True Romance

I watched True Romance the other day largely because it was there on Netflix.  A few things I didn't realise until now... Originally the script had a non-linear narrative and an unhappy ending but the director reordered narrative to a more conventional linear one and didn't want to kill off Slater & Arquette's characters so changed the ending.  I think this was a mistake as it kind of makes the film celebrate their amorality in a way that I don't think was intentional.  In Tarantino's films some characters get happy endings and some don't but we're not really encouraged to idolise any of them ... Apart from perhaps Natural Born Killers and that's satire ... Well, obviously the title of the film suggests that we are supposed to root for Slater but it's also a joke ... is selling a suitcase of cocaine to a film producer really that romantic?  Gary Oldman's wigga pimp villain is an interesting phenomenon of it's time.  Samuel L Jackson is in it for all of 5 minutes as are many other Tarantino alumni such as Chris Penn...  But what I didn't see before because I hardly knew who he was then was James Gandolfini's excellent performance as the heavy trying to get the drugs back.  I mean, I saw it but I didn't appreciate it.  The mixture of super polite and psychopathic rages in this film is apparently what won him the role of Tony Soprano.  The violent sequences between him and Arquette are truly scary as being the physically weaker one Arquette's character fights back by using everyday household items as weapons from a toilet cistern lid to a corkscrew.  I wondered if this was inspired by the scissors scene in Dial M for Murder.

The film just about broke even perhaps because many of the characters are unlikable.  For example Saul Rubinek turns in an excellent performance as the kind of oleaginous character he excels at but... he's not kind of the person you'd want to hang out with.  Brad Pitt is amusing as the comic relief.  It's a good ensemble cast but whilst the film comes together it never quite catches alight ... I also started to wonder if the success of Tarantino's revenge fuelled formula had an unintentional political dimension in that it represented a turn towards a darker view of the world an idea that society wasn't working for a lot of people as the economy got worse...  Though True Romance is a fantasy it seems to suggest that it's very hard for ordinary people to make it without living outside the bounds of a society where although it pretends to be fair the cards are stacked against them.  That may be reading too much into it...  

The love of Kung Fu movies portends Kill Bill.  I think it'd be funnier if the central character wasn't played by someone as good looking as Christian Slater.  It's hard to buy into him as a geek sometimes but I appreciate the comic book stuff in a way I didn't before.... after all the whole thing is a comic adventure.  There's some fun satire of the Hollywood entertainment industry too with the ten seconds audition that somehow leads to a role presumably as a by-product of the drugs deal.  William Shatner being an unseen character is amusing too ...