Love Conquers All | True Romance (1993)

Getting blown on the road when the cops show up.

Dir. Tony Scott

A quintessential 90s film, True Romance offers a gritty alternative to the wholesome grunginess of contemporaneous movies like Reality Bites (1994) and Singles (1992).

Written by Quentin Tarantino, True Romance is a launchpad for the legendary body of work that will follow his seminal directorial stint with Reservoir Dogs (1992), released the year prior. Though he’s not in the director’s chair in this instance, Tarantino literally writes himself into the character of protagonist Clarence Worley (Christian Slater), with his professed love for comic books, Sonny Chiba kung-fu flicks, and a geekiness that belies a violent predisposition.

Tony Scott delivers a visually attractive film, the exterior sequences of snow-kissed Detroit being a prime example of how the utterly drab is rendered somehow compelling. As part of his star-filled cast, Brad Pitt—who plays the ultimate, couch-bound stoner, Floyd—is enjoying a meteoric rise to stardom, in between his roles in A River Runs Through It (1992) and Interview with the Vampire (1994).

Not to be outdone, Hollywood veterans Dennis Hopper (as cop-dad Clifford Worley) and Christopher Walken (as mobster Vincenzo Coccotti) flex serious acting chops. Hopper’s Sicilian monologue, while skirting the line of what’s considered offensive, is a classic moment in indie film.

Reformed, one-time prostitute, Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) shines as half of the anti-romantic couple that is the focus of Tarantino’s version of a (blood-drenched) love story. As Alabama’s new love, Worley takes it upon himself to liberate her from her pimp, the dreadlocked drug-dealer Drexl Spivey (Gary Oldman), a cut-throat wigger of entertainingly psychotic proportions.

True to form, Samuel L. Jackson enjoys another all-too-brief cameo. As two-bit criminal Big Don, he gets shot and killed in the same scene he first appears in.

Playing the gold-suit-wearing ghost of Elvis, Val Kilmer turns in a creepy performance, appearing to Worley in mirrors and egging him on to violence. The motif continues with Worley adopting gold Elvis shades and later naming his first-born after the iconic rock and roller.

It’s part and parcel of the snide humor that abounds, in particular surrounding the Hollywood players who Worley’s friend, Dick Ritchie (Michael Rapaport), as an actor trying to make it in L.A., is keen to impress.

The result is the ultimate coke deal gone bad. The buyer, Lee Donowitz (Saul Rubinek), is a ludicrously over-the-top Hollywood producer, but it’s his assistant Elliot Blitzer (Bronson Pinchot) who gets busted. After getting pulled over for swerving—due to getting a blowjob while driving—Blitzer gets in a petty fight with his girlfriend, who, refusing to hide his cocaine from the cops, sends the bag of uncut blow powdering indelibly across his face.

Nothing Unites Like Revenge and Honor | The Magnificent Seven (2016)

The mighty, maladjusted, and malcontent as unlikely bedfellows.

Dir. Antoine Fuqua

A remake of a remake, The Magnificent Seven is the stuff of cinema legend. The 1960 version directed by John Sturges and starring Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen is based on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, a classic Japanese film in which poor farmers hire rogue killers to fight a gang of bandits plaguing their village at harvest time. For the Wild West version of events, the trope is reimagined for the dusty New Mexico plains where the townsfolk of Rose Creek find themselves fighting for their land rights against an unscrupulous mining concern headed by playground bully, Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard).

The Magnificent Seven is engaging from the start, the impassioned debate among the Rose Creek residents in the church just the first of many dominos that are sent tipping over, setting in motion this revenge-based action drama. Anyone familiar with Kurosawa’s oeuvre knows the fields will be strewn with the bodies of the dead.

As protagonist Sam Chisolm, Denzel Washington reminds the world of the mastery of his craft in this rarified role that dignifies his position as a black man in a white man’s world, a tricky proposition for a film set in the Wild West. It’s a performance that stands in stark contrast to Samuel L. Jackson’s lamentable role in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. As Chisolm, Washington renders an iconic enactment of the cowboy ideal, a fighter for justice and a defender of the downtrodden, like a modern day John Wayne but more deadly on the trigger.

The Magnificent Seven bears a pronounced steampunk vibe with its preoccupation with the explosive technologies of guns and dynamite, kicking things up a notch with a Gatling machine gun that delivers three cartridges of havoc. In terms of visual flair, Fucqua makes a obvious nod to the spaghetti western, with sumptuous visuals that highlight the rugged beauty of the terrain. The bright exteriors are never blown out, the shadowy interiors are never murky, and Denzel’s visage is never unflattering—all a testament to the extent to which cinematographer Mauro Fiore lights every scene with care.

           

The present day team of magnificence has been re-scripted to include a slew of minorities such as Comanche warrior Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), Chinese knife expert Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee) and Mexican outlaw Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). Completing the antiheroic bundle are ex-Civil War sharpshooter Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), haunted by the ghosts of dementia and PTSD, and the bearish Jack Horn (Vincent D’Onofrio), quietly out of his mind with high-pitched mumblings that often quote scripture each time he heads out to battle.

Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt) is an inherently likeable rapscallion. While he’s good at heart, he’s not all the way kosher. Emma Cullen (Haley Bennet) presents a strong female presence in a film where most of the women are either mothers or whores hanging out in the background. No shrinking violet, she’s not only the instigator of the plot to hire killers to avenge her husband’s death at the hands of Bogue, she’s first in line to take up arms to defend the town’s land rights.   

For those who wish to wax nostalgic, a tribute is paid to the 1960 film during the closing credits when the classic score by Walter Bernstein plays.