Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Like Pulp Fiction and his 1992 debut, Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino's latest film is populated with jive-talking killers and other lowlifes. The plot revolves around a streetwise flight attendant, played by Grier, who double- and triple-crosses a gun dealer (Samuel L. Jackson) despite interference from an ex-con (Robert De Niro) and a stoned-out beach bunny (Bridget Fonda) who bounces between the two men. Filled with Tarantino-lingo overkill (the N word is reportedly used 10 times in the first scene alone), the film mixes ultra-violence with the director's usual pop-culture references...
Though the plot gets quite convoluted, the basic premise of the movie is simple: the paranoid cab driver, Jerry, finally hits home with one of the many conspiracy theories he publishes in his newsletter titled, of course, "Conspiracy Theory." He is being trailed by an insidiously evil, Harvard-grad CIA psychologist, Dr. Jonas (Patrick Stewart), who wants to find Jerry and force him to admit what he doesn't exactly know he knows...
Jerry has only one ally: Alice Sutton (Julia Roberts), a justice department attorney he's infatuated with--even going to the lengths of parking his cab outside her apartment and watching her exercise every evening--who receives his wild tales calmly and begins to believe in him. As the plot thickens, Jerry is captured by "them" (you know, those "men in black" working for all those agencies with acronyms), drugged, plunged in water and tortured by having his eyelids taped so his eyes will stay open while he hallucinates scenes that could compete with the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine." He manages...
...addition to a great plot, the actors make the characters convincing. The beautiful Roberts, as the compassionate attorney, shows real and believable sympathy toward Jerry, even if she always looks a little too perfectly groomed and styled: Whether she's climbing through trap doors or running through fields to escape bullets and missiles, she is never flushed or unkempt...
Nelson Fairchild Jr. is by no means the scariest of these, but he has the problems--and dreams up the solutions--that set a very complicated plot into irreversible overdrive. The alcoholic son of a Northern California land baron, Nelson wants to leave his wife Winona but cannot without impoverishing himself. His tyrannical (and Roman Catholic) father has given Winona title to the house and property as a means of discouraging divorce. But Nelson needs money fast; he chickened out of a cocaine-smuggling scheme in the Rome airport, and now owes an irate druglord back home nearly...