The last couple of weeks, I’d been thinking about a film I saw back in 2000, Go. “Thinking about” turned into “seeking out”, and it turns out that it’s available on Hulu network right now, which I can stream to my TV through my XBox 360. So, I saw it again tonight, and for the second time, I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Go was made in 1999 and staring a cast of actors whose work I’ve really come to enjoy: Sarah Polley, Taye Diggs, Jay Mohr, William Fichtner, Timothy Ollyphant, with Scott Wolf and Katie Holmes rounding out the cast. The narrative is set over the course of one night and the following morning in both Los Angeles and Las Vegas, unfolding the events after an amateur drug deal in loosely connected though largely unrelated story threads that all come back together in unexpected ways at the end. It’s black comedy hyper-fiction told with sincere but hilarious dialogue, slick cinematography, and snappy editing. …All supported by a very coming combination of electronica score and Techno/Ambient standards (like Massive Attack’s “Angel” and Air’s “Talisman”).
Roger Ebert states that the narrative “takes place entirely in Tarantino-land,” followed up with, “I’m not saying ‘Go’ couldn’t have been made without the example of Pulp Fiction, but it can’t be seen without thinking of it.” James Berardinelli cites “an over-reliance on Tarantino”.
While I definitely see the connections, I felt the film was certainly fresh enough on its own that it doesn’t have to be an homage to Tarantino. It is its own story, and while the story-telling may be similar, at some point in time, we must recognise that multi-faceted portraits of the underbelly of society with unlikely anti-heroes, witty dialogue, and quirky, unexpected but perfect twists is a genre all on its own: Go; Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels; Snatch; Suicide Kings; and numerous other films since Pulp Fiction litter the cinematic landscape, and I don’t think we need to all credit one man, visionary though he may be. I call it the “dark caper tragicomedy”.
I suppose that in 1999, the 1994 Pulp Fiction was too fresh to recognise that a legitimate sub-genre had been born and that it’s perfectly fine to artfully produce a film in that genre without “breaking new ground”.
Berardinelli does make a good point about the pacing of the third act being a little off, and the humour is of a completely different nature: it’s that awkward-silence humour like you experience nowadays on The Office.
In the end, though, I was quite entertained by the entire oeuvre, and what strikes me today, beyond the unusual mixture of grit and polish, was the look into the late ’90s rave scene. I haven’t been to a rave since about the same time-frame in which the film is set (1999), and it was… well… filmed exactly as I remember it.
I just saw the film, 