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comment by blackbootz
blackbootz  ·  3500 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Have you read the 200 'best American novels'? | Art Beat | PBS NewsHour

I think I concede your point. Help me out though: you say Pulp Fiction is gimmickier than all the above, and I agree, except I don't know exactly why. True Romance feels a more genuine, single-entendre film than PF, which feels more self-aware.. Or something. I think my lack of film knowledge and vocabulary are showing. So what makes PF (more) gimmicky?





kleinbl00  ·  3500 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Smoke and mirrors.

A movie about a shark that keeps throwing up people until they have to open a beach sounds like some sort of magical shit, but it's just Jaws backwards. Jaws forwards is "Roy Scheider enlists Richard Dreyfuss and Oliver Reed in killing a shark puppet." But Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Oliver Reed are f'ing fascinating killing a shark. They're fuckin' dope at it. There are no song'n'dance numbers, there's no basement full of gimps, The Wolf does not show up in an NSX for the express purpose of giving the director a cameo.

The Usual Suspects has a lot of smoke'n'mirrors, too, but you have to watch it cynically to see them. There are a lot of blind spots that are well-hidden from the audience but as soon as you peer Sneakers or Silence of the Lambs, on the other hand, are straight-up linear storytelling with no hidden gotchas, no obvious shit hidden behind mirrors, nothing funky to disguise a thin narrative.

On the other hand, Pulp Fiction is an ensemble film about tied-together narratives that disguises the fact that nothing really happens, nothing is advanced, nothing is lost, and nobody has any stakes by throwing the whole thing out of linear time and substituting plot with violence and wise-cracks.