LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 42

Angeltown, Mon Amour Pulp Fiction and the triumph of cool sweetness. The one who truly gets to walk away is Jules, departing through a pair of streaky glass diner doors widi as much quiet bravado as any laconic cowboy swaggering out of a saloon. The choice to liberate Jules, a black man, although its a liberation shot through with delusion, is no more accidental than the use of Urge Oserkills version of Girl, Youll Be a Woman Soon (instead of Neil Diamonds) for Mias oozv, Godardesque sashav. And just when the repetitive use of the word nigger begins to feel like a bludgeoning misstep, the movie throws in an unexpected wremh the wife of Jules onlv friend in Code 818 is African-American. Tarantino, in constructing his funhouse of mirrors, is nothing if not a maestro of the moment.

Gulp hciiox i ingers most oftin in the heat of conversation, as when scheming lovebirds Honey Bunn) and Pumpkin hunker ov er bi eakfast at a ubiquitous L.A. coffee shop, the very sort they want to begin knocking off. The cutesy nicknames, bandied adorably between snatches of crime talk, signal an intimacy that binds every pair of conversationalistslovers in the movie. Honey Bunny, Pumpkin, Lemon Pie, Cupcake are as unhip as Mr. Orange, Mr.

Pink, et al. are cool, and the point is not so much to infantilize the characters as to peel back the usual veil that distances screen play and audience. Its excruciating, for example, to watch Butch and his Lemon I FILM BY ELIZABETH PINCUS a descendant of Frankensteins monster, gun homing crazily in on Willis, only adds to the moments transcendence. Hooray for Hollywood. 1 'Don't be a square, Daddy-0 I Mia (Uma Thurman) sets the standard for chic.

I Pie, Fabienne, coochie-cooing each othei in a mo tel bathroom, toothpaste dripping down Fabi-ennes chin. But its a clandestine pleasure, too, as is eavesdropping on Vincent and Jules as they discuss massaging womens feet. Im the foot fucking master, says Jules, eliciting a faux-flirty equest from Vincent for a little taste of that mastery. Indeed, the VincentJules story, in all its banality, is Pulp Fiction's locus of casual homoeroticism (as well as the movies brilliant centerpiece). The men spar, strategize, joke and watch each others backsides with a gentleness that if not overtly sexual is at least implicitly wise to the possibility.

The entire film is packed with anal icferences, further commentary on the body as pulp and pulp repository. The scat chat is also a less-than-subtle foreshadowing of a climactic eruption of violence: in Pulp Fiction's blurred universe of present and past, murder is bleak (if mundane), but the rape of a man is the ultimate injury, one that fuels ferocious revenge and a pact of secrecy so sacred a pre-existing blood feud becomes moot. later, when The Wolf says, Its not yet time to suck each others dicks, its just another queer-friendly aside in a film that honors bodily integrity even while flipping it off. The funniest sketch in the movie is the aftermath of a near-deadly drug overdose, a resurrection worthy of the king of himself, Ed Wood. Its not that Pulp Fiction devalues life; on the contrary, like its hard-edged fictive forerunners, it simply depicts human behavior without judgment, an approach that renders carnage all the more shocking.

When Travolta accidentally splatters somebodys brains all over the inside of a car, hes duly disgusted, though its not the mistake he minds so much as the mess. This doesnt make Vincent a bad guy. But it does make him tragic. For a film set in the City of Angels, Pulp Fiction ponies up precious few signifiers no palm trees, beach shots, passing glimpses of the Hollywood sign. Instead, the milieu is wide, barren avenues, colorless sky, squarish buildings.

Its the interiors that give the movie its arty cachet, from the glorious (Jack Rabbit Slims) to the beautifully plain (the coffee shop). Tarantino, while pushing pastiche to delirious extreme, only occasionally goes tongue-in-cheek, most notably when the character he plays.Jules friendjimmie, makescoffee for The Wolf. That cup joe tasty, laden with meaning is as pure as pulp gets. JJ 0-ULP IS A WORD OF MULTIPLE MEANINGS, and if theres any filmmaker currently able to milk it for all its significance, its Quentin Tarantino. The man who, in Reservoir Dogs, made the colors of Crayola the suavest monikers in recent movie history is back, riffing on pulp as body tissue, pulp as fiction, pulp as style, Jetsonian and now.

As reported in these pages last week, Tarantinos newest, Pulp Fiction, finds its pulse in the crime novels of the 30s and 40s: cheap, lurid trash brimming with tales of hardship and ennui, books printed on throwaway paper that quickly grew as ragged as the souls of the lowlifes chronicled within. Like its source material, Pulp Fiction is comic and grim, sun-soaked and shadowy, tender and blunt. A pop-drenched dream reel, the film is both a reverential nod to the power of words and a stunning entertainment that more than lives up to its hype. Tarantino auteur, dissident, true believer has a nose for pulps romance, but as a boy-wonder movie nerd, he also knows how to spike his nostalgia with allusions that span the decades from noir to neo-noir to, in a sense, anti-noir. Sure, he makes pulpy stew of James M.

Cain, blaxploitation, John Woo, kung-fu (ter lick just the tip of the iceberg), but the amazing thing about Pulp Fiction is how contemporary it feels. Oliver Stone seems to think mug shots of O.J. and Tonya position his latest opus in the present day; Tarantino, on the other hand, opts for deadpan vignettes at once glamorous and not that could be happening next door, down the street, in your neighborhood coffee shop. Watching the film is voyeurism of the most sensuous sort, one visceral jolt after another, the kind of blood-pumping charge that movies were made to evoke, or should have been. The scene in which Bruce Willis tacky little Honda plows into Ving Rhames (carrying a pink pastry box), then spurts into an intersection, takes a hit and careens woozily across a white-hot sidewalk, conveys all the horrific immediacy of every crash youve ever been in or rubbernecked for.

That Rhames proceeds to lurch across the boulevard like ULP FICTION WEAVES THREE STORIES into one tight tapestry, a composite that respects the urgent drive of conventional narrative while offering a few detours to prove that montage is, among other things, an elaborate form of lying. The effect is one of giddy delight, not unlike the thrill of a chance encounter. The triptych features a pair of two-bit hoods, Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) and Pumpkin (Tim Roth), in the midst of a career change; a couple of hit men, Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), assigned to dispatch a posse of double-crossing crooks; and a boxer named Butch (Willis), who, defying the imperative of mob boss Marsellus Wallace (Rhames), fails to throw a fight. Other key players in this roundelay of revenge and redemption include Marsellus wife, Mia (Uma Thurman); Butchs girlfriend, Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) and a cleanup man known as The Wolf (Harvey Keitel).

Threads of coincidence link the separate plot lines until they combust or disperse, mini-epiphanies by turns gruesome and sublime. With its long takes, leisurely rhythms and, above all, respect for language, Pulp Fiction is Short Cuts sans sociology; if both films are cock lit writ large, then Tarantinos is the one to privilege empathy over analysis, forgiveness over ridicule. He is, after all, of the white trash class he showboats (note the Tennessee license plate on the pawnshop wall, a cheery hello to his birthplace, Knoxville), not an interloper with a theory to prove. Some say Tarantino is all self-reflexive magician, an apolitical gamesman concerned with text at the expense of context. Yet is there another homespun film that so skillfully exposes the jagged cross-stitching of race, class and the American dream? Quiz Show trumpets its righteousness; Forrest Gump rewards insularity.

Of this years movies, only Crooklyn, Mi Vida Loca and the forthcoming Hoop Dreams come close to matching Pulp Fiction in guts, grace and intelligence. Not to mention heart. Part gorefest, part salvo. Pulp Fiction is a valentine to, of all things, survival and its improbable I 42 LA WEEKLY OCTOBER 14-0CT0BER 20, 1994.