News You Can Bruise for 2014 March 3 (entry 0)

Mon Mar 03 2014 09:23 February Film Roundup: Three films this month, none of them great, but all of them worth your time.

• Pulp Fiction (1994): I think I came too late to this one. Like Superfly, it puts style way, way above substance. And twenty years later the style a) is kinda dorky and b) has been copied by tons of other movies. Samuel L. Jackson is always cool, but John Travolta was never cool. (Admittedly, I passed up the chance to see Saturday Night Fever; maybe he was cool in that.)

  What substance there is, is gory fun. I loved Travolta's character in the bathroom convincing himself not to make a move on the boss's woman. He spends a lot of this movie in bathrooms, actually. I liked seeing the plot threads winding in and out of each other.

  Before the screening, several people read essays about how much this movie (specifically, its soundtrack) meant to them. I'm glad it was important to them but I'm not really feeling it.

• The Pajama Game (1957): A beautifully shot musical about labor-management relations. It's really good. Lots of background relationships (including one horribly creepy one), not just the male and female leads. Too bad the songs are terrible! I have never hated the songs so much in a musical that I liked.
• Wu xia (2011): Fun violent emotional martial arts movie that keeps jumping from one subgenre to another. Unlike Tai Chi Zero, this movie consistently uses chi manipulation as a driver of fight scenes, to the point of using acupuncture needles as weapons. Good stuff.