Pulp Fiction | Teen Ink

Pulp Fiction

January 30, 2012
By ChevyPillow PLATINUM, Fairfield, Connecticut
ChevyPillow PLATINUM, Fairfield, Connecticut
43 articles 0 photos 1 comment

Favorite Quote:
"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick @ss...and i'm all out of bubblegum." (They Live 1988)


My favorite movie of all time! What makes Pulp Fiction so different than anything else is that it doesn't make you think of that movie from the mid 90s with John Travolta. It makes you think of every other film ever made and how this makes fun of all the same formulas we are used to. It makes you think about fate, life, and just about anything that goes with that category. In Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie's message was much like the message in Pulp Fiction. 2001 was a movie about everything. Pulp Fiction also is as intelligent and I can easily see it as a movie about everything as well.

Pulp Fiction surrounds three stories. One of the stories is about two hit-men who like to talk small on their way to big jobs. The other story is of the hit-men's boss's coke-addicted, but sexy wife who also likes to talk, only not about awkward mindless bullshit. Another story is of a boxer who finds redemption over a watch through several violent acts. And there is the story about two British diner robbers who are also into conversation like everyone besides the boxer, Butch. Notice how Butch's story has the least amount of dialogue out of the three stories. Butch is also the only one who only talks when he is responding in some way. There are way too many hidden meanings and messages in this movie for me to talk about. I'd have to watch the whole movie and take notes because definitively every single scene and probably every line of dialogue in the movie has to do with something else in it that leads to a huge hidden message. And every time I watch this movie (or think about it hard enough) I find something new. There are so many things that make the intelligence of this movie so remarkable; for example, why is there a giant bandage on the back of Marsellus Wallace's neck? The popular opinion on this is that there is a hole in the back of Marsellus's neck in which his evil soul had escaped. It's current location is supposedly in the glowing briefcase (unlocked by the code "666") that Vincent and Jules take back from the kids at the beginning of the film. Also, we never get to see what is inside the briefcase. The audience is left to wonder about a lot of these questions. There literally is no right or wrong to this question because what's in the case is irrelevant. It's only a device used to further along the story; what Alfred Hitchcock so famously referred to as a McGuffin. If you think about everything this movie gives you, you can realize that it was fate that brought the three stories together. I just love this movie so much because when a story is about fate, it can easily be seen as a movie about everything, and when a movie is about everything, that is just incredibly awesome! Especially for a movie buff like myself.

This is a very fun and cool movie as well. It's always a joy to watch, and when a movie is over 2 and a half hours and you can say that, you know it's good! The cinematography and camera work is nice to look at, the music is perfect, the characters are all so colorful and the actors are at the top of their game. To be able to say who was best would be impossible. And everyone is in the movie just the right amount. We see Samuel L. Jackson at the beginning of the film and we don't see him again until the end. The first time I watched this movie I thought I wasn't going to get enough out of him, but I'm telling you, he absolutely owns the last 30 minutes. I was blown away and inspired by his performance. He should have won Best supporting actor at the Academy Awards. I don't want to get into the whole Tom Hanks vs. John Travolta thing. Pulp Fiction may have been a smarter movie altogether, but the performances in Forrest Gump and the performances in this film were equally great in my opinion. However, if Forrest Gump, or anything had beat Pulp Fiction to best screenplay I probably would stop watching the Oscars. The writing in Pulp Fiction is unbeatable. Every single solitary line has become iconic. Quentin Tarantino tries to show us things that any other editor would have easily cut out. In one of the earlier scenes, Vincent(Travolta) and Jules(Jackson) are on their way to a job to kill somebody and the whole way up to the apartment they talk about some very entertaining mindless bullshit that somehow connects to whatever's on their mind. When they finally get to the apartment, they find out that they still have some time to talk, so they walk to the end of the hallway and keep talking. The camera waits impatiently for them, not moving along with them and just waiting at the door turning towards them. It's a very unique way to make a movie: to have it move a long with just dialogue. In many scenes you can have your eyes closed and just listen and you won't miss a thing. But this new form of filmmaking must be done right. The writing must be good. Tarantino's dialogue is so rich that you can't remember exact lines of dialogue. There are certain movies that people watch over and over and over again and eventually after watching it they know it word for word. I don't care how many times you watch Pulp Fiction, you will never be able to remember every exact line. It took me a month to remember the exact lines of two minutes of the film, and I still can't remember it anymore. There's no question about it: the writing is pure art. It makes me feel like i'm watching a darker violent version of Seinfeld.

There is no doubt in my mind that this isn't the greatest movie ever made!


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