Pulp fiction review

PULP FICTION is a singular show. The best way to describe it is that it is as if you sit down in the movie theatre and are immediately transported to a roller coaster going full speed through a fun house of ghoulish images. If extreme violence (e.g., brains blown on car windows) is something you can not endure, if 700 uses of the F word is something you can not tolerate, if heavy drug use is something you care never to see (cocaine is passé we learn, all of the in-gangsters now do heroin), then do not pay your money to see PULP FICTION.

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On the other hand, all of the above really works in this show. This is a parody of criminal life and a really funny one. This is a show that takes one chance after another. John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are nothing short of terrific in it. Oscars are possible here. They play the hit men for a major bad guy (Marcellus Wallace). The bad guy is also paying a boxer (Bruce Willis) to take a dive. Harvey Keitel plays a fixer of problems for the bad guy. Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer play a couple of two-bit crooks that like robbing restaurants because nobody else does that. Eric Stoltz plays a low class drug dealer and Rosanna Arquette plays his girlfriend who has rings in every part of her anatomy (yes, there too). Christopher Walken shows up in a single long important scene. Uma Thurman plays the major bad guy's wife. I probably missed a lot of other people who did some great acting.

The major hero and the one who took the most risks in this movie was the scriptwriter. He was also the director - Quentin Tarantino. The script went from funny scenes like a restaurant where all the staff were 50s famous look-alikes to a scene where the two hit men were first discussing what a McDonald's quarter-pounder is called in France and why to a discussion of whether it was okay to kill someone for massaging your wife's feet.

This is a movie that to describe it will only make you want NOT to go see it, yet it is mesmerizing and wonderful. The intensity level of the movie is off the scale. People were laughing like crazy in the theatre and to intelligent dialog too. Other scenes had the audience gasping for breath and uttering out loud "oh, my god". Several scenes were worse the finger-cutting scene in The Piano.

The camerawork was mainly standard, but there are several scenes where it got pretty experimental. The best example is the long scene of Wills staring into the camera without moving while he listens to the major bad guy, whom we have not yet seen, delivering a long lecture. It then switches to a view of only the back of the bad guy's head with everything else out of focus while Willis listens for quite a while more.

Olivia harriman