The most important film of our generation

Rating: 10/10 (3 June 1999)

I was reading some of these posts and decided to put in my two cents worth on the Pulp debate. Someone stated that they had just seen the movie (in 1999, five years after its release) and could not understand the hype. Well, therein lies the greatest problem facing a film like Pulp Fiction: everything novel and unique it brought to the cinema five years ago has been utterly ransacked by the Hollywood mainstream. Anyone who saw a film like Bonnie & Clyde 30 years ago will say what an impact the film made on them, when today it seems only like a well constructed gangster film. Pulp Fiction already seems a little dated because we keep seeing these characters and situations appearing on film. Sure some of what Tarantino did had been done before. We'd seen rampant drug use in Drugstore Cowboy, and gangster black comedy in Goodfellas, but Tarantino successfully mixed the dark subject matter with hipness for the nineties, and thusly created the film, and the film revolution that true film lovers had been waiting years for. Pulp Fiction trampled the Hollywood blockbuster industry (remember this was the year of Forrest Gump) and sent studios running to Sundance to find the next big thing. People who look at Pulp Fiction years after its release are going to have the same reaction one would have after listening to, say, Nirvana's Nevermind: "It's good, but I don't get the fuss." Of course you don't. You have to be there from the beginning to realize just how much of an impact these artists had on EVERYTHING we see and hear today. People who call Pulp Fiction the greatest film of all time are probably in need of an introduction to a few more films. Pulp Fiction is not the greatest film ever made. It is however, the most important film of our generation.