Saturday, July 25, 2020

True Romance: You're not going to impress anybody with Sleepwalker, Clarence



A local cinema reopened after months of closure with a screening of True Romance, and the theatre was absolutely packed out because you can do that in New Zealand now. I went with my pal Nik, and it was an excellent way to get back into going to the movies.

It also helped that it's a film that I have a visceral reaction to, because it came out when I was 19, and I love True Romance almost as much as my first born. It was fascinating to see what had aged well - the craziest bits - and which hadn't - Clarence's 'a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do' routine really plays badly, but not as badly as Alabma's casual racism towards Persians. (Fun fact, appalled by that racism, Patricia Arquette used a different ethnicity, race, or nationality for each take, because she wanted to be equally offensive to all people.)

But so many scenes and so much of the acting is just immaculate, with Tony Scott at the top of his game, riffing on the Tarantino script with his own well-honed slickness. There's only two things that still really bug me, after watching this film a hundred times, and that's the posters in the expensive framing that are in Dick and Floyd's place, and that fucking comic book.

If Clarence is really trying to tell a woman about how comics are full of "great stories, great characters and beautiful artwork", while telling some half-remembered story about Nick Fury and a magic ring, he probably shouldn't be flicking through a comic that has Deathlok and Sleepwalker in it.

It's 1993, dude. At least show the girl some Sandman or something.

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