10 Reasons Why Pulp Fiction Is Still Cooler Than a $5 Milkshake
There’s no other occasion that represents a good excuse to run this list other than Pulp Fiction has been running on cable a lot lately. Most of the time I see it in the cable guide, I click on it. Doesn’t matter if it’s in the middle of the movie. Scenes I must have seen a couple hundred times in the nearly two decades since the film came out are still engaging, funny, and cool.
Back in 2008, in my final days at the Los Angeles Daily News before heading to Colorado and the Rocky Mountain News, I was invited by a friend at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to crash a screening they were having in a series that honored films nominated for Best Picture — but didn’t win. I was a bit late, having dashed over from the newsroom, and slipped into a row near the back of the plush theater. The rest of the row was empty, and viewers were scattered around the theater. But this guy sitting behind me kept cackling louder than anyone at all the right scenes. And after the final credits rolled and the house lights came up, an emcee for the screening invited Quentin Tarantino — the guy behind me — to come up to the stage and talk about the film. Joining him from the audience for the panel were The Gimp (Stephen Hibbert) and Raquel (Julia Sweeney).
Tarantino confessed that night that he’d slipped into the theater for the screening because he wanted to see if people still found the film funny and entertaining after all these years. What I loved was that as much as the Pulpers still quote the movie endlessly and click over every time it’s on, the director and scribe still loves his film more.
Here are 10 good reasons — in no ranked order — why Pulpistas still keep loving it. (NOTE: The movie’s R-rated, and so are the clips)
1. The five-dollar milkshake
Thanks to this and There Will be Blood, the milkshake has had it pretty good in movie lore in recent years. But even though this exchange is dated — as milkshakes are now five bucks at sit-down restaurants — it’s still funny because, yes, it’s still just milk and ice cream. (And do you recognize Buddy Holly the waiter? Think Reservoir Dogs — or Boardwalk Empire.)
“Check out the big brain on Bret, everybody!”
“What?”
“I dare you to say what one more time.”
“What?!”
“What ain’t no country I ever heard of! Do they speak English in ‘What?’”
“What?!”
“English M&^%&^&*#$*r! Do you speak it?!”
Sorry, I still cannot get past “I don’t eat dog neither”…
Zed’s dead baby….Zed’s dead.
“I don’t remember asking you a Goddamn thing!”
Wow. I can’t believe someone feels the EXACT same way about this movie that I do. I watch this movie twice a year and have since it was released on video. Still, THE. COOLEST. MOVIE. EVER!
“……..I’m gonna go home, jerk off, and that’s all you gotta do.”
“Yo, Flock of Seagulls…..why dontcha tell my man Vince here where ya got the shit hid at….”
Quentin Tarantino is a good example of everything that is wrong with the contemporary film industry. And yet, PJMedia encourages it.
Agreed. His vulgar, hateful dialog is almost the negation of language.
Wow. You sound really smart.
Punchbowl, turd… turd, punchbowl.
Tarantino impressed people who knew nothing of film or literature, were coarse crude and ignorant. In a word, Sundance. He couldn’t miss.
One is amazed at PJM’s approval of bad film and bad rock and roll in an effort to be cool. It ain’t working for the Caninavore in Chief, either.
I still think the best line is: “Sewer rat may taste like punkin pie but I wouldn’t know ’cause I won’t eat the filthy @#%#$%^!$.”
For the record–I hate pumpkin pie. But I’d eat it over sewer rat any day.
I would have included the moment when Butch kills Vincent. It’s masterful sleight-of-hand direction. Butch pops in some bread for toast, sees Vincent’s gun, picks it up, Vincent comes out of bathroom.
And the toaster, WHICH WE HAVE NOW COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN, pops the bread up.
I don’t think Butch even intended to kill Vincent.
Brilliant.
The look on Jules’ face as he drains Brad’s Sprite is pure malevolent impending doom
When I saw the title, I though the article had missed the April Fools deadline and was running late. Alas, no.
Pulp Fiction is a piece of c**p.
You’re wrong. Maybe you and TheBigBadGman can compare notes on ‘Twilight’ or the latest Jack Black movie.
Have you got nothing better to do than attack every person who does not like Quentin Tarantino? Instead of slandering others for disagreeing with your opinion, maybe you should grow up and learn to dialogue as an adult. Conservatives generally do not like gratuitous language, sex, and violence – the very things that are Tarantino’s trademarks. I suppose I was mistaken in my belief that PJMedia was conservative and that their readers acted with maturity.
It ain’t nobody else’s business. Two: you leave town tonight, right now. And when you’re gone, you stay gone, or you be gone. You lost all your PJ privileges.
“You hear me talkin’, hillbilly boy, I ain’t through with you by a damn sight… I’ma get medeival on your @$$!”
Let’s see, we have a elderly white man beaten nearly to death and you are writing about this? Or a 10 year Marine who was given a LTH discharge for voicing his thoughts about Dear Leader and you thought this was more inspiring and important. And how about one of the marxist in the EPA spouting his idea of using the EPA-extra Congressionally-to attack our oil companies.
I guess some levity is necessary to break the strain of what is going on, but the timing, to me, is off..
But this is the “Lifestyle” page. I can’t figure out why some of you think this site has to be hard news all the time. Don’t you like a doughnut with your coffee occasionally?
“It’s not a motorcycle, baby, it’s a chopper. Now get on.”
I have to say I agree with the naysayers. The movie does have an annoying quality to it–I remember parts of it long after, having forgotten most or all of other movies I enjoyed in the interim–but the overall pretentiousness of the whole thing was just way over the top to me. The cutesy rearranging of the plot so that it’s “non-linear” just struck me as a gimmick, wherein Tarantino was saying to his writer buddies, “Look at how clever I am!” Some of the acting was OK, but most of it was so over the top it was ridiculous. The scene with Walken was especially bad, though it did explain why the boxer had to go back for the watch.
I don’t want to give you the impression I don’t like Tarantino movies. I enjoyed True Romance, shrugged my way through Reservoir Dogs, and liked Jackie Brown. I also essentially laughed my way through both of the Kill Bills. Pulp Fiction is bad because Tarantino is taking himself, and his “art,” too seriously for my taste. It’s as if he’s a really handsome guy or beautiful girl, and you catch them admiring themselves in the mirror. It’s just too narcissistic.
Just my 2 cents…
When Tarantino did the non-linear structure in Pulp Fiction, it wasn’t gimmicky, and it worked perfectly. I agree with a commentator above re the scene where Butch kills Vincent, you just don’t see it coming. Tarantino can do the overkill on killing, but that scene is perfect.
Nothing Tarantino has done before or since can match Pulp Fiction. I loved Uma Thurman and Rosanna Arquetta in their respective roles. Eric Stoltz, Chris Walken, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer. Nobody hits a false note. A true American classic.
Ever give a man a foot massage?
We should’ve brought shotguns.
One of the top ten movies of all time.
You did notice that this is posted on the Lifestyle section right? Where the lighter, pop culture not-so-serious articles go? Or do you really just have a giant stick up your ass?
It got cross-posted to the main page, so now the article is in the way of anyone who just wants straight news. Too bad for them
Don’t worry, we got gay news here, too.
Jules’ interrogation of Bret is truly one of the great monologues in movie history.
The brilliance of the non-linear story is that is it beyond non-linear. At the end of the movie, you completely understand the story, and everything that happened makes sense, but, if you try to arrange the scenes in chronological order, you get nothing. I would call it a Mobius strip plot.
You ok?
No Butch, I’m pretty F***ing far from ok!
Jules you give this Nimrod 4,500 dollars and I’ll shoot him on general principle.
What amazes me is that somebody may have gotten paid for writing this article.
It was almost as fun reading this article as watching (and re-watching)the movie. Pulp Fiction never fails to stop me in my tracks when it shows up on cable. The author didn’t mention, though, one of the best scenes: The dance contest. Absolutely the coolest Twist rendition ever filmed.
The style Tarantino captured in Pulp Fiction came directly from the dime detective/crime novels of the fifties. They were printed on cheap paper, very low production quality, and they were known as pulp fiction novels. Mickey Spillane and Elmore Leonard could be considered the successful rear guard of a long line of pulp fiction authors.
I would also place Tarantino’s True Romance right up there with Pulp Fiction. Many thanks to Tarantino and director Robert Rodriguez for the table dance scene with Salma Hayek dancing to Tito and Tarantula playing ‘After Dark’. I never get tired of that scene – it simply couldn’t be sexier!
“Don’t you just hate that?”
“What?”
“That Uncomfortable Silence.”
Let’s see:
1. Overblown, overhyped, and long since past its expiration date; assuming it had any validity in the world at all. No real entertainment value in this movie. Simply gratuitous violence, profanity, and is incoherent on any level…perfect for kicking your brain into neutral and absorbing images, but not much of a film.
2. Chock-full of loony liberal scumbags masquerading as actors.
3. Half of the “cool factor,” is based on the maunderings of a coke addict, black separatist, hostage taker, and convicted felon: Samuel Leroy Jackson.* Felons are not exactly my definition of a “cool,” guy, and he continues with inflammatory racist rhetoric to this day.
4. To my mind, there is nothing “cool,” about this abomination, except in the minds of folks that were in their late teens and early twenties in the middle-late 1990s and experienced this trash in college. I chalk that up to simple teenage rebellion, much like we all experienced at that same age. Support for such filth only furthers the cause of the leftists that produce such, and the cause(s) of the associate scumbags that generate profit. I wish I could have the time back that I invested in watching this garbage…alas, it is not meant to be.
*http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/dec/07/samuel-l-jackson-hollywood-film – if the claims about his conviction are false, then the Guardian is lying about one of their fellow lefties….
The film entertained me. That’s about all I ever ask when I go to the movies.
I always enjoy the flick, but can’t really say the same about the rest of Tarantino’s stuff. All those who think Uma is hotter as a brunette than as a blonde, raise your mouse! Even “Kill Bill” has gotten stale, and “Reservoir Dogs” — well, once you get past Michael Madsen dancing as he prepares to cut the cop’s ear off, not much to it. FWIW I’ll say Tarantino is overrated, but Pulp Fiction will always be a classic.
Wow. Dig the big brain on Jaime.
“Check out the big brain on Bret, everybody!”