“No film better represents the transition point of American cinema in the mid-90s than Pulp Fiction. It was the movie that made Quentin Tarantino, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Bob and Harvey Weinstein into household names; cemented the status of the Weinsteins’ Miramax Films as one of Hollywood’s hippest distributors; spawned a million cheap knock-offs, imitators, parodies. It seemed to represent the giddy joy of cinephilia itself, a dream movie served up by a guy who claimed to have spent his youth binging on every VHS tape he could get his hands on and who now seemed determined to break every rule in the Hollywood playbook from the opening credits sequence (in which, with the sudden twist of a radio dial, Dick Dale’s surf-rock ‘Miserlou’ gets replaced by Kool and the Gang’s funkalicious ‘Jungle Boogie’) on. To those of us who came of age watching Pulp Fiction, everything about it seemed exciting and nothing about it seemed predictable. Its gangsters were poetic and nerdy. Its plot was shaggy and digressive. Its tone was light when you expected it to be heavy and funny when you expected it to be suspenseful. If there is any ‘message’ to be found in Pulp Fiction, it’s this: stay on your toes.
“Buzz around the movie had been building from the time of its premiere at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. When it opened in the U.S. that October Janet Maslin declared it ‘a work of such depth, wit, and blazing originality that it places [Tarantino] in the front ranks of American filmmakers.’ Even those who were more mixed on the film, like The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, couldn’t deny that it was an ‘intriguing spectacle,’ a piece of narrative innovation on par with the work of Godard or Antonioni. Almost overnight it became a cult hit, the movie with the quirky title and that catchy surf-guitar riff that played under its TV spots.
“By the time of the 1995 Academy Awards, a symbolic battle over the soul of American cinema had been waged. Hip, profane, ironic, ultraviolent Pulp Fiction would go head-to-head with Forrest Gump, the sincere, good-old-fashioned Hollywood feel-good movie, albeit newly updated with state-of-the-art technical wizardry. Although Forrest Gump took most of the top prizes that night it was clear that the future of movies belonged to Tarantino and all that he represented. By 1996 (informally dubbed ‘the year of the independent film’) the North American marketplace would be flooded with ‘indies’—many great, some terrible, all of them posing challenges to the conventional wisdom that had governed Hollywood since the 1970s and the rise of the blockbuster.”
“The significance of Pulp Fiction wasn’t just a matter of Hollywood versus indie or sincerity versus irony. It was also a matter of old versus young. Precocious, motor-mouthed, pop-culture-obsessed, Tarantino inaugurated the figure of the fanboy-as-artist and (whether for better or worse) helped push geek culture from the margins of the entertainment industry to its center. A child of the video age, his cinematic influences where eclectic and cosmopolitan: yakuza movies, Blaxploitation, spaghetti westerns, Brian de Palma, film noir. He spoke, somehow, for all of us for whom the local video store and late-night cable TV served as our film school. So we got drunk on Pulp Fiction’s stylish panache, its sly humor, the surreal gut-punch of its violence, the way that it could speed up or slow down at will, all of its twists and shifts masterfully orchestrated by this kid who, though barely out of his twenties, had the command of a Spielberg or a Hitchcock. We were still too young to get Tarantino’s references to films like Bande à Part. But we understood, instinctively, what Pulp Fiction meant—namely, that movies didn’t have to follow the rules that every other movie seemed to be playing by. They could change the radio station right in the middle of a song.” ~ Ian Scott Todd
Muriel’s Top 10 Films of 1994:
1. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino) [191/26]
2. Ed Wood (Tim Burton) [164/26]
3. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai) [120/19]
4. Satantango (Bela Tarr) [86/13]
5. Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski) [83/13]
6. Hoop Dreams (Steve James) [55/8]
7. Exotica (Atom Egoyan) [48/9]
8. Ashes of Time (Wong Kar-wai) [46/8]
9. Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson) [43/7]
10. The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel Coen) [34/6]
No comments:
Post a Comment