Review: Pulp Fiction (1994)

okay so okay, you ever hear the old expression "a good decoy can lead the enemy away from the king, a master decoy can do it again"? how do you prove you weren't some flash-in-the-pan ripoff artist who got lucky once? and if you just do the same, it has to be moreso, right? critters moved from the house to the neighborhood, so Tarantino moves from the warehouse to the outside world, into the yellowed pages of Amazing Tales.... into John Carpenter's modern wild west, with danger and death behind every door, where law enforcement is a sad, distant dream. you can find a lot of the mundane, circular repetition of Reservoir Dogs but in a larger space, in a fascinating universe of neo-nostalgia resell and sudden shootouts and a literal macguffin, characters having musical conversations and possessing a strange sense of killer's honor. it as well is not an action film -- its visceral thrills are a surprising rarity amid the words themselves, and can barely compete. film's got it going on all over, never slows down, and never gets old. it's magic.

oh I guess Roger Avary helped with that, fine, fine.

Review: Reservoir Dogs (1992)

listen, listen: let me tell you a little somethin' about the early nineties, all right? it was a magical time full of possibility and wonder, okay? all of the sixties kids had grown up and were selling us nostalgia we didn't understand, a lot of rudy ray moore and pam grier who-the-fuck-knows who else. vague memories of blaxsploitation and Baby Boomer sitcoms and porn and 'Nam ultraviolence and whatever song was on the radio the day they were learning to touch themselves. best part of it all was the only nearby database was a video store... a group of fellas could go into a warehouse and make a movie that ripped off about twenty-seven French and Hong Kong productions and only other filmmakers would know about it... and maybe it didn't even fucking matter, okay? because style can go a long fucking way, my friend, and it can even fuel your career for a few decades. a Greek Tragedy centered around a jewel heist and a group of thieves pointing guns at each other ain't half of it when you make the structure your bitch, too, when you humanize these monsters with lyrical, mundane conversations about popular culture that increase the stakes around the site of the climax, instead of leading up to it. when ya got velocity, nobody else can turn the wheel -- right place, right time, right personality never meant so much. the only sad part is that it can never be done again... unless, of course, you're the guy who did it this time.

Review: Song to Song (2017)

When cooking a steak, be sure to awkwardly stare at it until it heats itself.

Malick's ongoing scriptless Shoot the Rodeo projects continue their study of the Human Osprey, squandering the goodwill of performers and viewers alike and generally sucking valuable oxygen away from the working class. A movie about musicians and producers who fuck each other has never contained so little music or fucking. It's amazing that his steadicams and fish-eye lenses haven't been confiscated by a government or an angry mob.

The film, in comparison to his recent works, is at least telling a story this time. The four featured characters have discernible arcs -- relationships start and end, mistakes lead to revelations, somebody dies tragically... all could be universally relatable experiences if they weren't set between the 200 vacations they go on over the course of, seemingly, one year. When the film doesn't twitch with faint signs of life or when Malick splices in footage from Voyage of Time to wake you up, you can derive some suspense from reimagining it all as a PSA on sexually transmitted diseases, because nobody-but-nobody wants Cate Blanchett to get herpes.

You know the pattern by now and you can imagine the entire film, start to finish, without seeing a single frame of it. In addition to the minor positives above, I'll say that Malick also included the line from one of his Osprey surrogates, "I could go on for hours with one chord..." as perhaps the ultimate proof of self-awareness. Remember when this guy only made films every 20 years? Those were the fucking goddamn days.