Most overpraised movie of the last 100,000 years

Rating: Null/10 (20 March 1999)

Gen-x audiences, overstuffed by the yupped-out aesthetic of the Spielberg/John Hughes eighties, were dying for a soupcon of seventies grunge--something urban and gritty, but ironic and retro, to fit the cynical, beat-out, slackitudinous mood of the late George Bush era. That's how Quentin Tarantino served his wake-up call to the world with RESERVOIR DOGS in 1991, the alarm clock that jolted American cinema's eyes open after the long coma between BLUE VELVET and it. And PULP FICTION was the one that knocked the ball out of the park--commercially speaking. To find a cultural nerve-pinching phenomenon of similar force, you'd have to go back to BONNIE AND CLYDE or EASY RIDER. But even they didn't have the seismic, global force of this movie: it may be hard to remember a few years later, but this picture, and its author, were burned onto the public consciousness and referenced 24/7 for long, long after its release.
Seen in retrospect, it's clear what put the movie over--it's like a smooth, upscale theme store stocked with gen-x fetish items (heroin! faded seventies icon! jherri curls! tongue-in-cheek machismo! Kool and the Gang! Fruit Brute!) that could make the most out-of-it yahoo feel like a hipster.
What's also clear is that it's a logy, stilted, stagebound piece of work that doesn't seem to take place in any lifelike universe, even a stylized one. The only rhythm the movie can claim is that of a writer impressed with his ability to make coiled, jivy dialogue. Scenes drag on and on as Tarantino keeps on stylin'. The center section of the movie--a boxer's romance with a French honeypie and his escape from a gangster he's double-crossed--is so thoroughly leaden and spontaneity-deprived you'd think it would've been enough to sink the movie alone. But somehow the combination of the star-studded cast and the "inside"-y, you-can-be-hip feel of the picture made it a blockbuster of the calibre usually reserved for movies about skyscrapers or planets exploding.
Sadly, Tarantino, after a long, nail-biting hiatus, made his first genuinely great movie, JACKIE BROWN, which highlights all his strengths and eschews each of his flaws. All the fans who obsessed over the smallest minutiae of PULP greeted this impressive, grown-up work with a shrug and a quick retreat.