10 Great Movies That Accidentally Made Cinema Worse
1. Pulp Fiction Ushered In An Era Of Obnoxiously "Cool" Crime Films
Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is a stone-cold masterpiece, and one of the most influential films of the entire 1990s.
As brilliantly conceived as it is, though, its distinctive dialogue and inventive narrative structure inspired an entire generation of young screenwriters and filmmakers to produce their own inferior knock-offs.
Much has been written about the "post-Tarantino" period of cinema, where in the decade-or-so following Pulp Fiction's release we were inundated with a deluge of hip, darkly comedic crime movies filled with too-cool-for-school characters, pointlessly non-linear storytelling, and a story that wasn't explicitly about much in the traditional sense.
There were some successes, for sure - Doug Liman's Go and The Boondock Saints are inarguable cult classics - but many more that just cynically attempted to cash in on the triumph of Tarantino's work.
A few examples include Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Reindeer Games, 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, and The Big Hit, each of which attempted to approximate the style and tone of Pulp Fiction without any of the skill at storytelling or character-building.
Like bullet time, the trend eventually died out and is more of a rarity today, but for a time it seemed like every young up-and-coming male filmmaker was trying to produce their own Pulp Fiction, and largely failing.