Insightful, wonderful, geeky

Rating: Null/10 (28 July 2003)

Pulp Fiction is the ultimate playground for the mind of Quentin Tarrantino. The movie is a blindingly repressed spewage of pop culture, brilliant setup, drug excrement, softcore porn, and a magnificent mixture of philosophy, religion and violence. The movie's mood almost has us as tied to a chair as Ving Rhames and Bruce Willis are in the excruciatingly painful gimp sequence. Thus retrained, we are blasted on a whirlwind tour of the hippest of the hip. So hip, in fact, that we want to blow our brains out after it is over. Samuel Jackson gives the performance that will undoubtedly mark his career. It is a performance that is disturbed, hysterical, deadly, funny, compassionate, smart and scared (yes, scared.) He's a quote dynamo and is given more great things to say then possibly any character in movie history. Travolta is slick, slimy and stupidly sharp in his role. He's one of the few guys who comes off as an actor in this movie and not a lost soul in the new wave beat generation of the mid-90's. The cast is a who's who of the best cult actors of the mid-90's and Tarrantino gets them to deliver stunning performances. And why not? The dialogue is possibly the best written verbage for any film ever made and is a Holy Grail for fans of offbeat and subculture cinema. From "the holiest of holies" to "correctamundo", the movie is the masterpiece for a guy so immersed in pop culture that he needs an oar to navigate it all. Roth is dynamic in a relatively small part and Ammanda Plummer is like a shrieking little wicked witch. Uma Thurman is a thinking man's dream. She's vulnerable, demonstrative, and most of all, playful. The dancing sequence is priceless and needs no further discussion. Eric Stoltz is like that cool guy that everyone knew in high school that no one really paid much attention to but everyone liked. Bruce Willis is also in his zone as Butch the boxer. Willis has a nice blend of sensitivity and brutality. Any more or less probably would not have worked. The movie also rips on all cultures virutally equally with a burst of fresh air. The movie is more sympathetic towards blacks and not at all towards Southerners but that is par for the course in the civil rights revival in the 1990's. Shooting a movie of this length out of sequence was a tremendous gamble but the dialogue holds it together and it is, doubtlessly, brilliantly creative. The movie's weakness, like other Tarrantino movies, is it's obsession with believing that the drug subculture is somehow right about life and most other facets are somehow less then right or flat out wrong. Tarrantino evolved this idea slightly by the end of the movie and continued it in one of the best B-movies ever made, From Dusk Till Dawn. However, Tarrantino's glorification of radicalism gets old at times and falls flat by the end of the movie due to it's length. All in all, this movie is an all time classic for cinema junkies and pop culture nuts and will pop like champagne in circles away from the power players and the mainstream.