Pulp Fiction has to be one my favorite movies of all-time.  It’s not for everybody, and I certainly don’t recommend it for family viewing, as it has an MPAA rating of “R” (for violence, drug use, and a few other things).  I had rented the VHS tape from Blockbuster Video maybe only a couple of years after its initial release, and was watching on the family VCR in the living room with a friend.  Continuing a trend that had started some years before, my parents, and particularly my dad, had an eerie, uncanny ability to walk into the living room to see what we kids were watching during the most uncomfortable scenes while this could happen.  In the case of Pulp Fiction, it was the pawn shop scene, and that’s all I’ll say about that.  I may still be traumatized by the sound of the rattan chair in the living room creaking with the sound of my dad settling down into it immediately before the start of one of this movie’s most nightmarish sequences.  (Why, Dad, why couldn’t you just stay in your study with your books and nice thoughts and let us have our movie?)

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(first posted 6/14/2015. updated 6/13/2021)     Poor Virgil Exner; poor Dodge. The early sixties were such a rough time for them both; they were so misunderstood. Or they just misunderstood the American buyer. Both, realistically. But the damage from the 1962 models was done, and now the clean-up crew—headed by new Design VP Elwood Engel—had to get Dodge (and the other Chrysler lines) sanitized and looking less alien. By 1964, the job was pretty much finished, although it didn’t exactly result in a very compelling car. But it was bland and safe. Read the rest of this entry »