Pulp Fiction

As decades must, the 1990s had a beginning, a middle and an end. But in the spirit of Quentin Tarantino we’re going to launch our big summer series 90s, Baby smack in the middle, with 1994’s Pulp Fiction, the most original, exciting and influential movie of its era. On 35mm.

A pop post-modernist and voracious cultural magpie, Tarantino came out of nowhere (well, Video Archives), who was hailed as a new god of filmmaking overnight. With Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction and his screenplays for True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (94) he electrified 90s film culture, changing the way movies sounded, the way they flowed, and how they connected with audiences. His emergence coincided with the advent of the world wide web, and Tarantino constructed his genre hybrids from a wide array of international influences — French new wave, American noir and 70s exploitation pictures, Hong Kong action cinema — rewriting the rule book as he did so.

Pulp Fiction scrambles the chronology of three interlocking narratives, as if in homage to Godard’s observation that a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end “but not necessarily in that order”. Revitalizing the careers of several flagging A-list stars at a stroke (John Travolta, Bruce Willis and Harvey Keitel), Tarantino unleashed a torrent of black comic verbal riffs and repartee. If the tone is ironic, the characters are iconic, and the momentum never flags throughout its 154-minute running time. Backed by Miramax Films, the indie company that dominated movie talk in the 90s (even as it was bought up by Disney), Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or and broke the $100 million barrier at the North American box office, ushering in the era of the “mini-major”, through which the studios co-opted many of the best and brightest of the independent sector.

Content Considerations: Graphic violence

It is everything you have heard, and many things you haven’t. Audacious, outrageous, indulgent, extreme. Mischievously brutal. Giddily visceral. Wildly enthusiastic. More fun than a barrel of monkeys. Mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Rob Salem, Toronto Star

Media Partner