Ebert said, “Seeing this movie last May at the Cannes
Film Festival, I knew it was either one of the year's best films, or one of the
worst.”
Ebert continued, “Tarantino is too gifted a filmmaker
to make a boring movie, but he could possibly make a bad one: Like Edward D.
Wood Jr., proclaimed the Worst Director of All Time, he's in love with every
shot - intoxicated with the very act of making a movie. It's that very lack of
caution and introspection that makes "Pulp Fiction" crackle like an
ozone generator: Here's a director who's been let loose inside the toy store,
and wants to play all night.”
Ebert went on, “The screenplay, by Tarantino and Roger
Avary, is so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses
in it - the noses of those zombie writers who take "screenwriting"
classes that teach them the formulas for "hit films." Like
"Citizen Kane," "Pulp Fiction" is constructed in such a
nonlinear way that you could see it a dozen times and not be able to remember
what comes next. It doubles back on itself, telling several interlocking
stories about characters who inhabit a world of crime and intrigue,
triple-crosses and loud desperation. The title is perfect. Like those old pulp
mags named "Thrilling Wonder Stories" and "Official
Detective," the movie creates a world where there are no normal people and
no ordinary days - where breathless prose clatters down fire escapes and leaps
into the dumpster of doom.”
The movie not only brings back an old genre but also a
few careers.
John Travolta plays Vincent Vega, a middle-class
gangster who does assignments for a mob boss. We first see him with his partner
Jules, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Ebert mentioned, “they're on their way to a
violent showdown with some wayward Yuppie drug dealers, and are discussing such
mysteries as why in Paris they have a French word for Quarter Pounders. They're
as innocent in their way as Huck and Jim, floating down the Mississippi and
speculating on how foreigners can possibly understand each other.”
Travolta’s career is a number of jobs he can’t quite
handle. Not only does he kill people accidentally (“The car hit a bump!”) but
he doesn’t know how to clean up after himself. Good thing he knows people like
Mr. Wolf, played by Harvey Keitel, who is a master in messes, and has friends
like the character played by Eric Stoltz, who owns a big medical encyclopedia,
and can look up emergency situations.
Travolta and Uma Thurman have a part that’s funny and
strange. She’s the wife of the mob boss, played by Ving Rhames, who tells
Travolta to take her out for the night. Ebert said, “He turns up stoned, and
addresses an intercom with such grave, stately courtesy Buster Keaton would
have been envious.” They go to Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a 1950s theme restaurant
where Ed Sullivan is the emcee, Buddy Holly is the waiter, and they end up in a
twist contest. That’s before he overdoses and Stoltz, bringing a syringe with
adrenaline, shouts at Travolta, “YOU brought her here, YOU stick in the needle!
When I bring an O.D. to YOUR house, I’LL stick in the needle!” Bruce Willis and
Maria de Medeiros play another couple: He’s a boxer named Butch Coolidge who is
supposed to throw a fight, but doesn’t. she’s his sweet, innocent girlfriend,
who doesn’t understand why they have to leave town “right away.” But first he
needs to make a dangerous drive back to his apartment to pick up a sentimental family
gift – a wristwatch. The history of this watch is described in a flashback, as
Vietnam veteran Christopher Walken tells young Butch about how the watch was
purchased by his great-grandfather, “Private Doughboy Orion Coolidge,” and has moved
down through the generations – and through a lot more than generations, which
is understandable. Walken’s monologue has the movie’s biggest laugh.
Ebert mentioned, “The method of the movie is to
involve its characters in sticky situations, and then let them escape into
stickier ones, which is how the boxer and the mob boss end up together as the
captives of weird leather freaks in the basement of a gun shop.” Or how the
characters who start the movie, a couple of gun thugs played by Tim Roth and
Amanda Plummer, go way overboard. Ebert said, “Most of the action in the movie
comes under the heading of crisis control.”
If the problems are creative and original, so is the dialogue.
Ebert said, “A lot of movies these days use flat, functional speech: The
characters say only enough to advance the plot.” However, the writers in “Pulp
Fiction” are in love with words for their own enjoyment. The dialogue by Tarantino
and Avary is off the wall sometimes, but that’s the fun. It also means that the
characters don’t all sound alike: Ebert credited, “Travolta is laconic, Jackson
is exact, Plummer and Roth are dopey lovey-doveys, Keitel uses the shorthand of
the busy professional, Thurman learned how to be a moll by studying soap
operas.”
This is part of Tarantino’s life that he used to work
as a clerk in a video stores, and the inspiration for “Pulp Fiction” is old
movies, not real life. Ebert said, “The movie is like an excursion through the
lurid images that lie wound up and trapped inside all those boxes on the
Blockbuster shelves. Tarantino once described the old pulp mags as cheap,
disposable entertainment that you could take to work with you, and roll up and
stick in your back pocket.” Also, people could not wait until lunch so they
could start reading them again.
You could say that it’s like “Reservoir Dogs,” where
the story is told interchangeably, but you can piece everything together by the
end. If you haven’t seen this movie, what are you doing reading this review? Go
out and see it if you’re a Tarantino fan. Also, expect Tarantino to make an
appearance in this movie. Like I said, this movie is a must for everyone,
whether you like Tarantino or not. I give it a high recommendation.
Look out next week when I look at the first of a
two-parter in “Quentin Tarantino Month.”
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