What is "Pulp Fiction" ... about?

I wanted to come in here and have a serious conversation but then I saw someone say that Kill Bill 1 sucked and, clearly, there's just no reasoning with some people.

 

One interesting thing about postmodern homage and pastiche and Tarantino is that his audience seems to recognize few of the references as homage and pastiche.

 

Absolutely. I'll give an example.

In Kill Bill, Vol. 1, Uma Thurman's character is flying to Okinawa, or wherever the fuck, and they show her plane against a deep orange sky.

To 99.99 percent of the people who watched the movie, including myself the first time I saw it, if it was noticed at all, it was probably assumed to be some sort of artistic device Tarantino was using for ... who knows what for?

Actually, it was a tribute to an obscure Japanese sci-fi/vampire/alien invasion/paranoid psychological drama called Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell. Which, despite its poorly-translated title, is a pretty damn good movie.

But the only reason I know that myself is that I happened to watch Goke one night on TCM and they mentioned that it influenced that scene.

Tarantino liberally borrows from his influences, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes lazily. It's almost to the level of sampling, in its way. He's like the Beastie Boys/Dust Brothers of filmmakers.

Of course, Tarantino's own influences did the same thing. Sergio Leone "sampled" his favorite westerns and re-branded them. I just don't think Tarantino succeeds in that game as much as Leone did, because Leone had a style all his own. When Tarantino doesn't succeed within the limitations of his own limited style, it makes it look as if he's bereft of his own ideas.

The one that bugged me was when he used the main theme from Battle Of Algiers in Inglorious Basterds for the scene where they bust Stiglitz out of jail.

First of all, that music is not that obscure a reference for movie buffs. Secondly, Battle Of Algiers is a deadly serious movie. Using music from that particular film for a cutaway scene that combined elements of WWII action movie derring-do and blaxploitation hit me the wrong way.

The truth is that Tarantino probably just thought it was a bad-ass piece of Ennio Morricone music to put with that scene. But he ignores the context and meaning of what that music originally symbolized.

On the other hand, he borrowed Morricone's Un Amico for the scene where the German soldier shoots Shoshana dead in the projector room. The original use of the music was as end credits for some Oliver Reed Italian giallo movie from the early 70s. Tarantino took a great bit of music that was under-used in its original context and made it memorable.

So sometimes it works. But as the years go on, and Tarantino's styles haven't really grown much since Pulp Fiction, it seems a lot more cliched than it used to.

 

Great post.

I think maybe the worst case of this was 'Grindhouse,' in which re-imagining was so absent that the thing turned out not to be 'homage' at all - but was simply a couple of shitty b-movies.

 

Yes. That movie sucked horse cock.

 

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The 'about' is what's on the screen

 

Of course, it had the young Shoshanna. My mistake.

 

This thread made me want to go ahead and watch Pulp Fiction again last night.

Still too many scenes I just don't enjoy watching. Anything with Uma Thurman or Bruce Willis' girlfriend.

But the rest is just completely fucking amazing.

 

See, I loved the girlfriend. "I want a pot."

 

I realize that I'm probably one of the braindead few but I liked Death Proof. I thought it was entertaining and had some interesting things to say about the male gaze. The film starts out objectifying its female characters and in the end, sad loser Kurt Russell is triumphantly taken out by the second group of women he tries to victimize.

Fun fact about Tarantino. His mother named him after the Quentin Compson character in The Sound and The Fury. Unfortunately, she hadn't actuallly gotten around to reading the novel yet but wanted a "classy sounding" name.

 

The car chase was about as well done as any since Ronin, but overall, it wasn't as fun as I expected it to be.