Pulp Fiction - DVD Review

Tarantino didn't reinvent film. He just reminded us of what film could be. And this is a film geek saying this. Orson Welles brought us the fractured storyline with Citizen Kane. Telling a story out of order wasn't anything new. Hell, Tarantino himself did it several years before Pulp Fiction when he made Reservoir Dogs. I will give him credit for revitalizing the criminal genre. Without the witty chats between criminals in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, we probably would be without much of modern crime and mafia films have become. We certainly wouldn't have the witty and urbane Sopranos. So, Tarantino took a genre that had long gone stale (remember some of the crime films of the eighties?) and revitalized it, injecting it with crackling dialogue that is most certainly not the way people talk. As a writer, I've taken to calling this hyperreal dialogue. Like Mamet, this ISN'T the way people talk, but has been exaggerated to the point of being believable once again. He also gave us an interesting story, or rather three interesting stories, all culled from the most bare essentials of the crime drama, the two hit men, the accidental death cover-up, the pressured date with the "boss's" wife, the boxer throwing the fight. None of these are new ideas, but they all have a new vitality in this film under Tarantino's steady and perhaps overconfident hand.
So, Pulp Fiction is roughly the story of three people and their relationships with each other and the world around them. We're first introduced to Jules and Vincent (Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta), two hit men on the way to pick up a briefcase from some bozos whose assignment it was to go get it. After their task is completed, we meet Butch (Bruce Willis) a boxer who's being paid to throw the big fight. He's given money by yet unseen crime boss Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). These three characters allow us to be introduced to other characters, MEMORABLE characters, such as Mrs. Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) a trophy wife with a bad drug habit that nearly gets her killed, Lance (Eric Stoltz) the local heroine dealer (and possible prototype for The Coen Brothers' Dude in The Big Lebowski) who wears his bathrobe all day and watches The Three Stooges late into the night with a bowl of Fruity Brute Cereal (a discontinued cereal from the same line as Frankenberry, Count Chockula and the also discontinued Boo Berry). Then there's Captain Koontz (Christopher Walken) a former POW from Vietnam who delivers a very long monologue about a hand me down watch. Throw into the mix two sodomizing hicks that are but a single banjo lick away from being in Deliverance and you've rounded out a very strange film. (Also on hand are Harvey Keitel and Tarantino himself, but both their roles, and their story, are too priceless to give away.)
What is Pulp Fiction then? At its best, an independent film gone horribly out of control towards something truly great. At its worst, self-indulgent borderline tripe. Hmm. But there's something amazing here. Perhaps because it was the first in a long line of nearly identical films that never seemed to get the formula right (Two Days in the Valley anyone? How about Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead?) Is Pulp Fiction overlong? Yes! It's about a half hour longer than it has any right to be. The monologues run on and on into self parody and the profanity is so plentiful that a single viewing could either desensitize you or send you (or perhaps your mother) screaming into the basement with calls of "Why must we listen to this filth in this house?!" (In DTS sound, no less) So, Windom, you gave the film a 5 and then talked about the problems. What gives? Well, here's the rub, in other films, all of this would have detracted. The length, the dialogue, the profanity, the violence. . .it all works. And I'm at a loss to explain it. The film exists outside reality, in a strange hyper real LA, and it's the slight detachment that allows it to work. It's almost as though, through the very title, Tarantino is telling the viewers that this isn't real, it's Fiction, so it'll be stylized and manipulated, as is any good fiction. We get to hear the first person inner monologues embodied as speech. People say what they think and talk about the minutia of life. And it all works. (Tarantino did this again in Jackie Brown, a film I've only seen once and was not nearly as impressed with or interested in.) So try your damndest to forget about those that followed. Pulp Fiction revitalized a dying genre, unfortunately for nearly the rest of the nineties, it revitalized the crime genre into the Tarantinoesque genre. Luckily, now the genre has done as they always do, pulled the best from that trend setting film (the dialogue, the minutia of life) and evolved beyond the hangers on, one needs look no further than HBO's The Sopranos to realize this.

VIDEO QUALITY
The image is great, don't get me wrong. Especially considering that this film was shot on around a $20 million dollar budget, it does look great. Unfortunately though, the movie is a long one and suffers from the inherent problems in compression, namely pixelization at times. It's a shame, though, because aside from the occasional pixelization and some edge enhancement, the image is pristine. It's presented in the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio and Anamorphic. (As it should be!)

AUDIO QUALITY
We have two nearly identical audio tracks here with one just barely edging the other out. The DTS track is slightly more interesting than the 5.1, but happens to be much louder than the 5.1. Both tracks feature well rounded dialogue sounds in the center with nice stereo in the fronts, little happens in the rear except for when the deep music Tarantino included kicked in. The true beauty of the DTS track is very subtle. I'd suggest that, during the coffee house scenes, you get up and walk to one of your surround speakers and listen to the ambient coffee shop sound, the clinking of dishes, the other customers. The same goes for Jack Rabbit Slims. A beauty of ambient sound, and not afraid to understate it.

EXTRAS
Why, why, why does a man who clearly loves talking about films, especially his films, and clearly enjoyed doing a commentary track on From Dusk Till Dawn not do commentary on his own films? Is it a time issue? Because he clearly hasn't had ANYTHING to do since Jackie Brown and, c'mon, that was a long time ago. So, we don't get a commentary track. We do get an interesting subtitle track with information about the film much like the Ghostbusters track. It's like Pop-Up Video without the high production values. The track is extremely informative and interesting, although it occasionally just stops for a long period of time making you forget you were watching that and get engaged in the movie. The info it provides is not always new, but rarely just trivial, it discusses the little details of the movie that are inferred but not stated and the reasons for such. For instance, Jimmy (Quentin Tarantino) used to work for Marcellus until his wife Bonnie made him quit. The gun in Butch's apartment didn't belong to Vincent, but to another man who is on his way back with coffee and donuts. (Those who've seen the movie'll know what I'm talking about, but I'm not ruining anything for those who haven't.
Next is an overgrown featurette of the making of Pulp Fiction complete with the "stylish" visuals and strange pat on the back interviews. I'm giving it a hard time; the doc is interesting and at times quite informative. It would've been much more informative, however, if I hadn't just watched the info subtitles track. An unusual note about the doc, it seems to have been shot with a box in front of the lens to create a faux widescreen image where the bars shift and go in and out of focus, a strange choice to say the least.
There are all the deleted scenes, but these are hardly new to Pulp aficionados. The first three were on the Special Edition Videocassette released way back when, and the next three came off of Criterion's disappointing laserdisc. All six are relatively inconsequential and added little to the story, but it would've been nice to see Dick Miller's scenes in the final film. He plays Monster Joe of Monster Joe's Truck and Tow.
We have a collection of short (not short enough) behind the scenes footage shot by Tarantino on a video camera who sounds like an ignored teenager trying to shoot a party, trying to get everybody to listen for his jokes, not content to just have the attention of, say, Bruce Willis. Also on tap is an episode of Siskel and Ebert reviewing the film and the subsequent hype and controversy surrounding it. Interesting, and nice to see the late Gene Siskel again, but ultimately suffers from the same pomposity that the show has always had and, now with Ebert being at the top billing over the submissive Roeper, likely always will. Interesting, but you may not watch it all. Much better is the Charlie Rose interview that is becoming a staple of the hip Special Editions (Rushmore being the shining example.) Rose asks interesting questions and doesn't cut in with his own agenda ever. He allows his guests to be themselves and, with a personality such as Tarantino's, this is essential.
Then, as always, there's a still gallery, trailers and TV spots (all of which blare the opening cue of Misirlou until you NEVER want to hear it again) and things of that ilk ad nauseum all dying to reveal to the viewer who already knows what a great film this is. Luckily, the earlier offerings make up for silly things like this, but as for the sake of completeness, this DVD delivers in spades.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
So is Pulp Fiction great? Yes. Is it a landmark film that'll likely be remembered forever and a day? I don't know. Films come and go, who knows what'll be remembered. It's the one that put the jumper cables on John Travolta's (and I use the term loosely) "career" and brought that battery back to life. It's the one that spawned so many imitators and homages that a man with only two films to his name then (still only three) actually had his own term, Tarantinoesque. That is worth praising and worth revisiting. And finally in a digital format that belies the quality of the film rather than simply giving us a "get it on the shelves NOW!" standard edition. Definitely worth owning, if not that Ultimate Edition (with Commentary) that all us drooling film geeks were hoping for, this may be the closest we get.

An aside note: I do plan on revisiting Jackie Brown for a future review and thus giving it another chance. When this will happen? Only the Internet gods can say.