It’s vaguely unsettling to me that they’re also all registered “not yet”.
Perhaps the chronology of the thread is shuffled around, just as the movie.
What’s in the case…
Personal Guess: Laura Palmer’s gold-plated pelvic bone.
Boy, am I glad this is in MPSIMS.
I thought Snatch was excellent. Great characters and dialogue, and excellent acting all around. The guy who played Brick Top was just flat out perfect in his portrayal of the sociopathic mid-level crime boss. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen Lock, Stock, etc., - were the characters the same, or just the actors? And I have to say, after Fight Club and Snatch, any opinions I held that Brad Pitt was just trading on his looks have pretty much dissipated.
He was a nobody, who had the opportunity and took it to rat out Brad et al to curry favour with Marcellus, to gain points and move up in the criminal world. The guys didn’t kill him as part of the deal, but they took it very seriously when he didn’t mention the dude with the hand cannon hiding in the bathroom. That’s why Vincent was pointing the gun at his head in the car. He was pissed.
As for the fascination with the movie, a big part of it is the fact that pretty much all the characters are villains or “bad guys”. Normally their role in a movie would be to receive justice from some hero, like James Bond or Dirty Harry, but not in this movie. There is no clear cut right and wrong or good and evil, and the characters twist and turn and fumble and stumble, sort of like a dark vision of real life.
Just because someone likes Pulp Fiction doesn’t mean they’re a Tarentino fan.
Is it just me, or. . .
Am I the only person on the planet who thinks that RESERVOIR DOGS is far and away superior to PULP FICTION? DOGS is a clever film. PULP is just funny bits, a good story in there somewhere, but broken by interminable stretches (does anyone actually like that drivel between Willis and his French girlfriend?) but much of it does not gel for me. I get it, I just don’t like it.
JACKIE BROWN strikes me as being made by someone badly imitating Tarantino’s style (I know it was Tarntino).
Sir Rhosis
For Spritle and others who want to know the origin of the term MacGuffin (or even those who want to know what a MacGuffin is!), I quote the following concise explanation from the St Augustine Record (that’s St Augustine, Florida,for your information) -
The term “MacGuffin,” first used by Alfred Hitchcock in a lecture at Columbia University in 1939, is an element in a film, novel or play that provides a pretext for the plot. It may be anything - secret papers, jewelry, money - that propels the story. The MacGuffin itself has little, if any, intrinsic meaning.
MacGuffins in Hitchcock’s own films include the stolen $40,000 in “Psycho,” the scientific formula in “The 39 Steps” and the smuggled microfilm in “North by Northwest.”
Other cinematic examples include the falcon statue in “The Maltese Falcon” and the mysterious briefcase in “Pulp Fiction.” (Some contend “Rosebud” in “Citizen Kane” is a MacGuffin, but I disagree. Its meaning, revealed at the end of the film, illuminates Kane’s life.)
But why “MacGuffin”? Hitchcock said the term originated in a strange story told by his longtime Hollywood friend, writer Angus MacPhail: Two Scottish men are riding on a train when one man asks the other about the contents of a package on the overhead luggage rack.
“It’s a MacGuffin,” says the first man, “a device for hunting tigers in Scotland.”
“But there are no tigers in Scotland,” replies the second man.
“Well then, it’s not a MacGuffin,” says the first.
As for spelling, most authorities prefer “MacGuffin,” in deference to the “Mac” of “MacPhail,” but “McGuffin” is an acceptable and common alternative.
The whole soul argument falls apart once you learn that Ving Rhames, who played Wallace, had a really bad scar on the back of his neck and the makeup people put on a bandaid to cover it up because it was just beyond help. I’m inclined to believe it is the diamonds because of Buscemi’s role as the waiter. In Resevoir Dogs, he tipped poorly, so maybe this is cruel irony, a common thing in Tarantino movies. The briefcase is probably just another connection to Resevoir Dogs
I agree that Dogs is better in some respects; I’m not sure which movie I like better overall. Dogs is tighter, more suspenseful, and has clearly articulated themes about trust and suspicion. There’s hardly a word spoken in the film that’s superfluous. On the other hand, Pulp Fiction meanders a bit in places - the Butch/Fabienne scene you mention is a good example.
And I also agree with you that Jackie Brown was crap. 
Thinksnow: We hear a shootout shortly after Mr. Pink leaves, but after that there is a lot of shouting. On the DVD, you can clearly hear cops shouting for Pink to get out of the car and put his hands up, but there is no more shooting. I think it’s pretty clear that Mr. Pink survives. But there are no plot connections between the two movies. Tarantino just reused some actors he likes.
I personally like both movies about equally. One of the appeals of Reservoir Dogs for me is the way it shows a world where morality has been turned completely upside down. The thieves have absolutely no compunctions about killing cops because, to them, the cops are the bad guys. The Tim Roth character, who is the only positive developed character in the movie, and most worthy of our respect because of the risks he is taking to do right, is in this world the ultimate evil (an undercover cop) precisely because of his positive attributes. Yet, despite all of the other characters being scum, there are varying degrees of evil here. Danny Aielo is less evil than the rest because he is at least loyal to his friend to the point of being willing to die to protect him. That Tarantino is able to develop truly individual characters is a great credit.
Pulp Fiction actually has some more positive characters. Butch, in particular, isn’t really a bad guy. Pulp Fiction has much of the same theme of there being different levels of bad guys, whereas movies that focus on the good guys tend to have less developed villains.
Jackie Brown probably doesn’t seem as much like a Tarantino movie as the other two because it was an adaptation rather than entirely his own creation. I liked it a lot, not as much as Pulp or Dogs, but as an Elmore Leonard adaptation, it worked for me.
Rather than refer to Pulp Fictionesque movies, I would say that Pulp Fiction is more of a Reservoir Dog type movie. Some other really good ones:
The Killing directed by Stanley Kubrick uses the same time shifts to examine the chaos surrounding a big heist. There is a lot more emphasis on the heist itself, which actually goes well, but disintegrates when it comes time to split up the money.
Ecstasy of the Angels, directed by Koji Wakamatsu is a Japanese “B” movie about the aftermath of a heist gone wrong, caused by an informant in their midst. The thieves are radicals trying to steal nuclear material, and their code names are the days of the week.
Hard Boiled, directed by John Woo, does the “undercover cop who’s in so deep he’s begun to identify with the gangsters” thing about as well as it has ever been done. And he’s just one of three undercover cops. It also has one of those three-way Mexican standoffs that made it’s way into Reservoir Dogs.
City on Fire, directed by Ringo Lam, would probably seem very familiar to Dogs fans, as Reservoir Dogs is about half remake of this Hong Kong film about a deep cover cop, played by Chow Yun Fat. Many of the set pieces in Dogs were inspired by individual scenes in this movie.
Some less charitable than me claim that Tarantino ripped off City on Fire. I think Tarantino borrowed elements of a lot of different movies. When you draw from a large enough pool of sources, that’s just good research. Reservoir Dogs is highly derivative, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also very well made.
Aha!!