The Talkies /Sweat Dreams

...We get into the spirit of the occasion and hope that Vincent and Jules can get cleaned up (with the help of Harvey Keitel) before the wife gets home...

...Vincent tries to talk him out of his epiphany and takes it all as rather a joke, but Jules is having none of this...

...But in the filmmakers' view the villain of the piece is the basketball coach at St...

...Both cherished the same hope of hoop glory and, unable to let go of it, are now trying to live it through their son and brother, respectively...

...Unfortunately, he is right...

...It took a radical change in sensibility for him to receive—alas, too late—the recognition that has come to him with Tim Burton's film, Ed Wood, and the cult status it betokens...

...Essentially, Tim Burton's answer is the same as the traditional and sentimental one: that such things never happen and such people do not exist...

...But here the guy hasn't got it...

...He curses their indolence, their sloppiness, their lack of discipline...

...Joseph's ought to have taught a lesson to the filmmakers instead of their trying to teach it one (the school has recently sued them for its treatment here...

...To be sure, it moves us mostly to laughter...

...he is only really interested in what they can do for his basketball program...

...Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when he was only 25, and I'm already 30...

...a suburbanite whom the same two killers ask for help when they unexpectedly find themselves riding in a car drenched in blood can only worry about what his wife will say when shegets home from work...

...Sweat Dreams by James Bowman F rom those who disagree with me about the merits of the popular movies I so regularly disparage, the question I hear most often is this: What's so bad about sentimentality...

...Vincent and Jules (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson), two hit men on the way to wipe out five human lives, discuss whether or not giving a foot massage is a sexual act...

...In fact, evil is not so much banal- as charming...

...We know he is going to cling to the dream for James Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement dear life, just as his father and William's brother have done...

...intend that we should take the experiences of these two boys as what one critic calls "emblematic" of the deficiencies of educational and other social institutions which are thought to have failed them...

...As they draw their guns and stand up to command everyone to lie down, the film cuts away to its first story...

...The doubt that must be shrugged off in the classic situation is here the simple truth...

...James et al...

...Tarantino has managed to put together a jokey, allusive, ironic, self-referential movie that is much more about other movies than it is about real life, and yet still to give it the power to move...

...In between, we witness a wonderful phantasmagoria of memorable images, witty dialogue, and excellent jokes...

...For Arthur's father, this "dream" is harder than crack cocaine to get out of his system...

...Jules has experienced "what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity" when he and Vincent have survived—"miraculously," as he insists—certain death at the hands of one of their victims, whom they are able to kill instead...

...And these are a rare pair who might actually have something close to a realistic shot at the pros...

...I would give the guy an academy award...

...The filmmakers juxtapose thisscandalous desideratum of the basketball winner with Arthur's being mugged at gunpoint and his mom's being thankful that he has made it alive to the age of 18, as if dedication and desire to win were too dangerous and likely to get them killed...

...His name is Gene Pingatore, and he is obsessed with basketball, which is what has made him a winner over the years...

...But it is rare that I am able to point to a specific example of that destructive effect at work...

...As Wood is lying sleepless beside his girlfriend, Dolores (Sarah Jessica Parker), in the silent watches of the night, he says to her: "What if I'm wrong...

...So, too, we are drawn in to the ongoing conversation between them, which ranges from the relative merits of different fast-food chains to what the French call a quarter-pounder to the foot massage to whether a dog is a filthier animal than a pig...

...T he Movie of the Month, Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino, represents the high-water mark, artistically speaking, of postmodernism in America so far...

...Burton's film is worth seeing for the splendid performances of Johnny Depp as Wood and Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi...

...We are invited to hate the place for trying to collect the debt owed it by Arthur's family or for putting too much emphasis on winning and fostering what Coach Pingatore calls "the killer temperament...

...Such qualities are much less important back home—where both families split up, where William is twice a father before he is out of high school and Arthur thinks that, if he misses out on NBA stardom, "I'll probably go into [being a] comedian or architecture or something like that," but where, at least, "dreams" are nourished...

...William's brother went to college but is having a hard time holding down a job...

...This is a wonderful chance to take a cliché and give it a disturbing new life...

...What if I just haven't got it...

...Nevertheless, the film as a whole is a bit of a disappointment...

...In fact, they are media dreams...

...The documentary Hoop Dreams by Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert is such an example, though the filmmakers have not intended it as one...

...Indeed, it is debatable whether Wood himself could have foreseen that his proclamation in 1980 by The Golden Turkey Awards as "the worst director of all time" was to the hip, the ironic, the postmodern temperament, tantamount to a certification of his greatness...

...He has no use for their moony, childish "dreams" in the absence of total commitment...

...The dreamers of Pulp Fiction, like Arthur Agee and William Gates, like Ed Wood, have media dreams, dreams concocted out of the deceiving images of the popular culture...

...He died in 1978, at the age of only 54, on the very eve of the postmodern revolution that has conferred upon him posthumously something of the greatness he sought...

...Genuine grace does have that touch of the absurd about it, as Tertullian first noticed 1800 years ago...

...The coach may not be a caring guy in the sentimentalist's sense, but he knows what neither William nor Arthur nor those who have put their lives on film know—namely, what it takes to turn dreams into reality...

...In the midst of all this triviality and gossip and bickering, the conversation becomes theological in nature...

...It misses some opportunities that arise right at the beginning...

...His father is now a recovering drug addict and convicted burglar...

...But it will come back to Pumpkin and Honey Bunny at this same moment two-and-a-half hours later in the surprising conclusion...

...The relationship between the aged, washed up, morphine-addicted Lugosi and the young, ambitious, and clueless director is beautifully and movingly portrayed...

...This being the case, it is rather a cop-out to go with the postmodern solution that he did, after all, have a kind of talent—a talent for badness...

...Joseph High School, the private Catholic school and basketball powerhouse in suburban Chicago that recruits both boys...

...Vincent thinks it was just one of those strange things that sometimes happen, but Jules sees it as a direct message from God Almighty to give up their wicked way of life...

...I can't go back to sleep...

...E d Wood had a dream too: to be a great filmmaker like Orson Welles...

...is stunning, in a way Depp has the harder job to do...

...At the climax, there is a wonderfully comic scene in which Jules negotiates his salvation with Pumpkin and Honey Bunny at gun point...

...His great fault is meant to be that he doesn't care about Arthur and William as people very much...

...Ain't nobody going to take my dream away from me," says Arthur in response to his mother's mild suggestion that it might be wise not to lodge all his hopes of life in the expectation of an NBA career...

...Though Landau's acting (like his makeup...

...But what is truly emblematic about Arthur and William is their failure to understand what success requires of them—a failure which they unfortunately share, along with their dreams of stardom, with a great many kids from the ghetto culture...

...We have heard such words many times before, and every time the dynamics of the drama have depended on our understanding that the speaker does have it, that he only has to persevere and to believe in himself and eventually he will achieve the success he dreams of...

...Its three stories—"Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife," "The Gold Watch," and "The Bonnie Situation"—each live up to their collective billing as pulp fiction, for each is a shocker, a lurid popular story (though of a rather superior kind) set in a sort of gangland demi-monde that is half Los Angeles and half Movieland but looks surprisingly real—perhaps because the real Los Angeles is half Movieland...

...It starts with a kind of prologue set in a coffee shop or restaurant in which a young couple, calling each other Pumpkin and Honey Bunny (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer), decide that robbing restaurants is preferable to robbing banks and why don't they just start here...

...God got involved," he says...

...Like John Keats, he was unappreciated in his lifetime...

...It is sentimentality that has taught them that they are entitled to the most wildly fanciful of ambitions, which then become the excuse for a lifetime of failure and self-deceit...

...I reply that it is a species of falsehood, which corrodes and ultimately destroys the human spirit...

...This solution is much too easy...

...This pseudo-talent remained entirely unrecognized until camp was transmuted into postmodernism and took over the moviegoing sensibility of the whole country...

...But at least Tarantino doesn't allow his dreamers to take the media too seriously...

...But Tarantino has arranged the three stories in a self-consciously artful way—out of chronological sequence and with overlapping characters—so as to produce satisfying character development and a sense of a rounded whole that makes the film into something more than pulp fiction...

...The film tells the story of two high-school basketball players, Arthur Agee and William Gates, from inner-city Chicago who dream of careers in the NBA...

...unlike John Keats, he was a talentless dolt...

...Tarantino allows both Vincent's levity and Jules's seriousness to carry equal weight, as they soon find themselves at the point of a gun wielded by Honey Bunny...

...I would give both guys an academy award...

...The question of what becomes of the talentless, of those who believe in themselves mistakenly, of those whose self-esteem is based on a lie, of those whose perseverance only makes them more ridiculous, is lost and forgotten...

...Nearly all of them are what we might call Hannah Arendt jokes, focusing on the banality of evil or the juxtaposition, as in the case of Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, of sentimental sweetness and sickening violence...

...It is a nicely postmodern touch that Tarantino takes as the moral of his story the lesson learned by a rather absurd religious crank...

...CI The American Spectator December 1994 75...

...He goes off to grace, we must suppose, as Vincent departs to what we already know from the second story—featuring Bruce Willis as a boxer who double-crosses the crime boss who has fixed his fight—will be a less happy fate...

...but that is also a way to cut the incipient sentimentality...

...He has to make Wood both believable as a fool and sympathetic as a man so completely out of touch that he doesn't know how bad he is, a man whose sunny optimism sur74 The American Spectator December 1994 vives, seemingly effortlessly, the most crushing defeats, and who—as if that were not enough—is a transvestite with a thing for angora sweaters...