About the pulp fiction movie

You ever try making a "suicide" at a fountain beverage dispenser? You put your cup or glass under the nozzles, take a little bit of everything (e.g., root beer, sprite, coke, orange) and hope the best, but it usually results in the worst.

Some implausible concoctions work. Take

½ fluid ounce vodka,
½ fluid ounce rum,
½ fluid ounce gin,
½ fluid ounce tequila,
½ fluid ounce triple sec,
1 fluid ounce sweet and sour mix,
1 fluid ounce cola or more,
and 1 lemon slice

and you've got yourself a Long Island Iced Tea, a classic cocktail. That's Pulp Fiction. It's all the oddball parts working in harmony. That's why is it is so hard to copy this copy. Quentin made a perfect cocktail in Pulp Fiction. His imitators decided that the formula was simple; "be quirky," "get an ensemble cast," "add violence," and "mix vigorously." Hack mixologists need to stick to pouring margaritas and beers. It ain't that easy.

This type of cinema wasn't invented in 1996.

You seem to be hung up on creation, invention, originality. What makes Pulp Fiction great is NOT that it is doing anything, in particular, that is new. Pulp Fiction finds its excellence, and arguably its singularity, in the way that it brings those elements together. What it does is ambitious (e.g., non-linear story-telling among partially intersecting plots), but what counts is that it does it well.

Quentin is not original. He stole the plot for Reservoir Dogs and lied about it. Pulp Fiction pulls from pulp fictions. Jackie Brown is an adaptation Elmore Leonard. Quentin's revenge plots certainly don't bring anything new to the table. Quentin's talent is that of a pastiche artist who takes chunks, fragment, from artists and artworks, and rearranges them.

The people who copied Quentin after Pulp Fiction weren't trying to do anything new either. They just didn't have the talent to do it well.

Coincidentally I watched Pulp Fiction last night again. In 4K. I love it. It's amazing. I just think that it's a tad ironic when people say that film-makers try to copy QT when that's what QT has done his entire career. To state that, also needs context.

There are plenty of other hyperlink films that do what Pulp Fiction does in terms of non linearity. And they also do it well.

Well, it's not just that, but also perhaps the possible inference that this means he is somehow "original." I would never praise Quentin for inventing anything. He's not original (if he is, he is original in his unoriginality), but Pulp Fiction is singular, I think and QT definitely has his own stamp. He's in the discussion for a reason, even if his films so often seem as if they're made by a wildly gifted but goofy edge-lord kid.

Sure. I am a particular fan of Pulp Fiction because it all fits together so well. Non-linearity for the sake of non-linearity is a hollow art school exercise. Pulp Fiction, however, is a juicy organic whole. It all works. Likewise, Memento is one of my faves where the non-linearity really serves the story. Again, neither did it first, but both did it well. There are some films that just click very strongly (e.g., ALIENS, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Tombstone) even if they're not "epic" or "transcendent". For me, Pulp Fiction is in this category.

You can recognize that Tarantino copied from other people, while simultaneously recognizing that other people copied from Tarantino. These statements aren't mutually exclusive. Neither Tarantino nor the people who copied from him are original.

I think this says it better than my garbled attempt!