PULP FICTION MOVIE MOVIE

Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan was one of the few dissenting voices. Wheeler Winston Dixon, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, says, “It changed the whole model of what people would sit through, because it was so long, the complexity of it, the intelligence of it, the vitality of it, the originality of it and the fact that it never really did what you expected and it constantly kept audiences guessing.”īut not everyone was won over by Pulp Fiction. It was the film’s form – its non-linear structure – that really startled audiences. “But to audiences it was the way he had compiled it together, people had never seen that before.” “He drew from a lot of influences that were already out there – foreign cinema and niche filmmaking,” he says. He was deeply impressed by what Tarantino had brought to the screen.

PULP FICTION MOVIE MOVIE

“It felt like you’d seen something revolutionary in American filmmaking,” says New York movie fan Frank Powers, who was in his mid-20’s when he saw Pulp Fiction. They include Travolta and Jackson as mob enforcers, Uma Thurman as the wife of a mob boss and Bruce Willis playing an ageing boxer. The story unfolds out of sequence as it chronicles a group of well-drawn underworld characters who inhabit a Los Angeles crime subculture. No factor accounts for Pulp Fiction’s tremendous impact more than the almost universal verdict that the film felt entirely fresh. It was, of course, also a major triumph for Harvey Weinstein at Miramax Films, who backed the movie. He received an Oscar nomination as did co-stars Samuel L Jackson and Uma Thurman. All of this was exceedingly good news for John Travolta, whose career the film revived. It eventually grossed more than $200 million worldwide. Pulp Fiction became a huge commercial hit, especially for an independent film. “Everybody absolutely was convinced that Harvey Weinstein had faked it and had put a plant in the audience so it a very memorable screening.” David Ansen, then film critic for Newsweek, recalls: “Someone fainted, a doctor was summoned. They restarted the movie just as they plunged the needle into the heart to revive and the crowd burst into cheers.”īut as New York Observer film journalist Steven Garrett recalls, many thought this was a publicity stunt orchestrated by the film’s producer. When the picture was shown as the opening night attraction at the New York Film Festival the screening had to be stopped.

In the weeks that followed, as the film travelled to other festivals and into general release, it was met with considerable praise, a little dissent and the odd bit of drama. The reaction was swift and very soon there were proclamations that Pulp Fiction had reinvented the gangster film in many dazzling ways.Īt Cannes it won the Palme d’Or, the top award. There was a lot of expectation that this would be something remarkable – and it was,” she says. “I don’t remember anything but really enthusiastic applause. She was inside the Palais des Festivals, as a senior writer for Entertainment Weekly, for what turned out to be a joyous screening. “That would have been 8:30 in the morning,” recalls film critic Anne Thompson.

But another seismic event took place early one morning on the French Riviera when Quentin Tarantino’s crime drama Pulp Fiction was screened for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival. In May 1994 Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa’s first black president and the Channel Tunnel linking England and France finally opened.

Pulp fiction movie