It's only fitting a film with as abstract a title as Reservoir Dogs should end with a song as bizarre as Harry Nilsson's Coconut. The second Tarantino film to appear on the list, much like Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs is chock-full of terrific music memorably matched with cinematic imagery. The film is about a heist that goes terribly wrong because, unbeknownst to the thieves, one of their members is an undercover police officer. In the background of the film's increasingly disastrous events is K-Billy's Super Sounds of the Seventies, a radio show that plays relatively obscure 1970's hits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA9OqUuA6a0 The film arguably has more memorable music-to-scene pairings earlier on, but as the film's "spare-no-souls" finale plays out, the segue to Coconut is still numbingly great music selection. What makes Coconut such a suitable end for Reservoir Dogs is the emotional rollercoaster that is the film. The audience is on the edge of their seat so much of the time, that when the tension is finally relieved through the film's fantastically bloody denouement, Coconut seems like perfectly appropriate commentary on the preceding events. The use of the song almost feels like a joke on the audience, which would be fitting because ultimately, Reservoir Dogs is a tragicomedy whose bizarre, downward spiral trajectory is the counterpoint that Harry Nilsson's Coconut was always looking for but never knew it needed.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
