The 27th General Hall of Fame

I was actually going to go with this one but instead, I've been playing catch-up in the Twilight Zone HoF.

The dialogue on the boat during the drinking has always been my favorite.

__________________
What I actually said to win MovieGal's heart:
- I might not be a real King of Kinkiness, but I make good pancakes

~Mr Minio

Think I'll rewatch everything except Midnight Cowboy which I seen fairly recently in the Personal Rec III.

I like being wrong, I do. It's self renovating to allow one's self the ability to be flexible and to reverse a held belief. And I believed that Midnight Cowboy would be something I'd loathed to watch. That's why I avoided it until now as it was originally rated X.

But as it turns out Midnight Cowboy was tame as an old farm horse. I've seen more provocative stuff in modern R films. More importantly the film won me over with a heartfelt and original story backed up by two standout actors who bring these colorfully interesting characters to life. So yes, I liked the movie and the friendship between Dustin Hoffman and John Voight.

Most people will mention the story, the characters and the actors who played them as being the reason they like the film. And those are good reasons!

But I have two other reasons to admire this film:

• The cityscapes as seen through a time machine back to 1960. I love history, I love time and I think about time all the time! There's no time machine that will lets us travel back in time but movies allow us to do just that. I'm not talking about a film that's a period piece. With Midnight Cowboy we see actual events, actual people and events as they occurred in time and captured on film. I loved the look at 1969 New York City. My eyes gobbled up the fashions and the store fronts and the way the world looked back then. All that is priceless to me.

• Then there's the cinematic history of Midnight Cowboy. It's not just an Oscar Best Picture winner, it's the one and only X rated film to win an Oscar. It's also the only X rated film to be screened at the White House, and by Richard Nixon no less, wow! It's ground breaking too in it's frank look at New York City's colorful 42nd street circa life in 1969. Midnight Cowboy is probably the first American mainstream film to show gay people so up close and personal. The film captures a microcosmic on events and historical attitudes of a rapidly changing world.

My Dog Skip (Jay Russell, 2000)
Imdb

Date Watched: 01/14/22
Rewatch: No.

Although it's barely more than 90 minutes long, My Dog Skip felt more like 5 hours. It was unrelentingly boring and horribly clichéd. It tried so hard to be heartwarming that it viewed more like a satire of Lassie or Leave It to Beaver or some other nauseatingly wholesome tripe than any genuine attempt to tell a believable story. I never once bought any of these characters as real people. I never connected on any level with any of them and the only performances that made any sort of impression on me were those of Enzo and Moose - the dogs that portrayed Skip.

Maybe if I was a young boy or even a dog person I might've been moved by this, but I'm not either of those things and this movie utterly failed to raise the temperature of this cat-loving bitch's bitter little heart.

__________________

That's going to be excruciating for me to watch

Tony Scott's True Romance is exciting and has flair, but it's the film's many varied characters that shine brightest, with an assortment of personalities jumping to life from the pages of Quentin Tarantino's script and attracting some of the finest acting talent available to sear themselves into the consciousness of those lucky people who saw this in a cinema in 1993. It's a collection of personas that weave themselves neatly into the story of Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) and actually deserve a paragraph each - such is the impression each individual character made on me, and the pleasure I got in watching them.

Christopher Walken plays crime boss Vincenzo Coccotti with style and a towering menace that truly makes him seem like a behemoth and a deadly man to cross. He only has one scene, opposite Clarence's father (played by Dennis Hopper) but that one scene just happens to be a classic - truly memorable, only in a way Tarantino could write - with words biting harder than the punches and cuts do. The entire scene ends with a kind of exclamation point, before Coccotti recedes into a place far removed from that of us mere mortals.

Gary Oldman plays pimp and drug dealer Drexl Spivey, aided with some awesomely effective make-up that transforms him into a scarred and ugly devil. Spivey is white, but thinks that he's black (I know someone who does in real life, which makes this less ridiculous than it seems to others.) His dopey crassness is almost poetic, and his physicality is as menacing as a snarling Pitbull. Oldman really disappears into this violent creature, and some consider this to be one of his greatest acting performances. I concur. I loved watching Oldman as Drexl Spivey, and I'd hate to run into anyone like this in a dark alley. He oozes brutality and sadism, but also the crass idiocy of a man devoted to pain and hedonistic selfishness.

Brad Pitt plays Floyd, one of my favourite characters the first time I saw this film. Floyd is simply a complete stoner whose mind has been dulled by the cone he just smoked a few moments ago (he's always just smoked one, or is smoking one.) Despite displaying displeasure once or twice, he seems to be the most friendly and easy-going guy you could meet - and often inadvertently gives the villains in this film a fairly easy time of it. Pitt plays stoned better than I've ever seen anyone else do - not counting Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson in Easy Rider, who were actually stoned when they filmed their scenes. Floyd is slow and confused, but at peace and happy with his lowly lot in life. He provides a great counterpoint to Walken's crime boss.

James Gandolfini plays Virgil, a hitman and violent thug who does dirty business for Vincenzo Coccotti. Ice cold, he nevertheless opens up to Alabama about how hard his first couple of kills were. He's also filled with an inner rage, and finds beating up a young woman to be nothing more than an amusing diversion. You could easily imagine Virgil torturing people, then going to have a meal with his mother and sister - Gandolfini really gives us some depth despite only really having one scene in this film. Of course, that's one good thing about Tarantino's writing that not many people give him credit for. None of his characters are mindless automations only used to forward a plot. They're all people with a degree of depth.

Dennis Hopper plays Clifford, Clarence's father who is introduced to us singing the Burl Ives song "A Little Bitty Tear" which I thought was clever, really clueing us in instantly that his character was somewhat softer, more put-upon, genuine and sad than any of the other characters in this. Ironically for Hopper, he also plays one of the more 'normal' people in True Romance. Living alone in a trailer, he shows real affection for his son, who he is somewhat alienated from. He still has a funny edge to him, tinged with a tired and weary streak that life seems to have added.

Val Kilmer, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore and Bronson Pinchot all have smaller roles, but are great inclusions that I also enjoyed. Jackson, Penn, Christopher Walken and Brad Pitt have appeared in other Tarantino films.

So that leaves the film itself - a story (you could call it a fantasy) about a young guy named Clarence who loves movies and works in a comic shop who just so happens to have attracted a beautiful young woman to marry - she transforms him into someone with fight and vigour. A confrontation delivers an unexpected surprise : a suitcase full of cocaine which he decides he'll sell for a fortune to live the high life for a while. Unbeknownst to him, there are powerful people intent on recovering the drugs, and are hot on the tail of this young married couple. This takes all parties to Los Angeles, as Clarence tries to sell the cocaine to a hot-shot movie producer as the criminals and then finally the cops both close in. Christian Slater is serviceable as Clarence as is Patricia Arquette as Alabama. It just so happens that they're having the film stolen from them by an incredible supporting cast.

The opening act was taken from an early Tarantino short film, and introduces us to Clarence and Alabama, who has been a call girl for a short time before falling for Clarence - meeting him in a movie theater as a customer - but he doesn't know this initially. Their love story is introduced via a narrated intro from Alabama inspired by Badlands - and there are plenty of film and comic book references slipped in, as we'd come to expect from Q. Nothing feels too derivative, and there's enough vulnerability to these characters that they become instantly likeable. Clarence's sudden decision to kill Alabama's former pimp is slightly out of character and improbable - we almost have to come to a realization that he's slightly out of his mind. Clarence's obsession with Elvis Presley has the King talking to him in fantasy sequences (a shame we don't get to see a little bit more of Val Kilmer in this role) and Elvis sometimes encourages Clarence's view of himself as a man with machismo, perhaps trying to compensate for weaker aspects of his personality.

Once the wheels are turning, True Romance is gripping - violent consequences constantly conspire to bring our couple undone as we explore almost every tier of the criminal underworld - specifically in regards to the drug trade. This roller-coaster ride is aided by a soundtrack that is many-varied and takes us in many differing directions. Hans Zimmer doesn't shy away from the romantic aspect of the film in his score, giving us some xylophone music reminiscent of skipping over meadows and rivers in a plinky, dreamy rhythmic kind of way - it perfectly matches the kind of fantasy this film is. Cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball is a Tony Scott regular, having filmed Top Gun and his experience mainly resides in the action genre - this perhaps explains how expertly scenes with much movement are provided to us in a clear way. The characters move and strike and we can observe in a steady manner.

The ending of the film is where screenwriter and director differed - but aside from what happens to our characters ultimately, I was just slightly let down by how bombastic and frenzied the final act is. I would have been hoping for something a little more clever than the all-out unbelievable violence the film erupts in with little regard to where the story was taking us. Perhaps it was inevitable, but it just seemed like there was a real lack of ideas left when all of the characters and forces at work converged on the one area. That, and the fact that I would have preferred Tarantino's ending (without saying exactly what that was.) But considering just how good the film was every step of the way there, it only diminished the film slightly in my eyes. When I first saw True Romance I was blown away by it - and I still have a great time when I watch clever scenes with great characters that have amazing actors bringing them to life. It flies along with heart, excitement and exuberance in a simple, yet driven way. You can tell that everyone making it loved the art of making films, and knew what audiences really wanted.

__________________

Really enjoyed catching up with True Romance. The scene with Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper I could watch over and over again :


I was already nervous about My Dog Skip - @Miss Vicky has just sent that into outright panic.

True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993)
Ok so I got the one I was dreading the most out of the way and yeah its not good. Tarantino dialogue, especially early Tarantino dialogue, is my kryptonite. He's just so cringe constantly. Any time he starts going off on some random factoid about some pop culture bs or seeing how many times he can cram the n word into a scene its just so embarrassing. And its sooo long too. Why is this two hours?? Why would anyone watch this when Wild at Heart is right there, and I'm not even that crazy about Wild at Heart. I will say that I like Tony Scott's visual approach more than a full-on Tarantino joint (QT would never dare put some actual grit in a film) and that marimba theme goes hard. It does get better as it goes on (marginally) since there's way less time-filler dialogue scenes that make me want to die and the dialogue is much more palatable when its actually relevant to what's going on and not a 15 minute detour about the origins of Sicilians. Yeah this trash.

Fantastic review @PHOENIX74 !

I actually think the only time I ranked my own film first was when my first choice was disqualified haha. I love these HoFs because I almost always find a couple films I enjoy more than what I nominated. I've even had my choice halfway down my ballot a few times. Those are usually my favourite Halls.

It would seem that Siddon accomplished his goal then.

__________________

Attachments

 

If you liked this one, I would highly recommend Pulse from the same director.

A controversial opinion: Pulse is better than anything by that other Kurosawa.

__________________

The film tells you from the start that the characters are from the perspective of a nine year old. You shouldn't think of Willie as a trust worthy narrator because he's not and he makes it clear at the start of the film.

I'm aware that it's from the perspective of a nine year old. Trust me, the movie makes it excrutiatingly obvious that it's from a kid's perspective. That a film succeeds in doing what it's trying to do does not somehow magically make the experience enjoyable.

I've seen Pulse already. Should probably rewatch it though as it's been a really long time.

I thought it had a similar atmosphere to Cure, but connected with its themes a bit more strongly. Really love both.

I wouldn't go that far, as High and Low is one of my all-time favorite films. But Pulse is amazing.

Pulse is a movie i get nothing out of each time but i keep having a urge to try it again so there must be something there lol.