The year was 1994. I was a sophomore at Regis.
I had recently been introduced to the Mecca that was the local all-girls high schools. When you go to an all-guys high school, getting an "in" to your sister school was like finding the Holy Grail.
So there I was, with some newly minted friends from Marymount and the older Regis guys they hung out with, and they couldn't wait to see Pulp Fiction. I was largely unaware of what I was going to see. In fact, I remember being largely unaware of a lot of cool pop cultural stuff at the time, aside from what I heard on Z100 or from my Brooklyn friends. I remember in freshmen year being told who the Ramones were by this girl Veronica I met at a Regis dance. The Ramones! What a sheltered life.
Anyway, Pulp Fiction was, by far, the coolest thing I'd ever seen on the screen. It was edgy, creative, and totally unlike anything else. I must have easily seen it ten times in the movie theater... also because it played FOREVER. You could always find it playing somewhere in the city.
Pulp Fiction marked the resurrection of John Travolta's career as well. He'd just come off the second sequal of "Look Who's Talking"... (yes, they made THREE of those movies) and hadn't done much since... well, since the early 80's.
Another first.... it was also the first time was saw all this mix and matching with storylines that were out of order and tied back into each other. When I saw that the diner scene tied back into itself, I was really wowed.
All the characters... well, they're all just so fantastic and how many lines from this movie just got repeated over and over again? "Check out the big brain on ______." From Pumpkin and Honeybunny to Jules to the Wolf, the casting is kind of like watching art.
And its got a Christopher Walken monologue... This scene is just hilarious. "And I hid the watch..."
There isn't one thing I would have done differently with this movie. I love every character. Every scene is art. Every line is so carefully constructed. It was part of growing up for me. I owned the soundtrack, too... great soundtrack. Everyone my age had it.
I think of this list like the Hall of Fame, but some of the movies are like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. They're just on another level that would be a list of like 5 or 10 or something and not make for much interesting comparison. Pulp Fiction is on that list, Shawshank, and few others. Truly greay.