My Best Friend's Birthday (1987) This amateur film was co-written and directed by Quentin Tarantino and has become somewhat of a cult favorite over the years. Fans of Tarantino are willing to check out anything he has done so this leads them to his first feature, which originally ran 70 minutes but due to a fire there are only fragments that remain. The total running time is just over 35 minutes so half of the movie is lost but there's still enough interesting material to make it worth sitting through. The story is pretty simple as Tarantino plays a DJ whose best friend has just been dumped and the two try to have some fun. This leads to the Tarantino character getting involved with a hooker.With half the film missing it's impossible to fairly judge this movie but I must say that as a Tarantino fan I enjoyed it. On a technical level there's certainly nothing special about the film as the director obviously hadn't gotten that great eye of his. However, the dialogue and how people talk to one another is on full power here and there are some very funny sequences. One such example is when they are discussing great actors in bad movies and also a scene dealing with good music.Tarantino is actually a lot of fun in his part and he certainly knows how to handle his dialogue. What's most interesting here is the subplot dealing with the hooker as a lot of their relationship would be used in TRUE ROMANCE so fans of that film will certainly want to check this out.

This is an interesting short directed and written by Quentin Tarantino. As he's stated in interviews this movie was his film school. Some of the dialog, scenes and names he would reuse in True Romance. The soundtrack is great by the way and the look is not unlike other low budget films of the 80s, think Shes Gotta Have it. The acting is weak but it's to be expected from a film like this. I gave this film a ten because I think the rating is too low, it deserves a 6. My favorite line was "Your ass is grass and I'm the Lawnmower!". Anyways it's a fun little movie and if you're a Tarantino fan, you should get some enjoyment out of it.

Tarantino is the man! The movie is watchable (surprising for how old it is), obviously its lacking the polish (both script and video) of his later movies but who cares. This movie probably cost him the price of a six pack and it shows. Whats great about it, is that it shows this generations greatest director in his youth giving this whole "movie" thing a shot. In that respect this movie really succeeds. It's one of those things that you watch and then say "Hey I could do that... why arn't I doing that?". Really cool to know that this guy started with this... offbeat... film and then went on to direct the Pulpiest of Fiction (hands down, best film ever). The best part of this movie is not the script, directing or acting. The BEST part of this movie is that it has inspired me to get going on a film of my own.Thanks QT No time like the present.

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.