Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Misirlou

Film: Pulp Fiction
Format: VHS from personal collection on big ol’ television.

I haven’t been shy about the fact that I think Quentin Tarantino is overrated as a director. My biggest issue with him isn’t that I don’t think he’s any good as a director; it’s that he shows a great deal of evidence that he believes all of his press. I have some problems with his sensibilities as well, which we’ll get to eventually. But really, my problem with Tarantino is that he’s lost control of his ego. That’s sort of my problem with Pulp Fiction, too.

See, Pulp Fiction really was a seminal film in a lot of ways. More importantly, it holds up. It’s just as good today (or almost as good) as it was in 1994. Tarantino lived off this movie for almost a decade though. Except for Jackie Brown and a segment of Four Rooms, he didn’t put out another film until 2003. There’s no reason for that, really, except that he was living off this film.

I’m not going to attempt to describe Pulp Fiction. If you’ve seen it, you know that it’s non-linear. The order of the film isn’t explained. Characters appear for a few moments in one part only to be featured in another part. We spend a good deal of time with Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and with Jules (Samuel L. Jackson). We meet Butch (Bruce Willis) and Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) and his wife Mia (Uma Thurman). There are all sorts of crazy violence and drug use. For all the skipping around in time, it’s wildly entertaining. I will not deny it.

But it’s also a Gordian knot to unravel in terms of a plot summary. So I’ll try to do this quickly. Marcellus Wallace has lost something and he sends Vincent Vega and Jules to get it back. They do, and they manage to kill a number of people doing it, including one guy killed accidentally. This means they need emergency help from a guy named Winston Wolfe (Harvey Keitel). At the same time, Butch the boxer is told to throw a fight by Marcellus. Rather than throw it, he kills his opponent and needs to go on the lam because Marcellus will hunt him down. However, his girlfriend Fabienne (Maria de Medieros) forgot his watch at the apartment. We learn via flashback with Christopher Walken exactly what the watch means to Butch. He goes back for it, and eventually encounters Marcellus. They fight, but are rounded up by a couple of guys in a pawn shop who evidently enjoy raping men. Butch saves them both and leaves. Oh, and Jules foils a robbery and quits the hit man business.

So let’s talk about the stuff that doesn’t work for me. There is a long sequence in the middle in which Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace go out for a night on the town with Marcellus’s permission. It’s a cute scene until we get to the drug overdose part. The first time I saw this, I liked this part of the film, but now, after several watches over the last 18 years, I find this scene drags. It goes on about five minutes too long for me, and it doesn’t really do anything for the film. We get a quick reference to it later (and it’s a brief conversation between Vincent and Mia) and that’s really it. Similarly, there’s a lot of chaff in Bruce Willis’s scenes. I don’t really care at all about the dialogue with Fabienne, and the scene in the taxi is completely unnecessary.

But, Pulp Fiction is still a great film. There’s still a lot here worth watching, and as I said above, it’s a film that holds up really well. It’s also a seminal film for a lot of the players in it. It revitalized Travolta’s career and in many ways created Ving Rhames’s career, at least for a few years afterwards. It also solidified Samuel L. Jackson as a badass in the minds of the movie viewing public.

This film is Tarantino at his best, and it’s a best he may never equal again. What I truly dislike about Pulp Fiction is that he seemed to learn the wrong lesson from it. It was such a success that he evidently decided that all of his movies should follow a similar pathway. The obscure references here are fun; in subsequent films, they just end up annoying me. To put it another way, I’d love to see Tarantino stop trying to be awesome and start trying to be simply good. With Pulp Fiction, he was just trying to make a good movie, and he made a great one. If he can learn to leave his ego out, he could continue to shoot for good movies that turn out great.

I said at the top I have some problems with Tarantino’s sensibilities, and I do. The problem is simply this—everyone in all of his movies is depraved or a criminal. There isn’t a single normal person anywhere. In this respect, his work reminds me of a film like Sin City, which was visually stunning and morally reprehensible. Would it be too much to ask for a single person who isn’t a criminal, lunatic, or deviant?

Evidently, the answer to that is “Yes.” It would be too much, more’s the pity. But that doesn’t matter here, because Pulp Fiction, even with its few stumbles, is rightly regarded as one of the best and most important films of the ‘90s.

Why to watch Pulp Fiction: It’s what made Tarantino into Tarantino.
Why not to watch: Same reason. It made Tarantino into what he is.

15 comments:

  1. I agree with almost everything you've said. Pulp Fiction is a great film and it really screwed up Tarantino's ego. And he'll never be this good again.

    His half of Grindhouse, Death Proof, was probably the worst thing I've ever seen in the theatre. I never walk out of movies and I seriously considering it during that talky, uninteresting, self-indulgent, god-awful mess. I absolutely despised it.

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    1. I really liked the first half of Death Proof, right up until the car accident. Then, suddenly, it all went stupid.

      But yeah, I agree with you on the self-indulgence. Tarantino likes to prove that he knows really obscure stuff. To him, evidently, knowing stuff that few people know--a particular film, a band--equals credibility. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, that seems to be the case.

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  2. He borrowed a lot to the universe of Elmore Leonard novels. But one can't deny his writing ability. For everything else, he tends to go overboard and try to reinvent the wheel every time. I'm so unsure about Django Unchained. Western Spaghetti was awesome because it's full of hairy, sweaty men who are now dead or very old. I'm just getting tired of his nostalgia shtick.

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    1. He seems a lot more mean-spirited than Leonard, too. Everything in Tarantino's universe is cruel.

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  3. Do you consider Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds to be "depraved or a criminal"? Or Lt. Hicox? I mean, everyone in that movie does some pretty extreme things because of the situation they're in, but I never got a depraved/criminal vibe from them, especially.

    As far as his long breaks in filmmaking, would you say the same thing about someone like Terrence Malick, who took a twenty-year break between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, then another seven years before The New World and another six before The Tree of Life? I suppose because Tarantino continued to be a public figure in between without directing while Malick is notoriously reclusive, you could feel like he was enjoying publicity without doing any work, but he was also producing and acting during that time. I dunno - I definitely understand why people find him personally abrasive, but calling him out just for taking a long break in between films seems weird. Paul Thomas Anderson, who you just said you admire in the Director's Relay post, made films in 2002, 2007 and 2012. That's not far off of Tarantino's timing of 1994, 1997 and 2003. Why not call him out as having "no reason" to wait that long between films as well?

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    1. Mostly because I don't seen P.T. Anderson basking in the glow from his own ego. Maybe he is--I don't really pay close attention. It really does come down to that--so much of what Tarantino does appears to be, essentially, self-aggrandizement. I don't get the vibe from either Mallick or Anderson that they want everyone to know how cool they are, and that's the distinct feeling I get from most of Tarantino's work. If I got the sense that he was just trying to make a great movie instead of make an awesome movie by showing off, I wouldn't begrudge him seven years between films.

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    2. So in other words, your distaste for Tarantino's movies and production schedule is (at least partially) based in his off-screen persona. I wouldn't necessarily say I'm a fan of that, either (I probably wouldn't like him that much if I knew him in real life), but I'm certainly an unabashed fan of his work. I just don't care that much about what directors are like apart from their work. (I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like Jean-Luc Godard that much in real life, either, but that doesn't stop me from loving his films, and his personal stamp is as much on his films as Tarantino's is on his.)

      And you didn't answer my Inglourious Basterds question. :) For the record, I think Inglourious Basterds is a genuinely great movie, not just an awesome one.

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    3. In part, but it's more than that, because that off-screen persona bleeds into his work. He can be as much of a jackass in real life as he wants without it affecting me. He can be crazy or whatever, and that doesn't affect my opinion. Tom Cruise is a good example--he's a nutbag, but I really like a lot of his films. The fact that he's a nutbag doesn't bother me.

      With Tarantino, though, I see evidence of that "Lookit me! I'm so cool!" mentality bleeding through into what I see on the screen. That is as much a part of his personal stamp as Red Apple Cigarettes. So it's more than his off-screen persona, since some of that shows up on-screen, too.

      As for Shoshanna? Sure, one character.

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    4. I'm with Jandy on the QT's break business - outside of all that, though, I wonder if he wasn't also a) a bit tapped and b) genuinely concerned about what to do next. I don't think that he was creatively bankrupt or anything, but perhaps attempting to be savvy/calculating with his next project(s)? Perhaps I'm making excuses for him in the same way you're demonizing him for it. Jandy makes a great point with Malick/PTA - seems you have a general distaste for his personality and/or persona that's bled into your opinions of his films. Not sure how fair that is, but at the same time, I think we're all guilty of such things from time to time, and QT certainly is an outsized personality, so it's all the more understandable.

      Not sure I agree that it's a best he'll never equal again, and Pulp has been one of my top three films since its release. That said, I asked myself (and others) recently if Basterds hadn't topped it (if it truly was his masterpiece, as Pitt said), and I've yet to decide. Give me another decade. Though, if anything, you've pointed out what I feel is his one weakness as a director: his lack of range. Now, I say do one thing and do it well in general, but one could argue that all of QT's films follow similar paths in pretty-similar genres dealing with similar people (those depraved criminals) and one would probably be right. I wouldn't mind seeing him stretch just a bit, and I think your advice about being good/great and not AWESOME is solid.

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    5. It's worth remembering, incidentally, that I did say that Pulp Fiction is one of the best AND most important films of the '90s. I really like Pulp Fiction a lot.

      And yeah, it is a persona thing, but it's a persona that is present in his films. I'm not the type of film fan who reads up on celebrity news or pays much attention to what's going on in the world. I don't watch the Oscars and I tend to skip over upcoming movie news. My opinion of Tarantino's persona comes specifically from what I see in his films, not much anywhere else.

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  4. Hmmm, all this reminds me I still haven't seen Jackie Brown.

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  5. I think Pulp Fiction is Tarantino's best film. I don't have a problem with his persona, either on or off screen, but I also think his more recent movies are overrated. Inglorious Basterds is a case in point. You could actually lift the title characters completely out of the movie and it would not really change much of anything in regards to the outcome. I was far more interested in the French woman and the German soldier than I was any of Brad Pitt's exploits.

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    1. That's a good point. I had never thought of it that way, but I see where you get that, and I think you're right.

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  6. I think this thing about his public persona bleeding into his films is due to the fact that his movies are always deeply personal. He writes, produces and directs almost all of them; he has total creative control. I also think that this is a good thing, he's a very brave filmmaker that's completely committed to his own vision. I disagree that he doesn't show range, Jackie Brown is totally different, in style and in content, to Kill Bill.

    My only issue would be that characters in his movies often speak like he does. To me, there's not a great deal of personality difference between all of the women that populate Death Proof. But then since Pulp Fiction he's also created characters like Hans Lander.

    In either case, Pulp Fiction should be judged as the work that it is and not in anyway associated with what Tarantino has done since.

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    1. I agree on the last bit. As much as I may dislike Tarantino's persona or his ego, I can't help but admire Pulp Fiction for what it is.

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