On the QT - Part 1, sort of

Right, so carrying on from HERE I was hoping to start with a good review of Quentin Tarantino’s first ever film - “My Best Friend’s Birthday”. Written by Quentin in 1987 it was the first of his scripts to be made into a film. Not Resevoir Dogs, like most would believe and if I’m honest, that’s what I thought.

With the little research I’ve done the synopsis is simple. “It’s Mickey’s Birthday and his girlfriend just left him, so that’s when his friend Clarence shows him a birthday he’ll never forget”.

Quentin plays Clarence and straight away you can see that his acting skills haven’t exactly improved over the years, but some would say they didn’t have to.

It’s grainy and black and white and I wish I could offer more of a review on it, but I can’t track down a copy of it and I really don’t fancy trawling through Youtube to put together a version of it.

One thing I will say is that it was obviously the birthplace for everything we recognise as Tarantino today, especially the dialogue:

“If I were going to fuck a guy, I mean because my life depended on it. I’d fuck Elvis…… I’m not a fag or anything, but Elvis was a good looking guy”

K Billy (K Billy’s superstar’s of the 70′s in Resevoir Dogs).

I’m going to keep trying to track down a copy of this movie for my own interest if nothing else and when I do I’ll come back and do a proper review, hence the title of this post.

From the little I did see of it I can imagine that the film will eventually end up on a super collector’s edition of all of his movies at some point down the line, although if it were put on general release now I’d still go and see it. Maybe just for the camp, retro and “before they were famous” values.

Here’s a clip of it from Youtube and there are plenty more, but like I said, I’d rather wait to find it on DVD and watch it un-interrupted.

Until next time.