My Best Friend's Birthday

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.

(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.

We will never see this movie in it's full glory. The final reel of this movie was destroyed in a lab fire that broke out during editing and the only surviving parts were edited together to make this 34 minutes short movie. Still you never get the feeling that you're ever really missing any sequences while watching this movie.

This is a Tarantino movie alright. It has some absolutely amazing dialog. The story isn't really about much but the dialog makes sure that this movie is an interesting enough one to watch. The line 'Your ass is grass, and I'm the lawnmower.', right before two persons get into a fight, is an absolute classic in my book and now actually one of my favorite movie quotes. The movie is interestingly told and divided in several different parts, in the same style as "Pulp Function". This movie would latter also form the basis for Tarantino's script for "True Romance".

Real problem with this movie is that it lacks style. It's a very amateur like looking movie and it uses standard camera-positions and weak editing. Because of this not everything in the movie works very well, such as most of the comical moments and the weird kung-fu fight toward the ending. Tarantino's vision was obviously already present but he didn't had the right tools and persons around him to make the right movie he had in mind with it. Oh well, he eventually ended up alright with that!

Probably only truly recommendable to Tarantino fans though.

7/10

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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.

SPOILERS AHEAD

To those who wonder how I discovered My Best Friend's Birthday, I found this video on ebay, and it was definitely worth the money despite the deteriorated quality of the copy. This is filmmaker Quentin Tarantino's first independently funded film, and from what was assembled (the film wasn't completed and this can be seen since a couple of plot points are left un-answered at the end of 40 minutes) I can tell that it was one of those well-intentioned (if slight) signs-of-things-to-come.

Clarence Pool (Tarantino, with a full-on "Elvis Man" look) is a disc jockey at K-BILLY Radio (Reservoir Dogs' music conductor in a sense), and is planning to give his friend Micky Burnett (co-writer Craig Hamann) a call-girl for his birthday party (a story later re-used for True Romance). This is used as more of a signpost for the film to follow as the characters, in particular Clarence, go off on riffs of Dialog - the "I'd f*** Elvis" speech is in its first revelation - and it's often very funny. Even a kung-fu fight between Mickey and the call girl's pimp (Al Harrell) is executed with the similar sense of dark hilarity that has made Tarantino the pro he is now. Truth be told, the film isn't without its shortcomings for a budget of so little, and a couple of the scenes really don't work at all. Yet for what it's worth it's a small ruby of underground cinema.