Pulp Fiction

(Dir. Quentin Tarantino) (1994)

It’s flashy, it’s funny, it’s overly literate.  Styled after comics and melodrama magazines, it hops about a series of vaguely interconnected vignettes.  The thugs trade Tom Stoppard-like wit…a portmanteau potboiler unravels, and whilst everyone self-consciously shoots from the hip, no-one’s hip when they shoot.

This film is great fun, don’t get us wrong, it has some memorable scenes, some top rank stars thoroughly enjoying themselves, and it dumps all over 90% of films made by man, but actually, it shows more talent than brains.  No one talks like that in real life and few act that way. To put it another way, in a more solemn mode, one might say that the precocious Tarantino here has forgone the hard work that artistic creation requires, and ‘phoned it in.’