True Romance (film)

-
True Romance (Directed by Tony Scott)/1993


True Romance is my favourite Quentin Tarantino film, which is interesting as he is not the director (Pulp Fiction is my second). He wrote the movie script but it was directed by Tony Scott. I am not anything close to a Tony Scott fan, but for some reason this collaboration managed to produce a unique, dreamy and ultimately classic film. While having some of the signature Tarantino violence, it is not as ubiquitous as his other films and the movie as a whole has a more thoughtful, caring feel to it.

 This film is stacked with stars that were about to break into the limelight and others who had been around for a while. It stars Christian Slater (Clarence) and Patricia Arquette (Alabama). They fall intensely in love after meeting during a late night showing of triple feature martial arts films. We discover that Alabama had been a call girl for 4 days, which leads to Clarence killing her pimp and them ending up with a large supply of someone else’s drugs and on the run; a classic tale of lovers on flight.

 The supporting cast features Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken, and James Gandolfini. Walken only appears for about ten minutes, but it is the best 10 minutes of his career. He plays a Sicilian Mafia boss in what is one of my favorite scenes of all time. He interrogates Clarence’s father Clifford (played by Dennis Hopper). Walken is a sharply dressed, tanned, intelligent and softly spoken psychopath. Clifford sees the writing on the walk and decides to go out with a bang by telling them a story that would be most offensive in a long lasting and durable way. Words cannot do justice to the brilliance of this scene – just watch it!

 This film is mostly described as a dark romantic-comedy. On reflection, I think this movie (and most of Tarantino’s other films) could be best described with the literary term ‘magical realism’. It displays some aspects of human life, but exaggerates them and creates a world that is more intense and colorful than our own. Even while violence and killing is going on, perfect dialogues take place: too perfect to ever take place in reality. Tarantino creates fantasy worlds, and while his worlds can often be excessively violent and sinister, the world of True Romance is lighter and more beautiful than his others.

 The greatest irony and the comedy in the film is the despite the uniqueness and the intensity of the events that went on Alabama maintains a zen "That's the way it goes" attitude; that ultimately human will has nothing to do with determining one's fate and whatever happens was always going to happen.  Yet at the same time the beauty of True Romance is that despite the futility, human beings fight for what they value the most: love. 

Popular posts from this blog

The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (book)

-
Image
History rhymes: it moves in cycles of growth, destruction and then further growth; we see intense conflict followed by loving peace, leading to complacency and the withering of what brought the beauty and success to begin with, only to give birth to something greater. Another common historical rhyme is that each age has a wealthy establishment which attempts to suppress information or people that threatens its control: Emperors, Tsars and tycoons. Any serious student of world history, mythology and ideas knows these things to be true.                                                                                                               The Nag Hammadi Scriptures have captured the imagination of seekers around the world because their story and content exemplify the points raised above. In brief, they represent a type of Christianity that flourished between approximately 70 AD to 400 AD but ceased to exist thereafter. They are called gnostic which generally means a direct knowledg
Read more

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (book)

-
Image
Humanity tends to scapegoat individuals or groups to water the thirst for collective violence or to resolve tensions and angst. The scapegoating mechanism is at the heart of the Western canon: both Socrates and Jesus were put to death to appease the inflamed crowd. According to French American thinker Ren é  Girard, these are extreme, archetypal versions of a phenomena that plays out in lesser forms throughout human life. Girard sits at the crossroads of various traditions but is uniquely brilliant when discussing the role collective violence has in human communities. At the heart of Girard’s work is the notion of mimetic decision-making. By this he means that humans by nature imitate what they see, hear, and read, including in what they desire. The imitators inevitably begin to go after the same things in a world of scarce resources, which increases tensions in the community. Eventually, the tension becomes too great, and the individual or group is selected for scapegoating, whereby t
Read more

Aristotle's Ethics (book)

-
Image
A curious fact about the history of ethical theory is that the ancient Greeks did not have a word for happiness; it made no sense for them to speak about the final goal of human action as individual or general human happiness. The Greeks used the word eudaimonia , which is generally translated as flourishing. To flourish, in the eyes of Aristotle, is to fulfil one’s potential as a human being, or to be excellent at being what one truly is.                                                                                                                                                                                                            For Aristotle, in order to know what it means to flourish, it is essential to have a view of human nature. This means, that to know if an individual has flourished as a human, we must have a notion of what it means to be a human so we can determine what kind of things an exemplar human being would do. Aristotle believed that this answer had to be foun
Read more