Hitmen. Heroin. Rapists. Cheeseburgers. Foot massages. Crime bosses. Leather freaks. Pop-tarts. A boxer. A suitcase. A gold watch. A chopper. Restaurants. Robbers. Gangsters. Pot bellies. The Bible. The soundtrack. The vengeance. The violence. The spectacle. The redemption. 

Just what in the hell is going on here? Don't answer. Just go along with Tarantino pointing that shotgun in your face, because to explain the plot would be to miss the point. The point, however directionless and dragging, is to be swept up in its sprawling, pop-culture-filled mythology, which at its heart is really a bold and colorful exercise in cinematic style. The style is very much the substance, and if you huff that substance long enough, you turn into the ultimate film bro ready to read the Bible cover to cover, striking down your enemies with great vengeance and furious anger. 

PULP FICTION, a reference to all those old, cheap, throwaway glossies, is the kind of disposable entertainment that dares you to step out from being a square and enter a world that's sizzling, puzzling, exhilarating and downright dopey. 

Tarantino doesn't care so much for plot mechanics. It’s a film about texture, not plot, palette, not template. He'd rather get us high on *the way* a story can be told, the way a story becomes folklore by stretching conceits as far as they go, rather than spin anything predictable or easy. He essentially made a live-action cartoon, a carnival hall of mirrors, something that goofily goes on forever without going anywhere particular. It’s not that QT invented nonlinear storytelling, suitcase MacGuffins, or multiple shifting points of view (these techniques long predate the guy). It’s that he re-popularized them for a new audience unfamiliar with these narrative modes, while giving older audiences a trip down pastiche lane by rewarding them with a cornucopia of cinematic references. Think of it like a journey over destination kinda thing, where the reason it’s so highly regarded is because the journey is so irresistibly weird, inventive and ruthlessly original.

Cinephiles love it because it summons the ghosts of old movies and makes a perfect collage out of genre history, and to that Frankensteinian effect it's quite an impressive mosaic of pop and garbage culture all thrown into one. I fiercely wrestle with how brilliant and idiotic this film is. It's exciting and exhausting, thrilling and stupefying. A dazzling pastiche that merges high-brow and low-brow culture together, and while I'm nowhere near as religious about it as many of you, I do appreciate the guts it took to make it. 

It's a classic, a bravado game-changer, a film for dorks, and one that I'm sure I'll keep changing my mind about with each watch.

Tarantino Ranked