Movie Reflection: Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction is a film directed and co-written by the great Quentin Tarantino, and easily one of the all around best movies I have seen in recent memory.

Pulp Fiction follows the misadventures of LA Mobsters Vincent Vega (John Travolta), Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) as their stories ingeniously intertwine, and in classic Tarantino fashion, do so out of chronological order.

The first thing I noticed when watching this movie was the incredible dialogue that takes place between the characters, especially between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. The chemistry these two have on screen, combined with the amazing dialogue written for their characters, set up some of the coolest scenes to ever be in a movie, and the most memorable scene in my personal movie watching history.

(explicit warning)

The scene above is from the first twenty minutes of the movie, and the entertainment value never goes down from there. The fire in Jules we see in the above scene never goes away, and the calm cool collectedness of Vincent becomes a staple of the film. There were a couple of moments where I thought the movie kind of dragged on, and a few scenes I believed we just filler, but the ingeniousness of Quentin Tarantino shines through when it turned out that through two and a half hours worth of movie he only showed me things that mattered to the overall plot. Every single thing comes back around and every scene is important. 

Something else that stuck out to me was the amount of smoking. I don't have a problem with smoking, I don't smoke myself, but I suppose it is really a sign of the times. The amount of smoking in movies back then compared to how often you see it now, it has become much more of a rarity in today's politically correct environment. This really is too bad because this movie would not be the same without the smoking; it adds such a sense of "cool" to the entire film. I've never wanted to smoke a cigarette more than after seeing this piece of cinema.

While almost everything in this movie was fantastic, there were a couple of things that caught my attention that I did not think fit. 

The first thing I disliked quite a bit (spoiler alert) is how John Travolta's character just dies. I understand it was important to the movie that he dies, and in the end his death ties together the rest of the plot. I didn't dislike that he died, I disliked how he died. It was so disingenuous the way they just got rid of him like that. In my opinion Tarantino didn't make it seem important enough.

The second thing that I disliked was how Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) interacted with his boss, Marsellus Wallace. If the audience is supposed to believe that Marsellus is the big boss, we shouldn't have Jules, one of our main characters, who also happens to be an underling to Marsellus, talk to him like Marsellus is somehow beneath him. It was a inconsistency, but in my mind it was a major one, because it removed me from the immersion of the film, even if it was for just a second.

Along with those negatives, I felt like Butch's (Bruce Willis) storyline was kind of thrown in to the mix as an afterthought. It all comes back around, but his storyline just doesn't feel as important to me as Vincent's and Jules' parts in the narrative. 

Overall, I found that Pulp Fiction lived up to the hype. We don't often see movies with an all-star cast like this succeed as well as Pulp Fiction did. I do realize that a lot of the names in this movie were not quite as big then as they are now, but the acting was superb and the stylistic filming and framing of the shots were amazing. All that combined with an extremely well chosen soundtrack and we have what I believe is one of the best, and most influential movies of all time.

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