Calm

Rating: 9/10 (8 February 2001)

Like in the Pulp Fiction` segment with John Travolta and Samuel Jackson, we experience a certain, deplaced calmness here. The movie runs two and a half hours and singular scenes are longer than usual. There are hardly any violent scenes in the movie, no bloodshed; language is the only reason why I couldn't watch the movie before I was sixteen. The music is from the seventies and also quite slow and melancholic. Pam Grier was famous in the seventies and Robert Forster himself even looks like coming straight from a twenty-year old TV series. This calmness  that is the result of all these facts  had a great fascination on me. It produced a fantastic suspense and if the dialogues were not typical for Tarantino I would say, it's a very Hitchcock-like film.
If there was an Oscar for casting, this film would have won it. That unusual mix of well-known and coming-back actors, all together doing a great job, makes the film most interesting from the start. 9 stars out of 10.
Actually, there is nothing to complain about, as long as you see the film only once. When I saw it a second time, the dialogues started to get a little tiring and I asked myself: Do they really have to be so long each? So don't watch it twice one after the other.