Pulp Fiction

My knowledge of Pulp Fiction up till this point had been quite slim: I think I saw figure skaters dance to a song from this movie a million years ago (Stearns and Ilana love figure skating). And I think that I'd heard it referred to as a cult classic. So when I was rooting through Mr. Sayers' extensive dvd collection to see what to borrow, I picked it out (incidentally, Mr. Sayers doesn't watch a ton of movies, but as a hobby started buying lots of cheap dvd's during his time studying abroad in China).

This film was shocking--the drugs, the violence, the sex (Needles! An almost overdose! I can't recommend this film at all--especially because my mother reads this blog). Most interesting was the story telling--the overlapping stories of six or so main characters would pick up at random points, sometimes way in the past, sometimes at a moment that we'd already seen from a different perspective in the film. And there was this perpetual feeling of pointlessness--that the director was giving us a small vignettes that would never make any sense--small chunks of life that were nothing more than that.

The most intriguing parts of the story to me were the hit man Jules's strange religion (which included misquoting a passage in Ezekiel before he killed people and being profoundly moved by what he perceived to be a miraculous escape from death) and the boxer, Butch Coolidge's, relationship with his girlfriend--she was annoying as all get out, but he really cared for her, even when he was in absurdly stressful situations (after he returned back from retrieving his watch, for example, which involved killing the man who had been sent to kill him, he asks her how her blueberry pancakes were).

Also: I really like Tim Roth, although he had a pretty small part.


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