So for whatever reason, we’ve been watching a lot of late ’90s movies — Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, Fargo, and now this. It’s always fascinating to compare and contrast my current takes with my half-remembered thoughts from when I saw it back then.

This movie is one I hated at the time. Partly that’s because I wanted something where the characters were all cool, like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, and instead got a movie where the characters were mostly all fucked-up losers. Partly it’s because the vibe of the movie is a lot sleazier and ’70s-ier. Partly it’s because it’s a more straightforward movie, without all the dazzling narrative pyrotechnics I by then associated with Tarantino.

But watching it now… it’s good!

Are a lot of the characters fucked-up losers? Yeah, but notably not Pam Grier’s titular character, nor Robert Forster’s. (It seems notable to me that these are characters in their 40s and 50s, which perhaps didn’t resonate so much with a college kid. I actually misremembered this as being a movie where Jackie Brown barely appeared.) And besides, even the fucked-up losers are mostly interesting.

Is the vibe sleazier and ’70s-ier? Yeah, especially on the latter, to the point where I was surprised to discover it’s not a period movie, and is actually set in the approximate 1990s. (Which okay, it’s a period movie now, but you know what I mean.) Re the sleaziness, a funny thing with changing social norms is that the scenes where people smoke weed and get high now seem totally banal (as opposed to the shocking drug use they were back then), but the scenes where people smoke cigarettes indoors are mind-blowingly appalling. But anyway, the atmosphere worked for me now, in a way it didn’t back then.

And is it straightforward and un-Tarantino? Welllllll… kinda? It does do some interesting structural stuff near the end, but yeah, mostly it’s a straightforward narrative without any weird chronology tricks. But the dialogue and the character beats and the style of it are so aggressively Tarantino-esque that it seems hard to imagine I thought it missing his characteristic style.

So yeah, chalk this one up as another case where my youthful take was just wrong. That said, this still isn’t my favorite Tarantino, which would be Kill Bill (pending a modern rewatch; not like I trust my judgment on that either) or Pulp Fiction. But it’s solidly in the upper half of his repertoire, and that’s a solid repertoire.