My Best Friend's Birthday (1987)

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Excellent, a Must See

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

"My Best Friend's Birthday" is a film that runs for slightly over an hour and was made almost 30 years ago by filmmaker Quentin Tarantino in his early 20s. According to IMDb, this is his second project. Just like his co-writer Craig Hamann, Tarantino also plays a major character in this film looking pretty punk and with his mannerisms and all he has not changed a bit in the last 30 years. Of course I only watched about half of this film as the other half is apparently lost. What a shame. This is a pretty good work for such a young filmmaker and the talent is visible. The best about it is, as usual with Tarantino, the dialogs: fresh and creative from start to finish with tons of interesting references to music in this very case. We hear about Elvis and Rod Stewart and there is even a Johnny Cash song included in here. Love him. Tarantino must have had great taste in music as another of his early works features Leonard Cohen, another favorite of mine. So yeah what can I say: I recommend this little movie. It only runs for a bit over 30 minutes, so it does not take long to see, basically like a short film. A pretty good watch.

The opening scene is in my opinion one of QT's most (if not his and only matchless immortal most) iconic genius works of dialog. With a hypersensitive observer of pop ism like QT their works can grossly radically rewire the worldly adult computer mind. It can quite literally turn us into adult children. Either my mind is playing tricks on me from my godlike manic state from QT's genius or QT's writing can be comparable with JD Salinger or even Shakespeare.The opening scene is in my opinion one of QT's most (if not his and only matchless immortal most) iconic genius works of dialog. With a hypersensitive observer of pop ism like QT their works can grossly radically rewire the worldly adult computer mind. It can quite literally turn us into adult children. Either my mind is playing tricks on me from my godlike manic state from QT's genius or QT's writing can be comparable with JD Salinger or even Shakespeare.

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.