John Travolta's Lead Performance Provides Both the Best and Weakest Parts of Saturday Night Fever

Given how pop culture has immortalized Saturday Night Fever as basically a movie where John Travolta dances to a collection of Bee Gees tunes, it's a surprise to watch the actual film for the first time and discover that this is a much darker than expected feature. Over the course of the runtime, Saturday Night Fever reveals its true colors as a tragic story about a nineteen-year-old trying to break out into his own identity but struggling to do so with his toxic group of friends and a troubled home life. I wasn't fully captivated by this John Badham directorial effort but I do appreciate how Saturday Night Fever tries to be a more introspective motion picture than its general reputation would indicate.

Kill Bill Slays Thanks To Thoughtfully Realized Characters And Uma Thurman's Formidable Lead Performance

In retrospect, it's nuts that Quentin Tarantino had a whopping six years separating the release of his third film, Jackie Brown, and his fourth film, Kill Bill (which was split into two individual movies upon its initial release). In every part of his career, Tarantino has only taken three or four years maximum in between projects, but then again, he hasn't really done anything as large in scale as the expansive Kill Bill saga in the rest of his filmography, perhaps that extensive break between films was necessary for him to properly prepare for a motion picture of this magnitude. Whether that's true or not, that extensive wait was totally worth it as Kill Bill is a terrific feature that gathers up depth as it goes along like a snowball picking up snow as it travels down a snow-covered mountainside.

Fun, Style And Boldness, Not To Mention Some Great Acting..Ya Get It All In Pulp Fiction

Watching Pulp Fiction for the first time was a fascinating experience on multiple levels but I was particularly astounded to watch it and discover just how many moments from assorted pieces of pop culture I'd consumed over the years were, in fact, direct references to this movie. Little jokes in Space Jam and the Simpsons episode 22 Short Films About Springfield immediately come to my mind as examples of this while it's obvious that the entire indie movie scene of the second half of the 1990's was heavily influenced by the way Pulp Fiction wedged its way into the zeitgeist. Quentin Tarantino's 1994 masterpiece became a pop culture touchstone practically overnight, but 23 years later, it's amazing to watch the movie removed from its initial hype and discover that there very much is a great movie nestled in here.