Pulp Fiction 4K 1994 Ultra HD 2160p

Quentin Tarantino's landmark film in new remastered quality

Quentin Tarantino's black comedy follows the criminal days of two gangsters, Vincent Vega and Jules Winfield. They spend time in philosophical conversations between showdowns and "solving problems" with the debtors of their crime boss Marcellus Wallace. Three stories unfold in parallel.

In one of them, Vincent does not have much luck looking out for his boss's wife; another tells of a boxer hired by Wallace to take the fight, but who cheats him. The third story combines the first two - a couple of unlucky young robbers, Pumpkin and Honey Bani, attempt a robbery at a cafe, but Jules stops them.

Pulp Fiction 4K Review
Three years ago, Tarantino took on the Cannes Film Festival and then tried to clean out the American Film Academy - but without much success: he received only a consolation "Oscar" for the screenplay. But who knows how things could have turned out if not for the indestructible loft standing in the way of "Pulp Fiction..." Robert Zemeckis' "Forrest Gump." Circumstances were such that we could call this self-taught director's film a "new classic" just a month after its release; today, it's even a little scary to get close to the netliqué. A smash hit, a cornerstone, an example for all.

Neither before nor after in postmodern sets of quotations has there been so much air and life. By some miracle, Pulp Fiction overcame Tarantino's concentrated desire to take the best of the best. Twist and John Travolta, Vietnam and Christopher Walken, a gun and a sermon, boxing gloves and a chopper, crap and more crap. The scene in which Butch (Bruce Willis), having escaped from the perverts, chooses what he would like to beat the offenders with: a hammer? a baseball bat? a chainsaw? a samurai sword! The breadth of Tarantino's options is mesmerizing. That's why "Stuff..." is not a smelly collection of cinematic curiosities, but the meat of cinema itself, flesh torn and sewn together for new life. Palp. The dramaturgically sorted "Pulp Fiction" exists by the laws of the road movie.

From the roadhouse in the beginning to the same roadhouse in the finale - seemingly spinning in place, this movie nevertheless travels a giant distance. The tomato family anecdote and the cynical account of the Vietnam veterans are thrust into the territory of a religious parable about divine intervention. Not for nothing does Butch ride out of the frame on a motorcycle nicknamed Grace, meaning "Grace." It's a journey through space and time. Marcelas Wallace's mysterious suitcase, Butch's boxer's happy hours, and a cocaine dose snorted by the brunette Mia take a long journey.

The main events of the film unfold in the cabin of a car: someone's death and someone's escape from death, a dangerous romantic date, a conversation about French hamburgers. It doesn't matter if that car is going from point "a" to point "b" or is parked at a diner where a milkshake is served by Marilyn Monroe. Whether it's literally splattered with other people's brains or figuratively. The three stories, Aristotelian in their unity of time and place, do not flow one into the other (two days in the lives of the gunmen Vince and Jules) and live simultaneous lives in a single enclosed space, coexisting in the volume of cinematic history.

Curiously, but eerily logical, Cannes favored, among others, Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red, who, like Tarantino, insisted that everything is connected. But Kieslowski was talking about the connections of the big world. Tarantino took a much narrower approach, and it came out more truthfully. Knowing that the ideal movement is circular and without purpose, Tarantino flies his cinematic grounds from one tasty flower to another like a shaggy bumblebee: Godard, Samurai, Hitchcock's MacGuffins, boxers, big guns, the best music of the 70s, gangsters in white shirts. The physics of this flight is not entirely clear to science, but what are the physical laws to the children of the video library? Perhaps fifty years from now some reader will ask: Who is he, this Tarantino?

There is an answer to this question in the film, too. He's a thrifty housewife in a dirty bathrobe with a mug of smelly americana in his hand. He's a guy who knows what kind of rags you can find in the garage if you dig hard enough. He can haggle at length with Harvey Keitel over a wedding present-because every single thing in this household is in place. Yes, and it would be nice to furnish the bedroom with oak furniture.