Over the Hill?

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 1999)

When I saw Pulp Fiction 4 years ago, I have to say I was busting out laughing with everyone else in the audience. The vibrant dialogue, the intertwined storylines and unexpected plot twists took me by surprise. I took my girlfriend(now ex-girlfriend) to see Pulp Fiction a few weeks later, and she didn't laugh at any of the funny parts, and definitely took exception to the violence. Of course we got in a big fight over the whole thing in the car ride home. I couldn't believe that anyone with half a liver and a thyroid as their only major organs, could not see the brilliance that Tarrantino had crafted.
I watched Pulp Fiction for again since the last time I saw it with my ex, and you know what? I really didn't like it as much. Now much can be said about this reaction. Maybe my ears and eyes began to bleed with the post-Tarrantino melee of knock off culture that ensued after Pulp Fiction. Things that were already cool for twenty years, like Dick Dale, or Kool and the Gang got incessantly beat into our heads as "the new hip thing". Fine, maybe I harbor a little resentment for how the mainstream will eventually water down anything that has any artistic merit. I think I even saw a butter commercial that used that "Pulp Fiction" font as title cards. Gimme a break.
Back to the main point. Is Pulp Fiction a great movie? No. Is it good movie because it is entertaining? Yes. Is it an important movie? No. Do I think it isn't an entertaining movie because of the violence and profanity? Quite the contrary, I don't think that has anything to do with whether or not this movie is great or not. Pulp Fiction like myself, is a compost heap of pop-culture references. The Simpsons are a full of pop culture references yet considered great. Shakespeare is full of pop-culture references, but no one gives his work flak just because you have to open the OED to get half of it. I think too many people spend too much time dwelling on these obvious manifestations. I think the real reason Pulp Fiction is not great, is because it does nothing to create characters who are metaphoric in any sense. They are there to serve very one dimensional purposes on the screen. People praise Pulp Fiction for it's structural elements, but for my money Reservoir Dogs or a movie like Short Cuts did a better job of playing with narrative style. This brings me to Reservoir Dogs, which I think is a great and important movie because it did alter the narrative telling in a totally different way. Though much of the story element is ripped off from a similar chinese movie about twelves thieves with an informer and a heist gone bad(I can't remember the name of it), Tarrantino tells the story differently than any filmmaker has told before. Not only is the story non-linear, but if broken down into it's treatment of time, it looks like someone took a script chopped up into pieces, and then taped it back together randomly. Miraculously it all works. He also tells the story like a drama for the stage, with long extended dialogue sequences, but yet he manages to not get that "why did they even bother putting on this film, because it looks exactly like a play" look. (In the Company of Men, Oleanna) Reservoir Dogs has all the violence and profanity of Pulp Fiction, but it also has depth to it's characters.
Tarrantino is a well educated filmmaker, in the sense that he knows his film history, and pays homage to great directors like Truffaut and Godard. Is Tarrantino a great director like them? No. In my mind he has made one truly great movie, and couple of good movies, and a couple of duds. Tarrantino might be totally screwed, as he might be scorned for the very style he invented, the next time he comes around the mountain. True no one does Tarrrantino better than he does himself, but do we really need or want it. Maybe that's why he's hanging out on broadway with Marisa Tomei, trying his shot at acting. Which by the way, he sucks at. But you know what, I've never have made a body of work that comes close to what he has managed to accomplish in such a short period of time.