True Romance
I really hope Quentin Tarantino lets some more of his scripts go out to other directors in the future, because the few examples we have of other directors dealing with his work, including this one, are really quite interesting. I remember reading an interview with Tarantino where somebody had asked him something along the lines of, “When are you gonna do a romance movie?” and he was like, “I did romance, I did True Romance!” It seems with each subsequent Tarantino movie, you can go back to this one and it seems more and more non-Tarantino-esque. Everything about this movie, including the remaining dialogue from his original script, seems to be striving for cuteness. From the Badlands like opening with Hans Zimmer’s imitation of the music and Patricia Arquette’s Southern drawl voiceover, to the repetition of the theme over dreamy close-ups of the characters as they have heartfelt revelations… even in the final shoot-out, feathers rain down on the blood… it all comes to a head I guess with the napkin on which Alabama (Arquette) scrawls “You’re so Cool!” It’s an extremely romantic movie in its own right, never mind “for a Tarantino movie…” This really is genuinely, so Cool!
April 19th, 2007 at 2:56 am
[...] There’s hints early on at the brilliant potential for this movie to address love that transcends even time itself – and that’s the only reason, ultimately, it takes a slight downturn for me when Denzel goes back in time. It kind of breaks that whole potential. Don’t get me wrong, this moment is done as brilliantly as the rest, I completely accepted it and it doesn’t come over as too bizarre a turn, not even the way some people (not me) find The Prestige stuff does … but for me, the idea of someone falling in love, even just getting close, getting a connection to a person, without ever having met them, that deserves more and those shots where it looks like the girl “feels” Denzel watching her early on are just too tantalising for the rest of the movie to live up to. And, I know, I know, it’s not that kind of movie, it’s “just” a thriller, but if you’ve seen Man on Fire, or even True Romance you’ll know Tony Scott is capable of making a thriller so much more than a thriller, and it could’ve been both. The ending pulls this feeling back big time, I for one did not see it coming at all and when I realised what was going to happen, I primed myself for tears and they came on cue. [...]