#Pulp fiction murder monologues series
( Denver even had the good fortune of casting Tarantino favorites Steve Buscemi and Christopher Walken in supporting roles.) And Get Shorty certainly benefited from the Fiction bump provided by star John Travolta, but it too had been in development for years, and it went back to the source for its colorful criminals: the prose of Elmore Leonard, one of Tarantino’s most pronounced (and acknowledged) influences.ġ996 brought the first wave of clear imitators - films that reeked of writers glued to their seats as the lights came up after a Pulp Fiction screening, proclaiming, “I can write something like that!” John Herzfeld’s 2 Days in the Valley and Michael Covert’s American Strays both unspooled as a series of seemingly unrelated stories that intersect unexpectedly neither one particularly works, but at least the former introduced us to Charlize Theron. Which is not to say that they weren’t influenced by Tarantino The Usual Suspects, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, Palookaville, and The Immortals are unimaginable without Reservoir Dogs, focusing as they do on teams of funny/hot-headed criminals, often with peculiar nicknames, pulling off big scores.
Such elements are omnipresent in the first batch of films branded as Fiction rip-offs - unfairly, for the most part, as they were 1995 releases that simply couldn’t have been written and produced so quickly after Pulp Fiction’s release in the fall of 1994.
Instead, it prompted its own formula: stories of eccentric criminals and/or sympathetic hit men casts filled with either rising stars or faded talents looking for a comeback scripts that studiously avoided conventional chronology soundtracks filled with esoteric music cues, often serving as ironic counterpoint to the bloodshed onscreen verbose, theatrical monologues and the biggest tell of all faux- Fiction, dialogue peppered with comically unrelated small talk and/or copious pop-culture references. Roger Ebert was a famously accurate prognosticator, and he predicted that Pulp Fiction would be “the most influential film of the next five years,” but he sure fumbled the particulars he also said, “for that we can be thankful, because it may have freed us from uncounted predictable formula films.” But the Tarantino influence is undeniable, and in this age of endless attempts at cinematic universes, it’s frankly refreshing to spend a couple of hours with a good old-fashioned Pulp Fiction knockoff.Īnd such imitations were inevitable, considering Fiction’s three-pronged success as box-office winner ( grossing more than 25 times its $8 million budget worldwide), critical darling, and cultural sensation. Bad Times has its atypical touches (the period setting, the broad religious overtones, Chris Hemsworth in an open shirt), and owes equal debt to Goddard’s own Cabin the Woods. With its eclectic cast of eccentric criminal types, nonlinear narrative structure, and deadpan mix of comedy and violence, it recalls that peculiar period in the mid-to-late ’90s when every young filmmaker was trying to remake Pulp Fiction. But it also feels like a holdover from another era. Edgar’s FBI, sedans the size of houses, needle drops from the likes of Deep Purple and the Isley Brothers. Bad Times at the El Royale Photo: Kimberley French/Twentieth Century Foxĭrew Goddard’s Bad Times at the El Royale (in theaters this Friday) is set in 1969, and chock-full of signifiers of its time: a Manson-esque leader of a murder cult, a square-jawed agent of J.
0 kommentar(er)
