Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction

D: Quentin Tarantino (1994); with John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Ving Rhames, Eric Stoltz, Maria de Medeiros, Rosanna Arquette, Christopher Walken, Bruce Willis, Quentin Tarantino. I'm finally getting around to annotating some more of my Top 10 desert-island choices. This is not really a review of Pulp Fiction (I reserve the right to do that endlessly over the years) but a note as to why I include it in my list. This is one of the greatest films of all time, not for its celebration of popular culture nor its influential stylistic and narrative style (though not in spite of those either), but because of its richness and sophistication. Truly great movies are a little different every time you approach them. Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Renoir's Rules of the Game, Sturges' Palm Beach Story and Welles' Citizen Kane resonate differently with every viewing. The passage of time affects them even more. Watching The Wild Bunch, Citizen Kane or Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance at 20 is to see a far different film than the one you see at 40. Every time I view Pulp Fiction, I feel differently about it. Enough has been written about the film's innovations, its impact on writing and style, on content and theme. Totally hip to modern culture with a cinematic vocabulary that includes everything that came before, Tarantino re-imagined the modern movie. What's striking about Pulp Fiction is what a serious film it is, a consideration of the distance between perception and conception, it is a meditation on faith and fate. Every character is given a chance at redemption -- in the purest moral terms. Some take it,and some don't. Pulp Fiction is a stylistic tour de force, but at its center beats a surprisingly human heart. Which goes a long way to explaining the film's greatness.