Quentin Tarantino. Obviously.
This has become a classic, in a way, something everybody knows or should know, if they like cinema. It is indeed peculiar, because it is, no doub, a gangster movie, full of blood and violence and drugs, but it’s most of all full of words, becausse the characters talk a lot, really a lot, and there’s many stories combined, and there’s a sort of dark humour if you want to see it, and there are also ‘titles’ for various pieces of the plot, like ‘The diner’, ‘Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s wife’, ‘The gold watch’ and ‘the Bonnie situation’. The titles are not really something useful, but they’re cool and something of a signature, they contribute to the atmosphere of how this movie is made.
There’s another peculiar thing, that things move on until maybe two third of the movie, and then we go back to the beginning, and restart from there, to see what we missed before the story moved on.
Also, there’s a huge use of the bad word for black man, used mostly by black men but also by Jimmie and maybe others, not sure, anyway it’s used like someone else might say dude or guy…
Oh, and Tarantino’s character doesn’t die in this, he gets out of the mess well enough…
So, the plot in details:
We have:
Pumpkin and Honey Bunny are very much in love, but she doesn’t seem to believe him when he says that he’s done with robbing liquor stores. They’re having breakfast at a diner, and he says that it’s getting too dangerous, and he doesn’t want to get shot, and after a while he gets to the point: restaurants are safer, because the place has insurance, and because underpaid employees won’t risk anything for it. By robbing a restaurant, they won’t find any resistance, easy and full of customers with wallets. So they finish their breakfast, take out their guns and start their robbery right there. Still image, we leave them here for a while.
Vincent Vega is back, he was in Holland for three years I think, and now he tells Jules all about how things work over there, meaning the things that matter to them, like how hashish is legal, and stuff like that. There’s also a bit about how Marsellus Wallace threw a man out of the window because this guy gave Marsellus’ wife a foot massage. Vincent finds it reasonable because he thinks that a foot massage has meaning, sexual meaning, while Jules has ofter massaged his mother’s feet and thinks nothing of it, so the whole story is a huge exageration in his opinion. They talk about this while they drive to the house of some young men who made a business deal with Marsellus Wallace and then tried to keep the stuff for themselves. When Vincent opens the case, there’s a light coming out, likea mystic light, but we’ll never know what it is. That golden light made me think of gold, but they carry it like it’s really light, not heavy at all, so nothing like that… unless it was like gold powder, or something. It’s a nice image, that’s it.
So, these guys kept something they shouldn’t have, and are quite surprised to see their visitors, and terrified too. As they should be. Jules starts talking about breakfast, and tasting both the guy’s hamburger and his sprite, and then Vincent checks the case and it is what they want, and so Jules starts a long monologue, even citing the bible, his own way, but the vengeance idea is there. They shoot two of the three guys, and then we move on. But we learn that Marsellus has asked Vincent to keep Mia company for a while, he’s to take her out one night, and after that massage story it seems quite a risky thing…
We move on to see Vincent entering a place where Marsellus is talking with fighter Butch Coolidge. They’re making a deal, Butch will get money but he agrees to go down at the 5th round. Vincent is wearing some kind of beach clothes, but he doesn’t want to talk about it.
He goes to Lance’s house to buy heroine, and he injects himself one right there, keeping the rest in his jacket. Then he goes to pick up Mia to take her out. Mia sniffs cocaine at home, and then again when they’re at the 50s place they’re dining at. When she goes to the bathroom it’s not to see to her make-up, it’s to sniff coke. They talk and seem to get along, but then a dance competition starts, and she forces him to dance with her, and to dance well because she wants to win the trophy. So they dance, and we see that they get home with the trophy, so they won.
She invited him in for a drink, but he knows the risks and the importance of loyalty, and gives himself a speech on it. Mia sniffs some more, I think she found Vincent’s stuff and she probably thought it was cocaine and sniffed it… whatever it was, it’s pretty clear that she got a bad reaction, and when Vincent sees her he understands the gravity of the situation, for her but also for himself. He drives her fast to Lance’s house. It’s very late, and Lance and his wife Jody are not happy about it, also scared but he insists, and yells, and Lance finds what they need to give her a adrenaline shot. Vincent stabs her sternum and she starts breathing again. She’s still quite grey in the face when he takes her back home, but they agree that Marsellus must never know about this.
A very human thing here, that I liked, is that when they were eating she talked of a joke she had to say on the only pilot episode she ever did, but she felt embarrassed before and refused to tell him, because after talking about it a lot, the expectation was there and she was worried he would not laugh at the joke, or maybe laugh at her… but now the night’s gone to hell, in a way, and after what they both went through none fo them has the capacity to laugh, so she can tell her joke without worry. There’s nothing to fear now, only a way to lighten the air and get back to some kind of friendly ground like they were before…
Mia also said before that the foot massage story was fake, the guy never touched any part of her, and only Marsellus knows why he threw him out a window.
We see a flashback of when Butch was just a child. His father died at war, and Captain Koons comes to give him his father’s watch. It has quite the story, and my reaction was like: no thank you, take that watch away from me, but it’s not my dad we’re talking about after all. Captain Koons tells him that his great-grandfather bought that watch, the first wristwatch made and a gold watch too, judging by the ‘title’. His great grandfather died at war and someone gave the watch to the wife and her son. Then Butch’s grandfather died at war, and someone gave that watch to the wife and her son. Then Butch’s father went to war, and he had to hide th watch from the enemy and he only had his behind as a safe place… and after he died captain Koons did the same… so after seven years of being hidden up a man’s ass this watch is finally Butch’s property.
Butch is now a boxer, a fighter, but he doesn’t go down, not at the fifth, not later. He wins the fight, because he bet on himself when nobody else did, knowing the match was rigged, so he won a lot of money that someone will get for him in a day.
Knowing he’s in danger, he left the match after he won without even changing, he got into a taxi that he still had the gloves. His taxi driver, Esmeralda, asks what does it feel to kill a man, but he didn’t even know, he cares about the money. He gets to a motel where his girlfriend Fabienne is waiting for him, and they’re happy and ready to go away together the next day. But then, in the morning, Butch can’t find his father’s watch, she forgot to get it when she got everything else… she’s not sure, she thought she got it, but she never knew just how important that watch is for Butch, so much that he goes back for it now. Despite the danger he’s in, he won’t leave his father’s watch behind, after everything it got through to get to him… so he takes her car and goes home. He enters and gets his watch, and everything looks fine, he even puts some bread in the toaster because he’s missing breakfast, but then he sees a weapon, some kind of rifle. He picks it up, and when Vincent comes out of the bathrooom, he shoots him dead. He drives away fast, but at a stop it’s Marsellus himself that sees him while crossing the street. Butch runs him over but then crashes on another car. Marsellus gets up and goes after him shooting, and they end up fighting inside a shot (one that has baseball bats, saws, swords…). Anyway, they’re fighting and Butch is about to kill Marsellus when they’re stopped by the owner who takes them prisoners and calls a friend. This Zed is a cop, and this two men together like to rape and then kill men. (They also have a third man they call the gimp or something, but his role is not clear to me. Anyway, they chained this gimp and take Marsellus into another room to rape him. Butch frees himself and is about to escape when he thinks about it and starts looking for weapons, going from one to the other until he sees a katana. He goes back and kills the shop owner, stopping what’s going on. It’s Marsellus himself now that shoots that cop only to injure him, having a very different future planned for him. Butch gets what he hoped for: Marsellus tells him that they’re ok now, as long as Butch never tells anyone about this and never comes back to this city. Butch is totally ok with that, so he takes Zed’s chopper and goes to get his girl, and they go away.
Now we go back almost to the beginning, to fill a gap.
In order, Vincent and Jules talked while driving, and then entered the guys apartment, but they didn’t know there was a fourth guy. This one was in another room and had a gun, and he came out shooting at them… but didn’t kill them, so they killed him. Now, Jules thinks that’s a miracle, that’s divine intervention, a message from God, so he has a serious intention to retire from that life.
They took the only surviving guy - the other three are dead- and took him with them. Vincent doesn’t agree with Jules, he thinks that such things sometimes just happen, and he turns to ask the young guy what he thinks but he has his gun in hand and accidentally shoot the guy in the face. Now the car and his face are completely blood red. There’s only a man nearby that Jules knows, so they drive to Jimmie’s house to get out of the road. Jimmie is quite pissed at it all, but not so much about the fact that he has a dead guy in his garage, that they killed a man in the first place, if he knows Jules he knows what he does. No, what matters to Jimmie is that his wife never knows about it. She’s a nurse, who just did the night shift at the hospital, and he wants them out before she’s back because she’d get mad and he loves her and doesn’t want to divorce her… it’s the Bonnie situation, where Bonnie is Jimmie’s wife.
So Jules calls Marsellus and demands some help quickly, and Marsellus sends ‘the Wolf’, a man called Winston Wolf that solves problems. He’s very cool about it all, but also very precise and well organised. He has them clean the house and themselves. He has Jimmie give them big heavy blankets and new clothes for them, and Wolf gives him money in exchange for it all. The house is now all clean again, and the guys take the ruined car to a junkyard.
Now Jules and Vincent go to have breakfast, and they stop at the diner that Pumpkin and Honey Bunny are about to rob.
It all goes well until Pumpkin tries to get Jules’ case. That belongs to Marsellus, so he has no intention of giving it to anybody. Pumpkin sees what it contains and says something like ‘is that what I think it is?’ But then Jules gets him and things take a turn. Bunny is scared for him, but Jules says to keep calm that he wants to talk, and so Jules tells them that he can even take the 1500 that are in his wallet and everything else he got, but he has to leave the empty wallet and most of all the case behind, and Jules will let him live. After such a scare, Pumpkin and Bunny go away hugging each other.
Vincent and Jules hide their weapons under their beach clothes and get out of the diner.
From here, I guess Jules ‘retired’ which is why we’ll see Vincent alone, later on, and also why Vincent appeared in such strange clothes…
The movie starts with a definition of PULP taken from the American Heritage Dictionary, New College Edition: “1, a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter. 2, a magazine or book containing lurid subject matter and being characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper.”
Pumpkin-Tim Roth
Honey Bunny- Amanda Plummer
Vinent Vega- John Travolta
Jules Winnfield- Samuel L. Jackson
Butch Coolidge- Bruce Willis
Jody- Rosanna Arquette
Marsellus Wallace- Ving Rhames
Mia Wallace- Uma Thurman
Captain Koons- Christopher Walken
Jimmie- Quentin Tarantino
The Wolf- Harvey Keitel
Buddy Holly- Steve Buscemi (this was written in the ending credits, but I don’t remember seeing him…
