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Wednesday, October 15, 2014

20th Anniversary of Pulp Fiction: A Retrospective


“I wanna dance, I wanna win. I want that trophy, so dance good……”

And saying that aforesaid line, she took the floor. Ah, what a vision this woman was. That dove-white crisp shirt was complimenting her posture without her being aware of that. Like a breeze in its full degree of freedom, she moved her legs to the beats of ‘You Never Can Tell’ by Chuck Berry. She was oozing glamour and panache that pierced right through the viewers’ hearts and babbling a thousand words that broke the ‘awkward silence’ all over. Yeah, I am talking of Marsellus Wallace’s wife, Mia and the famous “Dancing Scene”. Do you realize how much time has passed since you watched her tap her feet for the very first time? Well, that will be exact TWENTY YEARS! That long eh? Well, you know how the saying goes, “Art is timeless”. And a Pulp Fiction-y one definitely is.

20 years seem quite a mark. It’s been 20 years since the silver screens of USA witnessed a never-seen-before Tarantinolized phenomenon that vehemently transformed independent cinema for generations to come and the impact of which hasn't tend to wane an ounce after all these years.
 On October 14, 1994, a crime comedy masterpiece titled “Pulp Fiction” was released in American theaters and subsequently worldwide and the rest is history yet in making. The magnitude of Pulp Fiction can not be constrained within a narrow profit-loss Box-office report. With its release, the movie-goers’ world saw something that does not occasionally make itself known. The avant-garde storytelling and ground-breaking themes and narrative made this film a cult fiction that has instituted its own genre of exceptional filmmaking. After 20 years, I won’t shrink back to state that this epic film will always be one of my most cherished films of all time and I won’t mind a bazillion rewatches to affirm that .


Pulp Fiction was director Quentin Tarantino’s ambitious project which he had developed over a year during his stay in Amsterdam. A modest apartment, a deep-rooted passion, and snippets of ideas- History tells us that this is everything that a writer needs to be unimaginably great or pathetically bust. What became of then 30 year old Tarantino is known to all. So that was how Pulp Fiction was being made, in the form of several pages of notebooks and scraps of handwritten jotted plots. However as things soon fell in place, all the seemingly discrete words and lines were intertwined to present what we today know as Pulp Fiction. When the film was released leading review portals of USA came into an almost unanimous verdict- This film grips you like a power shot of adrenaline and you cannot shrug off the hang that easily.

It seemed the whole American film industry was structurally reinvented by its arrival. Tarantino continued his obsession over distinctive story-telling, disjointed narrative, pop culture references, intense violence, drug cartels, mob gangs and vigorous swearing from his previous directorial “Reservoir Dogs” to “Pulp Fiction”. All the badass Bible quoting, gun blazes, booms, “a Royale with Cheese”, “English Motherfu****” opne-liners have chipped in our minds the countless memories that we easily associate with this classic directorial. This film was outrightly smashing all scales of hitherto accepted medians of filmmaking and we simply loved it that way. Ain’t so!

Pulp Fiction not only made loads of green and also won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that very year. It kickstarted the career graph for lead actors John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman and Tarantino was nothing short of a visionary among the bandwagon of young directors.


Honestly, a single post or a couple of follow-ups will never be sufficient to cover the true genius of this film. At its 20th glorious Anniversary all I can do is be absolutely shut up in sheer admiration of it. Not every film gets to be a household name throughout the globe and gets quoted every once in a while. After all these years, its relevance has not rusted an inch. If this is too much of a nostalgia alert for you, then just have a rewatch already. I know I am having one.

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