Movie Review --- Pulp Fiction
Number 3 on the Top 5 Movie list: Pulp Fiction, in my opinion Tarantino's best film no arguments about it. It's going to be hard to talk about this movie as if nobody's ever seen it, but I should do it anyway to feel like I'm really writing a review.
Pulp Fiction's most unique attribute is the insequential order of scenes, which today passes for a great attribute in a mystery movie but here it more or less makes you pay more attention to the film so you can't predict what happens next or be relieved of knowing what happens next, whichever you prefer. There is no mystery to be solved, except at the end if you want to put them in order.
Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) are two low-rent hitmen hired by Marcellus (Ving Rhames) to do mostly little tiny "whack" jobs I guess you could say, just without the mafia personalities. For this movie they have two jobs to do, one is to visit some old clients of Marcellus that have taken a briefcase from him and the second comes about later when Butch (Bruce Willis) takes money from Marcellus under the presumption he will down in the 5th round of a boxing match, but Butch ends up not just winning the match but killing his opponent.
Several other small stories are tied in to fill up the plot, but they do it nicely and since the scenes are out of order anyway it doesn't feel too much like it's filler for filler sake. The highlight of the movie is probably the Marvin story, where Vincent and Jules take a teenage boy Marvin along for a ride after killing his two roomates that stole Marcellus' briefcase. According to Vince, Jules hits a bump in the road that causes Vincent's gun to go off and blow Marvin's head completely apart, leaving the two stumbling hitmen to drive their car covered in blood in broad daylight. Enter Jimmy (Tarantino) who houses them to clean the car via Winston Wolf (Harvey Kietel), the specific show stealing scene of the movie.
What I love so much about this movie is that after you've seen it, it's pretty much a movie to make me an endorphin junkie for a few hours. On subsequent views, it's ok to just watch and not pay a whole lot of attention to because what you're really looking for is all your favorite parts to "oooh" and "ahhh" at, or maybe a certain scene that you know by heart and can recite along with some friends. Like the restaurant scene, that seems to be everybody's favorite scene to do the quoting on, that or the opening execution scene. It's brilliant on so many levels: the dialogue, the acting for the comedy, the drama, the suspense, and Tarantino makes an artsy film without doing crazy camera work or use any cheesy music during climactic scenes. A solid A+ movie for me, and that's hard to come by in my book.