The Best Movies: Editing

"Raging Bull" is a cinematic masterpiece which pulls no punches. Based on a true story, Robert De Niro (in his second Oscar-winning role) stars as Jake La Motta, a middle-weight prize-fighter from the late-1940s and early-1950s, who basically destroys himself and those around him because of an uncontrollable temper and poor decision-making. Instead of going down as one of the greatest boxers of all time, La Motta ruined his career because he was unable to see the "big picture". He threw bouts, he got involved with low-life underworld crime figures, he beat his wife (Cathy Moriarty, in her Oscar-nominated role), he abused all those closest to him, and he had relationships with young girls who were still considered minors. Even his strongest tie, his younger brother (Joe Pesci, in an Oscar-nominated, star-making part), gets cut during the course of his untimely self-destruction. La Motta goes from middle-weight champ to a washed-out stand-up comic at a local club. He gains weight uncontrollably and ultimately just becomes another face in the crowd by the end of the film. By the end, La Motta proclaims that he: "Could have been a contender....", quoting Marlon Brando's famous line from "On the Waterfront". "Raging Bull" is one of those films that is masterfully crafted in all possible departments. The screenplay is one of the best in the history of film. Martin Scorsese's direction is superb and so is the cinematography (shot almost entirely in black-and-white). The film delivered De Niro an Oscar and also won for its editing. "Raging Bull" is one of those films that is very close to "Citizen Kane". They both deal with men who desperately want to be great, but ultimately destroy themselves and those around them. This film is often rated the best film of the 1980s. I cannot argue with that opinion. I also think that this is the best work that Scorsese and De Niro have ever done. The fact that this film lost the Best Picture Oscar to "Ordinary People" in 1980 is probably the biggest disappointment since "Citizen Kane" lost to "How Green Was My Valley" in 1941.

Tarantino's follow-up to Resevoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, displayed even more of an entertainer's talent for luridness--"a funky American sort of pop, improbable and uproarious with bright colors, danger and blood," according to David Denby. The critic Pauline Kale put her finger on the special appeal of Pulp Fiction when she described it as "shallow but funny. And it's fresh. It was fun and there aren't that many movies that are just fun."
Tarantino is not an original in the way that David Lynch is; he lacks Lynch's powerful imagination. His scripts are not taken from real life, but from previously existing films, books and TV shows. Tarantino does not so much create his stories as build and reconstruct them, using material that already exists. But it's not the stories that he tells; it's how he tells them. More than other directors, Tarantino understands that in a society that takes all its points of reference from pop culture, Americans' sense of identity is largely based on media images, which explains his appropriation of the most common artifacts of our culture.

Lurid, low-life characters in cheap crime novels of the 1930s and 1940s provided the inspiration for Pulp Fiction, which is set in a modern-day Hollywood populated with hoods, gangsters, corrupt cops, and black widows. Boasting an audacious structure, Pulp Fiction comprises three interconnected stories that don't match up evenly. Tarantino breaks Hollywood's honored norm of presenting events in sequence. Yet, by the end, the chronology falls into place.

Each story centers on two characters. The first duo are lovebirds, Honey Bunny and Pumpkin (Plummer and Roth), in a coffee shop contemplating a career change--the question: whether to hold up restaurants instead of liquor stores. The second pair, which forms the central core of the film, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) are talkative hit men who work for crime boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). Wallace is jealously married to the exotic heroin-addled Mia (Uma Thurman). There's also a double-crossing prize-fighter, Butch (Bruce Willis) and his girlfriend (Maria de Medeiros); Butch is supposed to take a dive, but instead takes the money and run. The movie ends with Vince and Jules dealing with a drug hit that goes uproariously awry.

The thematic novelty of Pulp Fiction is that it's less about the depiction of crime than about what happens before and after crime--how to cope with the bloody mess of a man killed in the back seat of a car. Tarantino creates a character named Wolf (Keitel), a mobster cleanup man who instructs on how to do the job. What holds the movie together is its inspired playfulness and cool nihilism in stories that are pitched at a resolutely human scale. Tarantino neglects plot mechanics and linear narrative in favor of lengthy, sustained scenes presented out of sequence. Like Reservoir Dogs, there's very little action in Pulp Fiction: Tarantino's hit men spend more time talking than killing. At the end, a sociopath killer is transformed into a spiritual shepherd. In the final scene, Jules quotes Ezekiel 25:17 to his victims before blasting them.

In the self-enclosed world of Reservoir Dogs, there was no room for women, except for a cameo of a woman who shoots Keitel's character. But in Pulp Fiction, one of the central figures is Mia, Marsellus' attractive wife, whose date with Vincent provides an exhilarating scene. Knowing that her husband once threw a man out a window for giving her a foot massage, Vince escorts her with trepidation. A leisurely buildup of their date culminates with the memorable sight of Travolta and Thurman twisting on the dance floor of a 1950s themed restaurant.

Once again, Tarantino shows his penchant for the rhythm of words--the talk has the drollery of gangland Beckett with exuberant verbal riffs. As Vince and Jules drive to their first "mission," they talk about fast food in Europe. "Do you know what a Quarter Pounder is called in Amsterdam" Vince asks. "A Royale with cheese." The two bicker endlessly about whether a foot massage counts as a sexual act. Tarantino is a master at taking trite situations and giving them a sudden, vertiginous twirl, as the farcical scene of Mia's drug overdose demonstrates.

The three overlapping stories brim with anecdotes, debates, profanities, and biblical quotations. Tarantino's scripts contain so many stories that it's easy to overlook the restrained lucidity of his style and his respect for actors. Unlike most action films, in which actors compete with--and are upstaged by--special effects, actors are central in Tarantino's movies. In Pulp Fiction he builds the entire film around the cadence of their performances. When characters converse, Andrzej Sekula's camera gracefully observes the dialogue, without movement or other distractions.

Stylistically inventive, Pulp Fiction differs from the conventional landscape of film noir, showing a different side of L.A. Most noirs are set at night, but Tarantino's action is set in a sun-blasted sprawl with no palm trees, no shots of the ocean, no montage of Rodeo Drive shopping, no reference to the Hollywood sign. Pointedly avoiding a slick look, Tarantino replaces these icons with squalid settings of barren streets, dilapidated buildings, plain coffee shops.

Many directors have borrowed from classic Hollywood genres, but the achievement of Pulp Fiction is how, despite secondhand parts, it succeeds at being coherent and fresh. Tarantino takes familiar situations and subverts them with sudden outbursts of violence, radical changes of tone. As a postmodern work, Pulp Fiction succeeds where Soderbergh's Kafka, which was also made of borrowed elements, failed. David Denby has observed that Tarantino works with trash, but by criticizing and formalizing it, he emerges with something different: an amalgam of banality and formality.

There are weak scenes, such as the flat romance between Butch and his girlfriend, or Butch's gaudy encounter with rednecks, replete with S&M and male rape recalling the Gothic of Deliverance. Like the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino indulges in unadulterated villainy. His adolescent delight at showing physical torment and his uncertainty about female characters may derive, as John Powers noted, from the fact that his primary experience comes from old movies; he still doesn't know much about human behavior.

Released by Miramax (which in 1993 was bought by Disney), Pulp Fiction became the most morally subversive movie to come out of the Disney empire. But the public reacted with unprecedented enthusiasm, elevating Tarantino and his picture to a cult level. Of course, it didn't hurt that Miramax planned a brilliant campaign. Sweeping most of the critics awards in 1994, including Oscar nominations, Pulp Fiction became one of the few independent film to cross the magic $100 million mark.

If Pi showed that Aronofsky was full of ideas, his follow-up showed we didn?t know the half of it, with the director?s toy-box of technical tricks providing the film?s big buzz amid a gripping pessimism.

I was tempted to title my summary "Drugs are bad, mm'kay?" because this movie was so sad I was desperate to inject a little humor. Man, what a sad, scary, excellent, grim, disturbing, well-made movie. The more I read about this movie and learned about it, the more fascinating it seemed. I also am one of those people who, when they hear a movie is extremely shocking and disturbing, get a burning urge to see it as fast as I can to see if it shocks me (especially if it's unrated or 18), since I am pretty jaded. So, I eagerly anticipated seeing it.

Unfortunately I read SO many reviews and so much about the making of the movie, that I knew a little too much about the plot going in to see it, so there weren't too many surprises. It concerns four addicts. Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly play a young loving couple, Harry and Marion, who dabble in heroin and plan to make a big sale along with their friend Tyrone (Shawn Wayans) so they can be set for life and Marion can open up her own (legal) business. Unfortunately, their recreational drug use turns into day-to-day addiction, and things start to get ugly. REAL ugly. (Watching someone shoot up directly into a gangrene-infected, pus-filled crater in his arm kind of gave me a whole new definition of the word ugly.) Ellen Burstyn plays Harry's mother Sarah, a lonely widow who wants to lose weight to fit into a red dress so she can appear on her favorite TV show. She starts out by being addicted to TV and candy, but has the bad luck to go to a doctor who-in what I thought was the only unrealistic part of the film- gives her an RX for 'diet pills', that turn out to actually be speed. I say unrealistic because, as anyone who has ever worked in the medical profession knows, very few doctors will NOT just write someone who goes to them for the first time to see them for weight loss a huge prescription for extremely powerful and addictive controlled substances without so much as an examination. In this day and age, if you went to 100 doctors and asked for Dexedrine or a similar narcotic diet pill, I doubt even one would prescribe it. If the movie took place any time before the early 80's, this would have been a little easier to swallow.

Anyway, I found her story thread the most memorable and heartbreaking. Sarah takes pills and starts losing weight, as well as suddenly becoming very energetic and chatty. Like any addictive drug, her happy blue pills stop working after prolonged use so she ups her dose more...and more...and things slowly start getting very weird and scary. In one of the best scenes midway through the film (one of the few that had a tiny bit of comic relief) Harry visits her --the only visit he makes during the movie where he doesn't openly steal her TV to pawn for dope money. He is briefly riding high (in more ways than one) and tells her he bought her a big screen TV-he wanted to do something nice for her and figured out that "TV is her fix". He looks like he's getting a bad feeling when she's babbling happily about how she has a reason to get up in the morning, and then he hears her grinding her teeth, and figures it out. This is the first time in the movie you see real fear in his eyes. Sarah soon starts having very scary strung-out hallucinations-starting out with subtle things like time woozily slowing down and speeding back up, and when her refrigerator suddenly starts moving on its own, the real nightmare begins. An agressive fridge with a mind of its own sounds Monty Python-esque when you first hear about it, but trust me, you won't be laughing by the end of the movie.

One review I read said that the movie not only pulls the rug out from under you, it drags you and the rug down a long flight of stairs into a very dark basement. Another reviewer compared the experience of watching the film to a drug, and that's not too far off the mark either. Whenever a character gets high, there's a slam-bang fast cut montage of the same images over and over; a sigh, a pupil dilating, cells changing color. The scenes where Sarah hallucinates are pretty close to the real thing. The description I probably agree with most came from Darren Aronofsky himself-he compared the film to a jump from a plane without a parachute, and the movie ends three minutes after you hit the ground. The last few minutes that show the gruesome, depressing, worst-case-scenario fates of all 4 characters are just as intense, hard to watch, and nightmarish as I heard they were. I don't think I will ever forget Harry's mother's transformation from a harmless, plump, friendly older woman to someone so frightening looking that people cringe away in fear and revulsion at the sight of her.

My only complaints would be that I wish it were longer, with more time for character development. The film is divided up into 3 segments, Summer (things going fine, having fun getting high) Fall (the beginning of the downhill slide)and Winter (end of the line). I would have liked more scenes of what these people and their lives were like before they were addicts, as well as their relationships with each other. The cast is great- Wayans shows that he has the most range and talent of the Wayans bros- I laughed so hard at him in Don't Be A Menace that I ended up buying it, but here...wow. I would have liked to see more of his character. I never liked Leto much before, but he is excellent and also almost unrecognizable (he said he dropped 1/5 of his weight for the role and boy does it show). Connelly I disliked so much before that I would actively avoid seeing movies she was in, but I was very impressed and convinced that she can act. Burstyn gives the performance of a lifetime- not only convincing, but she was dedicated enough to let the filmmakers make her look like absolute and total hell, which many actresses over 50 would probably not be brave enough to do.

I still am amazed that "Scary Movie" got away with an 18 (WAY more graphic sex than this film-I had to pick my jaw up off the floor at what got by the censors in that one) yet this movie went unrated, reportedly for the flashes of the sex act at the end that, while nasty, was not shown in detail. Well, this wasn't a big budget studio film, so maybe I'm not that amazed, but it bugs me.

Not recommended if you're easily shocked, squeamish, or upset. If you only like movies that take you to a happy place, stay away. Everyone who left the movie theater looked like they had just been hit over the head with a very large board. And we were all people who knew what we were getting into. Recommended for those who want to see a movie that will completely overtake you and involve you emotionally. In addition, this film should be required viewing for everyone in the fashion industry that supported and glorified that whole 'heroin chic' crap. Also a good movie if you are having some problems in your life and want to put them in perspective VERY fast. I give it 9 out of 10 stars. And even though I keep my weight down the old-fashioned way, I'll probably never look at my fridge quite the same way again...

I wasn't sure what to expect from this film, I'd never heard of it but borrowed it from my brother when I was bored one day. The first thing that hit me was the shocking violence carried out by children, I nearly stopped watching it but really wanted to know how it concluded in the hope of there being a happy ending. When the film ended I couldn't stop thinking about it, the fact that it's based on reality just stuck with me; it's so far removed from how children grow up in our country I didn't want to believe that it was real. I knew that there are a lot of children living with gang violence but I suppose I never really thought about it but this film made me feel really fortunate to live in the UK. It made me realise that my problems are trivial. I would definately recommend it as it makes you realise how hard some children have it and in comparison most of us have a very easy life