Word: pulp
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Tarantino's movies are smartly intoxicating cocktails of rampage and meditation; they're in-your-face, with a mac-10 machine pistol and a quote from the Old Testament. They blend U.S. and European styles of filmmaking; they bring novelistic devices to the movie mall. And in Pulp Fiction, a multipart tribute to the hard-boiled books and films of American mid-century, he has devised a sprawling, sturdy canvas that accommodates the high-octane and the highbrow...
Just ask Bruce Willis, one of a half-dozen actors (along with Travolta, Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Ving Rhames and Harvey Keitel) who found some of the juiciest roles of their careers here: "You can say the most intellectual thing about Pulp Fiction and be right. But it also works for the trailer-park kids." It surely ought to work for those viewers lulled these many years by cinema soporifics. For 2 1(R)2 teeming hours it hits you like a shot of Adrenalin straight to the heart...
Tarantino's and Bender's company is called A Band Apart, after Bande a Part (Band of Outsiders), the 1964 film about two hoods and a femme fatale that Jean-Luc Godard based on an American paperback novel. But where Godard used pulp fiction as an excuse to discuss the philosophy of the boulevards and the boudoir, Tarantino is true to the genre's moral muscularity; he's interested in the philosophy of the abattoir. His tough guys chat about life's iniquities and inequities, about hamburgers, the Bible, the ethics of foot massage, the perfidy of women...
...loves acting too. Tarantino has small roles in his two features (and a ^ hilarious turn in the new comedy Sleep With Me). He knows what actors need and how to keep them percolating. "Quentin is a great collaborator," says Thurman, a creepy delight in Pulp Fiction as a woman convinced she's in control of her life and her men. "He is extremely clear about what he wants, but he's not close minded; he's no bully." Travolta says Tarantino trusts actors: "He lets you put all the icing on the cake. For Vincent, I could mock...
There are plenty of subsidiary characters worth their own movie, like the suburban drug dealer (Eric Stoltz) and his trippy wife (Rosanna Arquette) -- a married couple for the strung-out '90s. Part of Pulp Fiction's fun is that memorable weirdos keep popping up in the second and third hour. Part of the movie's skill is that familiar characters reveal new depths. By the end, Jackson's Jules -- in a "transitional period" from L.A.'s baddest malefactor to Tarantino's idea of masculine sanctity -- has commandeered the film. But even Jackson, brilliant in the role, knows that all good...