Another shockingly good film from Quentin Tarantino.

Rating: 10/10 (15 January 2003)

**SPOILERS**Tarantino has one of the most recognizable styles of any director working today, and Pulp Fiction is considered by many to be his greatest work yet. It is a conglomeration of Tarantino's own infatuation with the movies, as it is more about movie life than real life. One of the few little factoids that I know about Tarantino is that, like myself, he spent some time working in a video store and, like myself, spent a lot of his time watching old action films and horror films and pulp fiction films. Pulp Fiction is about the things that are in movies like that rather than real life. We have a lot of people put into extraordinary situations that do not have a lot of parallels with reality, but they are so well written and presented that we are more than willing to overlook this.
One of my favorite things about Pulp Fiction is the way it presents several different storylines and mixes up the chronology of the film, which enormously increases the re-watch value. The film starts off with Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer playing a married couple who decide to rob a diner in broad daylight. The opening credits begin just as they stand up and bring out their guns, and we don't go back to this diner until more than an hour later in the film, when Vincent and Jules (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, both in possibly the greatest roles of their entire careers) finally show up after going through some serious situations of their own.
Bruce Willis stars as a boxer who was supposed to go down in a big fight but killed his opponent instead, and now the bookies are after him. His absolutely adorable girlfriend, played by Maria de Medeiros, plays the part of the significant other who just doesn't understand Butch's (Willis) urgent need to leave, like right this second. This leads to some interesting situations where Butch is stuck trying to hurry her out of the house and calm her down at the same time, and we as the audience are stuck wishing that she would shut up and get the hell out of the house while at the same time wishing there was some way she could be made to feel better.

One of the biggest strengths of the film is the way the stories are all tied together. Vince and Jules, for example, after paying a visit to some guys who screwed their employer, take one of them hostage, only to have Vince accidentally shoot him in the face while asking him a casual question in the car. They take the bloodied car to their friend Jimmie's (Tarantino) house, and go through one of the more amusing scenes in the film trying to get the car clean before Jimmie's wife comes home, finds a bunch a gangsters in her house doing a bunch of gangster sh*t, and divorces Jimmie. Tarantino, as has become a tradition of his, plays one of the best roles (although also one of the smallest, which is also common) in the film, as a normal guy who just wants to live a normal life without people showing up at his house at 8 in the morning with a bloody car and a dead body.
Harvey Keitel shows up playing the role of The Wolf, and does his job of cleaning up messes like the one Vince and Jules have on their hands (and their clothes, and their car). Here is a guy that knows exactly what he's doing, and he works quickly and efficiently and hates to be slowed down by people who prefer politeness (`Pretty please, with sugar on top, clean the f**kin' car.'). Eventually it gets clean, the mess is solved, and in order to clear their minds (and so Jules can continue to contemplate the miracle that saved them from being shot by a guy who burst out of a closet and emptied his gun into the wall behind them at point blank range), they go to a diner to get some breakfast - the same diner that Ringo and Yolanda were robbing in the opening scene of the film. Everything that has taken place up to this point in the movie, except for the robbery itself, took place before the robbery, and now we're right back where we started.
(spoilers) It takes a few viewings to really get this movie straight because it is so complex and intricate, but I'm pretty sure there are something like four or five different stories operating at the same time, and it becomes even harder to get straight because some of them mix in with other ones. Butch has to make a desperate trip back to his apartment to retrieve a wristwatch that has more than a little bit of sentimental value, and when he gets there, he finds Vincent there, once more taking on a job that's just a little over his head. Not only is this guy not able to travel with someone in the back seat without shooting him in the face, but he also seems to have a hard time staking out someone's apartment without using the bathroom and leaving his machine gun on the kitchen counter. Not the smartest character, but certainly one of the most likable that Travolta has ever played.

In Pulp Fiction, the characters are not given dialogue that is meant only to further the plot. In many instances, it is there literally for no other reason than to show them having casual dialogue which often has absolutely nothing to do with the story. Jules and Vincent discuss at length the names of burgers at McDonalds' in France, the definition of a miracle, and the acceptable difference between a woman's foot and her holiest of holies. Granted, at least two of these have direct meaning to the plot, but when you see how deeply into the subjects Vince and Jules go, it becomes more and more clear that they are talking just to be talking. But the thing that really brings out the quality of the script is that no matter how long anyone goes on about one subject, it never once gets boring.
All of the actors involved deliver some of the best performances of their careers, and much of the reason for this is because the roles fit them perfectly and the script is written so well. It's full of drugs, violence, blood, crime, murder, sex, and guns, but never once even approaches anything gratuitous. Things like this are very often condemned by our society, and with good reason, if they are thrown into a movie just to advance a weak story, but in Pulp Fiction there is nothing thrown in without reason and nothing that is put in to make up for weakness anywhere else. But while it does have good reason to have everything in it that's there, the film is certainly not for everyone, because even the most logically placed violence and blood and killing is going to be hard for some viewers to take, so you should be forewarned. But the rest of you, as they say, are going to love it.