Excessively violent movies aren't normally my thing... but...

Pulp Fiction. We talked about it last year, we talked about it this year, and since people keep bringing it up that has to mean something, right?

Pulp Fiction is, at its core, a movie about LA mobsters. Which could have made for a predictable and somewhat boring movie… if it had been written by anyone other than Quentin Tarantino. The movie follows Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega, two mobsters working for their mob boss Marsellus Wallace. But the whole movie is written out of chronological order, forcing viewers to sort of connect the dots on their own rather than having the whole thing spelled out for them. So that totally random restaurant robbery at the beginning of the movie? Don’t let it fool you; it’ll prove its relevance. You just might have to wait until the end to figure it out.

Here is what I have learned after my first viewing of Pulp Fiction: You cannot even hope to understand what this movie is really about without having seen it at least twice. And if I had an extra 2 ½ hours to kill, I would have definitely watched it a second time. Tarantino takes your traditional blood-and-guts crime movie, throws in his signature “that’s so random…” dark humor, adds in a couple of real-world issues disguised in blood-splattered suits and holding rifles, and then cuts it all into pieces so that you are forced to watch the sequence of events out of sequence. But what makes the movie good is the fact that all of those things were done on purpose. As random as the movie may seem, there is a method to it all such that you can look back on the movie and see that everything has its place. It wouldn’t have worked any other way.

It goes without saying that Pulp Fiction is a revenge movie; most mob movies are. On a smaller scale, there are some elements of Man vs. Himself and Good vs. Evil, especially when you consider the character of Jules Winnfield.

Rating? 4 out 5. Go into the movie expecting it to be totally messed up. That’s classic Quentin Tarantino. What makes the movie good is the mildly sick and totally insane creative genius that it took to make this movie and do it well. There’s a reason they call it a classic.