Bad/Awesome Flixxx Review: True Romance (1993)

"No thanks? What does that mean? Means you ate before you came down here? All full. Is that it? Naw, I don't think so. I think you're too scared to be eatin'. Now, see we're sittin' down here, ready to negotiate, and you've already given up your shit. I'm still a mystery to you. But I know exactly where your white ass is comin' from. See, if I asked you if you wanted some dinner and you grabbed an egg roll and started to chow down, I'd say to myself, "This motherfucker's carryin' on like he ain't got a care in the world. Who know? Maybe he don't. Maybe this fool's such a bad motherfucker, he don't got to worry about nothin', he just sit down, eat my Chinese, watch my TV." See? You ain't even sat down yet. On that TV there, since you been in the room, is a woman with her breasteses hangin' out, and you ain't even bothered to look. You just been clockin' me. Now I know I'm pretty, but I ain't as pretty as a couple of titties." - Drexl

"In Jailhouse Rock he was everything rockabilly's about. I mean, he is rockabilly. Mean, surly, nasty, rude. In that movie he couldn't give a fuck about nothing except rockin' and rollin', living fast, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse." - Clarence

"Sicilians are great liars. The best in the world. I'm Sicilian. My father was the world heavy-weight champion of Sicilian liars. From growing up with him I learned the pantomime. There are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give himself away. A guys got seventeen pantomimes. A woman's got twenty, but a guy's got seventeen... but, if you know them, like you know your own face, they beat lie detectors all to hell." - Coccotti

This is a badass fucking flick. I remember hearing about it when i came out. My older buddies had seen it, they talked about Tarantino's writing, we all went to see PULP FICTION, but I never went back to see this one. The cast alone is worth giving it a shot no matter who wrote and directed it. But... written by Quentin Tarantino, directed by Tony Scott, and starring Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken, Gary Oldman, Michael Rapaport, Val Kilmer, Bronson Pinchot, Chris Penn, Samuel L. Jackson and James Gandolfini, you have to see TRUE ROMANCE!!!

SPOILER WARNING!!!! YOU SHOULD JUST WATCH THIS ONE, TELLIN' YA NOW, BUT IF YOU DON'T CARE, GO AHEAD & READ ON... We meet our protagonist in a diner on his birthday trying to pick up a chick by discussing his favorite person: Elvis. He eventually asks her to watch a triple feature of Sonny Chiba STREET FIGHTER flicks and she turns him down. We're in Detroit, and the narrator is a lady named Alabama. She wanders into the theater where "Clarence" is watching the flicks. She spills popcorn on him and they go eat some pie after the movies. Later he shows her the comic shop he works in and then they go fuck. Afterwards he wakes up to her crying outside his window and she confesses that she's a call girl on her fourth day at work and is upset that she really likes him and doesn't really want to be fucking for a living. They go get married and Clarence decides to pay her pimp a visit and get her things. He often speaks to Elvis when he's pissing. Elvis tells him to kill her pimp. We see a scene where her pimp Drexl (Oldman) doublecrosses some drug dealers and steals a suitcase full of cocaine. 
 

Clarence goes & confronts Drexl (my fav character) and ends up killing him and grabbing what he thinks is Alabama's things. When he realizes its the coke, he goes and asks his father (Hopper) for help. His pop tells him the cops probably don't care, they think it was gang related. Clarence decides to go see his old friend in LA to unload the coke for $200,000 and then head to Mexico. Christopher Walken and some mob goons come to see Clarence's dad & tell him to give them up. He never does but has a very memorable scene about an eggplant and a cantaloupe. Unluckily for Clarence he left the address in Cali on the fridge. 
 

Clarence & Alabama arrive at his old buddy Dick Ritchie's house. An aspiring actor with a stoner crashing on his couch, they expect that Ritchie will know someone to sell the coke to. Ritchie freaks but admits he does know someone even though its a long shot. They contact Elliot who is the righthand man for a director named Donowitz. Elliot sets up a meeting and then gets busted with a sample of the blow. The cops want to Elliot to help them bust whoever is involved in what looks to be a huge deal going down. Elliot agrees to dodge jail time. Meanwhile Walken sends goons to get the coke and kill anyone who gets in the way. Gandolfini finds Alabama alone in their hotel room after getting info from Pitt the stoner. 
 

Gandolfini beats the shit out of Alabama and she only barely gets the jump on him killing him right before Clarence shows back up. He helps her cover her cuts and bruises and they go to do the deal. Clarence almost makes Elliot give up the wire by putting a gun to his head in the elevator. Cops and mob goons all converge on the hotel room where the deal is going down. Donowitz is so taken with the compliments by Clarence that he is full on ready to buy the coke. The pigs and the mob both bust into the room at the same time. We are at a standstill until Donowitz figures out that Elliot has betrayed him. He throws coffee in his face and then gets shot and then all hell breaks loose. I'll spare you the very ending if you haven't seen it, this one is important. Make it happen. Only a Sonny Chiba triple feature sounds better. 

Thursday, December 27, 2012