Thoughts on: Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
I read this script in about two hours last night.
As far as screenplays go, this was a super readable one, but I would not recommend tackling it without seeing the movie first. I found myself remembering the scenes and imagining the actors in their roles and things.
Isn't it funny how you associate a particular movie with the first time you watched it? Isn't it even funnier when you think back to that day and feel nothing; no nostalgia, no sense of lost. Looking back on watching that film with a boy I used to date, I realise that I am a different person now. That girl in the memory reel I am watching is not me, but she sort of looks like me.
I digress.
I like Tarantino films because they deliberately fly in the face of taboo. Adultery, drugs, sex, gangsters etc. all feature in Pulp Fiction in a round about sort of way and yet it manages to remain remarkably kitsch, rather than deep and meaningful. I remember when I was small, seeing the movie poster framed in someone's playroom and thinking that because the movie was rated R, it must have been pornography. How naive I was. I also remember being shocked to see the video on the shelf of a family member. (I guess these are more just thoughts than thoughts on the movie itself...)
After I finished reading it, I lay in my bed in the dark listening to my iPod and trying to have deep thoughts about what I had read but I couldn't really come up with any. I guess that's part of Kitsh though... superficial, aesthetic entertainment value, with no hidden meaning or existentiality or whatever. I was disappointed though. There would be brag value to actually understanding a Tarantino flick on a deeper level probably. But I guess that's what we want in this Two Minute Noodle world. We want a visceral experience to entertain us and take us out of ourselves for an hour or two. We don't want to have to work and dissect this experience, we just want it to come to us.
I started to think about my own novel too. There is a lot of difference between the two stories, that is for sure. And I really wanted to write. But that drive has gone again. Perhaps it will be kind enough to return for the weekend.
As far as screenplays go, this was a super readable one, but I would not recommend tackling it without seeing the movie first. I found myself remembering the scenes and imagining the actors in their roles and things.
Isn't it funny how you associate a particular movie with the first time you watched it? Isn't it even funnier when you think back to that day and feel nothing; no nostalgia, no sense of lost. Looking back on watching that film with a boy I used to date, I realise that I am a different person now. That girl in the memory reel I am watching is not me, but she sort of looks like me.
I digress.
I like Tarantino films because they deliberately fly in the face of taboo. Adultery, drugs, sex, gangsters etc. all feature in Pulp Fiction in a round about sort of way and yet it manages to remain remarkably kitsch, rather than deep and meaningful. I remember when I was small, seeing the movie poster framed in someone's playroom and thinking that because the movie was rated R, it must have been pornography. How naive I was. I also remember being shocked to see the video on the shelf of a family member. (I guess these are more just thoughts than thoughts on the movie itself...)
After I finished reading it, I lay in my bed in the dark listening to my iPod and trying to have deep thoughts about what I had read but I couldn't really come up with any. I guess that's part of Kitsh though... superficial, aesthetic entertainment value, with no hidden meaning or existentiality or whatever. I was disappointed though. There would be brag value to actually understanding a Tarantino flick on a deeper level probably. But I guess that's what we want in this Two Minute Noodle world. We want a visceral experience to entertain us and take us out of ourselves for an hour or two. We don't want to have to work and dissect this experience, we just want it to come to us.
I started to think about my own novel too. There is a lot of difference between the two stories, that is for sure. And I really wanted to write. But that drive has gone again. Perhaps it will be kind enough to return for the weekend.