Shameless rehash of old noir stories or brilliant homage to them? both, neither and everything in between.

Rating: 10/10 (19 July 2013)

Tarantino is an enigma, and most people seem to either love him or hate him: there is no middle ground. Is he a brilliant, prodigious writer and director who meticulously takes the essence of the hard-boiled crime and detective stories that inspired him growing up and takes their heart and soul and re appropriates it into a story for the modern audience? Is he a shameless hack who simply steals from old movies and takes credit for them, trying to claim that these old stories are his 'original ideas'? The thing is, depending on who you ask you will get a different answer. Some say yes, some say no, but the thing is that everyone has an opinion! Because when you see a work of art such as this, forgetting about any possible derivatives within the story, it is impossible to look away. Always riveting, bloody, scary and most of all very funny, with Pulp Fiction Tarantino managed to take time-worn stories that had been done hundreds of times before and since and give it a distinctive Tarantino flavor.
What kinds of hit men discuss Cheeseburgers while going to and from their latest hit? The ones in Pulp Fiction do! And therein lies the brilliance of this movie, as Tarantino made everything that was old seem fresh again, through his distinctive auteur style, narrative that goes back and forth in time, the juxtaposition between street smart cheeky dialog and the horrific actions of the characters and the weird morals within the narrative, which presents bad guys as funny and sexy.
Perhaps the myths surrounding Pulp Fiction do an injustice to the movie itself, because so much has been written on the movie, it has been critiqued so many thousands of times, that watching the movie with the weight of all those expectations can seem a little underwhelming. After all, it probably won't change your life, or inspire in you a life long love for hardboiled noir stories or anything like that.
Pulp Fiction exceeds in something so much more simple, and yet something that so many other filmmakers forget to do: it succeeds in being a brilliant piece of entertainment that will keep you on the edge of your seat for the whole duration. And when you get down to it, I think being a piece of brilliant entertainment is much better than being a piece of film history. But what makes Pulp Fiction so special is that it is both.