Get Down Say Ugh! "Pulp Fiction" @ 25

Twenty-five years ago this week Quentin Tarantino's classic film Pulp Fiction was released and became the movie of the decade -- it was violent, profane, massively entertaining, and brilliant. It was a huge hit, launched and relaunched many big careers, made Tarantino a star director and a household name, and brought the independent movie world into the mainstream.

And it's still a classic, great movie a quarter of a century later.

I've blogged a lot about this movie and you can read it all here. But I don't think I fully appreciated the impact this movie had on me at the time until recently -- that it made me fall in love with art and culture in a way that my then-teenage self hadn't appreciated until then; that it made me love movies as an art-form and not just entertainment; that it made me fall in love with writing and storytelling, that it made me excited about creativity in a way that I hadn't been before. It made me realize you can take anything in the world, including things most people consider trashy, and turn it into art -- like, for example, this blog.

The movie is a pastiche of different stories, various characters, and old movies. It's the closest thing that a movie ever came to a collage while, at the same time, being totally original. It's artistic, slow-moving, complex -- and also simple and easy to understand, plus massively entertaining. It's a miracle of a movie, a true original.

It also had a great soundtrack! It was full of country songs, funk songs, covers of old songs, and classic rock. The soundtrack is as classic as the movie and introduced me to lots of great music that I had never heard before -- including my personal favorite, "Jungle Boogie" by Kool and the Gang. "Get down, get down!"

You should read New York Times film critic Janet Maslin's original 1994 review to see how this film was greeted back then -- and how it still resonates today.