Pulp Fiction - Collector's Edition
Miramax Home Entertainment   -   1994   -   154 minutes

Reviewed by Thor van Lingen

Review Date: August 26, 2002

FOR STARTERS

PHOTO GALLERY "Royale With Cheese."

In order to make a successful and popular movie, there are many things that a filmmaker needs. Great writing is a must. Creative directing certainly helps. Adding a big name cast and having an intriguing story will also boost your movie�s stock. Having all of these on one film will almost certainly cost you over $50 million, right? Well how about if I told you that you could do all that for $8 million and walk away with one of the most talked about movies of the decade? Well, that�s exactly what writer/director Quentin Tarantino did in the 1990s with Pulp Fiction. Directing his own screenplay and assembling some of the most entertaining personalities in Hollywood, Tarantino turned the best dialog written in recent years into a dizzying array of fantastic scenes with some of the greatest quotes of any movie on record. Everyone I know has an opinion on this movie; almost all falling into either the sour grapes or the lofty praise categories.

I, for one, am in the lofty praise camp. I can�t think of a movie I quote more often than this one. Certainly not for everyone with 271 confirmed uses of the �f-word�, Pulp Fiction is a tale of three oddly intertwined stories told in non-sequential fashion. This directing/editing choice is also cause for some dissension among both film critics and armchair critics alike. The central and most entertaining storyline is that of Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta), who are hit men that work for the notoriously powerful Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). Their oddly casual conversations in regards to their brutal vocations is what makes their dialog �vintage Tarantino�. They coldly go about their business, killing and collecting for their boss, and offhandedly talk about it over breakfast. Even the repugnant splattering of brains all over the car fazes them about as much as you or I spilling a cup of coffee.

Through their wandering adventures, we are introduced to many of the other principle players. Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) is Marsellus' cocaine-addicted wife. Lance (Eric Stoltz) and Jody (Rosanna Arquette) are the drug-dealing suppliers of Vincent�s who get involved when Mia accidentally puts some high-priced heroin in her nose rather than in her veins. Bruce Willis is brought into the mix through interactions with Marsellus as Butch Coolidge, a past-his-prime prizefighter who makes a deal to throw a major fight for a price. Sprinkle in with that a hysterical cameo by Christopher Walken and the comic relief of the low-budget coffee shop heist duo of Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer), and you have a movie that never really slows down from start to finish.

If you can keep up with all the characters and you�re not one of those people that has to see scenes in chronological order to be able to follow along, Pulp Fiction is a fun ride that is better the second time around than it was the first. If you�ve only seen it once, you really haven�t seen it. A movie that has been criticized as one that glamorizes drugs and violence, if you really pay attention, you will see that Pulp Fiction does quite the opposite. If you�ve seen it twice and you still think it�s offensive, then you�re just one of the sour grapes bunch, and that�s just fine. For my money, you�d be hard pressed to find a film with better dialog and more back-to-back memorable scenes than this one.

VIDEO

In whole, the video on this disc is good. It�s nothing to email the office about, but it�s good. The colors overall are solid, and the flesh tones are noticeably pleasant. The rich reds, particularly at Marcellus� bar, and the subtle greens throughout were nice to look at. The really lengthy sequences (a la Goodfellas) held up reasonably well, with only minor break-up in some of the better-lit scenes. On the other end of the spectrum, some of the darker scenes like the shots in the (obviously fake) taxicab and those in the basement scenes were murky and a little muddled. There was nothing that was outright offensive to me, but it just seemed like they missed the mark slightly in the video department.

AUDIO

With both a regular 5.1 and a DTS audio track on here, at least they did the right thing in the audio department. The sound overall was very good, though I was a little disappointed with the fronts and the center channel. It seemed to me like they focused on making the surround channels pay big dividends, and then forgot about the front channels a little. While the rears provided good atmosphere and excellent surround effects in the really spatial scenes like the coffee shop and Jack Rabbit Slim�s, the fronts seem to flounder when they should shine. They could have done more with respect to the right/left separation, and the gunshots could have been spruced up a tad. I wasn�t unhappy with the sound overall. It just could have been better.

SUPPLEMENTS

Leave it to a self-proclaimed movie geek to slam every bell and whistle onto his latest DVD release. Another two-disc wonder, Quentin Tarantino and company have put together a pretty impressive host of features. I will let the extras fanatic in your house tear this one apart, but go ahead and tell him/her to block off the better part of the afternoon to do so. One of the more original features was the soundtrack chapters, which was like the regular scene selections (which in themselves turned out pretty nicely) with an audio slant. You pick the song you want to hear, and it takes you to the spot in the movie where it is playing. Another pretty slick addition was the enhanced trivia track, which is basically text subtitles similar to pop up video. There is always some little tidbit for you to read about, and it gives you somewhat of a backstage look at some of the actors and their individual achievements. There are also a handful of deleted scenes with deletion rationale from Tarantino. Other nice additions were the Siskel & Ebert special, several TV spots, and scores of still pictures to keep you busily digging for hours.

THE BOTTOM LINE

A film that I obviously really enjoyed, Pulp Fiction is one special edition DVD that I have been waiting to see for some time. I�m glad to see they didn�t give it the �good enough� treatment, and really waited to put something quality together. If you bought the original DVD release back in 1998, you get the added bonus of a $5 rebate. So get off the couch and go get one.