10 stars. I can guarantee, though, that most of these people rating it at 10 stars would not give this movie the time of day if it were from a no-name director. I'm no different, but I admit it openly, and I'm not afraid to critique the man despite my near-idolization of him. I think it was actually a nice twist of fate that this movie was destroyed, making Reservoir dogs his first official film credit instead.

(32%) A curiosity piece that's for Tarantino fans only as about half of it is 100% missing forever, and what's left is largely a mixed bag. Quentin himself is about the best thing here and gives a good dose of effort and comic timing to his performance. The writing is somewhat decent at times; although like a lot of things here it's clearly the product of the inexperienced, and many will claim that it's nothing more than typical Tarantino movie name dropping, which really is only partly true. For a very low budget first attempt this isn't too bad, and it does at least show some future potential of what was yet to come.