Pulp Fiction is a movie that defined a decade. To some, it may not have been the best film of the 90s or the most highly revered. But it can be argued that it was very influential to other filmmakers. One only has to look at the slew of imitators that followed Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film all the way to the end of the decade, and into the new millennium.
A synopsis of Pulp Fiction is next to impossible. It is told non-chronologically, something that had been done before, but never to this amount of critical and mainstream success. It is divided into three different stories with intertitles between them. For the first two-thirds or so of the movie, it may seem to make no sense, but by the time the last story has finished, everything has come together in a most clever manner.
The colorful characters include two hit men named Jules and Vincent (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson), a boxer named Butch (Bruce Willis), a bathrobe wearing drug dealer named Lance (Eric Stoltz), a highly feared crimeboss named Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) and his wife Mia (Uma Thurman).
The unconventional manner in which the story was told was not the only exciting aspect of Tarantino’s film. His brightly colored visuals make the film visually stimulating. He also further cultivated his knack for writing snappy, quotable dialogue, which was already in evidence with his first film, Reservoir Dogs. If the viewer remembers nothing else about Pulp Fiction, they will at least have a line or two stuck in their heads after the movie is over.
Besides being the movie that put John Travolta back on the movie radar, the performances are also flawless all across the board.
Unless you are completely turned off by excessive violence and language, you need to see Pulp Fiction. To this day, it remains one of the most exciting and original films of the 1990s, and its 155-minute running time breezes by unbelievably quickly. Now that Tarantino is experiencing a resurgance, thanks to his Kill Bill films, it is the perfect time to see Pulp Fiction and jump on the bandwagon.
Chuck DelRoss Josephine Munis can be reached at cdelross@temple.edu
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