Spike Lee's 'Pulp Fiction'

Rating: 8/10 (12 July 2019)

This is Spike Lee's most Tarantino-esque project to date - like Tarantino, he lovingly absorbs 70's Blaxploitation to great effect and ends up surpassing the genre he's sending up. That's what makes it work so ingeniously - it's a message movie wrapped in the guise of a pulpy platform (the premise is inspired by a true story, but the delivery is pure pulp) and it works for the same reasons those 70's Blaxploitations worked - a style, an attitude (not to mention an outstanding soundtrack) that makes it immediately accessible to virtually all audiences. In a year filled with black message movies, many of which blur shamelessly together and range from bad to middle-of-the-road, this is a prime cut that decades of experience, the shocking revelation that Spike still had at least one more great movie left in him, have boiled up to. Even Do The Right Thing, while immediately likeable, took two viewings to recognize the greatness of it, while this was immediately palpable, vibrating with an instantly infectious sense of urgency. It's nice to see movies like this can still be made. Very rarely had I walked out of a theater so thrilled.