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In Focus Quentin Tarantino

A 20 Year Retrospective Look Back at Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs

text James Arthur Armstrong

The last eight months have been hugely successful for Quentin Tarantino. In October 2012 he celebrated his 20th year as a filmmaker with the release of the Tarantino XX Blu-ray box set. The year was rounded off with the release of his eighth film, Django Unchained. This quickly became his most successful film at the box office to date, grossing a whopping $422,805,434. It didn’t stop there. The Tarantino juggernaut continued it’s momentum into 2013, and didn’t look like stopping. After celebrating his 50th birthday in March, he bagged his second Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in April. He also picked up a BAFTA and a Golden Globe on the road to his second Oscar, both for his screenwriting. Not a bad few months for a guy who dropped out of high school in 1979 and virtually spent his entire twenties broke, sleeping on friends couches. To truly understand how far Tarantino has come, you have to go back twenty years to his first film, Reservoir Dogs. He finally broke into an industry that had refused to take him seriously for many years with a film that shuck the industry to its very foundations. He's a unique director who emerged as one of the great idiosyncratic filmmakers of the last two decades.