Pulp Fiction

I can still recall the excitement I felt during my first viewing of 1994's PULP FICTION.  Even during the opening credits.  Kool & the Gang's "Jungle Boogie" filled the soundtrack.  I knew I was in for something extraordinary.  Could just feel it.  There was considerable buzz for writer/director Quentin Tarantino's second feature and what unfolded over the next two and one-half plus hours more than lived up to it.   Quite exceeded, in fact.   Lately, it seems that appreciating this film is somewhat passe.  Even dyed in the wool fans are less than eager to expound on why they love(d) it.  Perhaps because they feel it is now the equivalent of a song that has been played to death on the radio, say, Steely Dan's "Reelin' in the Years".  Still a great tune, but so burned into consciousness its charms have been dulled by familiarity.

I don't feel that way about this movie.  It's always been fashionable to join the backlash against something so popular.  Especially something that at one time was so hip and cool and maybe even underground, soon to become mainstream and quoted even by the likes of sensitive grandmas.  Well, maybe not much of Samuel Jackson's dialogue, or what his wallet says on it.  I revisit this movie every few years and it retains the same explosive power it ever had.  What is so remarkable is how fresh and original it all seems even with the knowledge that every single moment has been lifted from somewhere else.  Not just from decades worth of films, but apparently even stories relayed by famous directors during interviews.  QT certainly took that famous adage to heart - "Good artists borrow, great artists steal."  

The non-linear narrative.  Not new in '94, but how Tarantino weaves his pulpy tales into each other feels like sleazy genius.  How startling to see a character reappear for the final episode after we watched him die in a previous one.  Adds quite a bit of intrigue and weight to things, dontcha think? 

The lengthy scenes of dialogue, often clever and even erudite.  In that pop culture sorta way.  Quentin's characters, which include hit men, boxers, gangsters, gangster's wives, redneck pawn shop owners, star crossed lovers who make bad stick-up artists, and a "cleaner" (whose coveted wisdom as to how to deal with the mess of a corpse in the back of a Chevy Nova is just pure common sense), are all cartoons,  all with the emotional and intellectual level of knowing adolescents.  PULP FICTION, set in identifiable L.A. locations, nonetheless never feels real, not in the slightest.  No does it attempt to.  It's as if these characters and their stories exist in another dimension.  One that many Generation Xers sought to emulate in their own humdrum lives. 

What a cast.  Joining Jackson in hitman garb is John Travolta, ready for his big comeback.  Bruce Willis plays the boxer who refuses to take a dive and suffers an eventful odyssey in the aftermath.  Uma Thurman is iconic as anything in her black pixie wig, staring across the table at Travolta before they dance to Chuck Berry and do heroin.  Ving Rhames as the imposing gangster who learns the boxer he paid off didn't go down in the fifth.  Christopher Walken as a man who tells a serpentine story about a watch, with a helluva punchline.   Also on view are Eric Stoltz, Amanda Plummer, Tim Roth, and Rosanna Arquette.   Oh, and QT himself, who's the only odd man out on that side of the camera.  His performance is legendarily awful, so much so I always wondered if it was intentional. "Okaaaaay?"

But his direction is divine.  A whiplash, in-love-with-every-shot style he continues to employ today.  Showy and shameless.  Bids taken from Godard and Scorsese.  Largely stolen, rarely borrowed.   His plagiarism never bothered me one bit.  PULP FICTION set Hollywood and the indie film world on fire, for better or worse, and it will always be a one-of-a-kind entertainment whose DNA includes just about everything you may have seen before.  It is the ultimate example of why the "how" and not the "what" is what really matters in cinema appreciation.