Val Kilmer Movie March Presents: True Romance

True Romance (1993)

Director: Tony Scott
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Genre: Crime/Drama/Romance/Thriller

The Story

It is Calrence's (Christian Slater) birthday. His boss decides to get him a call girl for his birthday without his knowledge, but the call girl Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) ends up falling for Clarence almost immediately. Clarence decides he needs to get Alabama's stuff from her pimp, but when he goes to get it he causes a stir and ends up with dead bodies and a suitcase full of cocaine. Now he has to figure out what to do about the cocaine and the people looking for him and the cocaine. Clarence decides to try and sell the cocaine to a Hollywood producer for a great deal just so he can get out fast. The deal is more difficult for Clarence to pull off than he had originally imagined.


Everything Else

The directing of True Romance was unique in a lot of ways, but did not really take flight the same way that Top Gun did. Although the directing was solid as most Tony Scott films are, it lacked the intensity of other Scott films like Days of Thunder or Crimson Tide. I fell in love with True Romance for its scripting and story; thank you Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino sold this script to get enough money to make Reservoir Dogs and the rest is history as they say.


True Romance does not have the edge of a typical Tarantino film because of Tony Scott, but that does not hinder the excellent story much. Also, it allowed for plenty of stars to be included in True Romance; but then again I seem to recall some decent names in Reservoir Dogs. Ah well, the point is they got paid a lot more for True Romance. That says a lot about how the actors thought about Tarantino's talent.


Back to True Romance, Slater did an excellent job. Slater has a real talent, but for some reason I have never really liked his acting style. We may visit his talent a couple more times in some later Val Kilmer movies. Speaking of Kilmer, I did not even realize he was in True Romance the first time around. That might have been due to his out of focus 15 second part in the film. He apparently shot his part in just two days. The rest of the actors did quite well. You have Dennis Hopper, Tom Sizemore, James Gandolfini, Christopher Walken, Bronson Pinchot (suspect in my opinion), Samuel L. Jackson for about 5 seconds, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman, Michael Rapaport, Patricia Arquette, and blah blah blah. Honestly it seemed odd that all of these stars were in this movie and only some of them like Pinchot got big roles. Maybe they could not afford the big names for much play time. It really worked though. However, look at Pinchot's face below; I think this says it all. I just don't buy it.


Val Kilmer

To be honest, there is really not a lot to say about Kilmer's performance in True Romance. We can say that he did well as Elvis, but he was in the movie for less than a minute. Kilmer originally wanted to play the role of Clarence, but agreed to do just the small role of Elvis. This was the second Tony Scott film that Val Kilmer appeared in. Possibly Val Kilmer was concentrating on more important roles such as his amazing role in Tombstone as Doc Holliday.


The Real Deal

I still like True Romance after the third viewing. I find the soundtrack a little bit annoying at times and still wish Quentin Tarantino had had the money to make this film on his own, but I will have to live with it the way it is. True Romance is a great movie if you are looking to see a large ensemble of great actors all together in a movie. There is a lot of sex, blood, and language, so keep that in mind if you are thinking of making this a family rental (it isn't).


The Short Version

Raw Score: 812,293
Sharon Movie? No

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Easy Rider

Easy Rider (1969) - Review requested by Tim

Brief Detail

Director: Dennis Hopper
Writer: Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper
Release Date: 26 June 1969 (Sweden)
Genre: Drama/Adventure

Plot

Two guys make a big drug deal and set out to ride across America on their motorcycles to find the real America. It is a simple story really, but sometimes the most simple of stories are actually the deepest. Easy Rider is deep enough to keep you hooked throughout. Along their way, the two men meet a few people and get a chance to experience different ways of life. Although the story is simple it is a great one.


Performance

Peter Fonda was awesome in this movie. He does a great job of playing the calm and collected man that really seems to have it all together. Dennis Hopper did well also (shocking for me; I don't know why, but I just don't really like him) as the man that is out of control and more concerned with everything going as planned. Peter Fonda's character has to constantly keep Dennis Hopper's character calm. Then enters Jack Nicholson. Nicholson rarely does a bad job if ever and he did not disappoint here. He added a lot of life to the second half of the film and it was needed at that point. Overall the acting was good and it is rare that I like Dennis Hopper's performance so this movie really scored the points in acting.

Cinematography

Although the film was shot on what seemed to be a very low budget, the scenery was very good. It gave a very relaxed feel to the movie for the first half. The picture quality was not what it could have been even in 1969, but it doesn't even matter because that is not what the film is about. The transitions between scenes were very interesting. It almost seemed annoying at first, but then it seems to have a greater purpose than just being cool once you get to the end.

Directing

Dennis Hopper directs; very interesting. He did a great job with this movie. The movie seems very calm and yet when they do different drugs the way that the movie is shot almost reflects how mind altering the drug is supposed to be. It was very interesting and helped to really make this movie worth the watch. This is not like Trainspotting or Spun where the entire movie has weird things going on. Instead it uses the calm parts of the film to intensify the parts that are supposed to reflect the drugs. Excellent job by both Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda.


The Real Deal

Great pick by Tim; I really liked this movie. It was a little rough in the sound and camera departments, but it was great in spite of those areas. The ending is classic and simply made the movie. You need to give this movie a shot if you have not already. And thanks to Tim for getting me interested in Peter Fonda.

The Short Version

Raw Score: 845,212

Sharon Movie? No

Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario Bros. (1993)

What's It About

Two brothers that are plumbers of course. This is in fact the first movie based on a video game. Super Mario Brothers was made in 1993 with some decent special effects, but it was a terrible start to the video game movie trend. Mario Mario (Bob Hoskins) and Luigi Mario (John Leguizamo) have a plumbing business that just can't compete with the Scapelli Construction company. Princess Daisy (Samantha Mathis) is a college student that is on an archaeological dig that has discovered strange dinosaur bones that "look like they are trying to be human." Sorry, I could not help myself; it was such a funny line. Turns out that Scapelli Construction has actually blown up enough stuff underground to open a portal to an alternate dimension. King Koopa is in charge of the alternate dimension and wants to join the two dimensions so that he can take over the world. The only way that he can do this is to have the part of a stone that Princess Daisy wears around her neck. King Koopa decides to kidnap Daisy and the Mario Bros. have to come to her rescue. What an amazing story right!


How'd They Act

The acting was in some respects good and others terrible. Fisher Stevens gets credit for some terrible acting as Iggy, one of King Koopa's goons. It was simply embarrassing. John Leguizamo did a decent job with his portrayal of a stupid plumber, but as my family members pointed out, where was the mustache? Dennis Hopper can really make himself look stupid. He did a great job of it here. Maybe it is just the movie itself, but it really seemed like he made effort to not take the performance seriously. I would expect better from him. Overall the acting is very difficult to assess. The movie is so ridiculous that you are not thinking as much about acting as you are about the horrid lines that are being delivered. Ouch, and even three writers could not make it decent.

Delivery

The directing was as sloppy as the acting and writing. Why not round it all off with terrible music? Of course the best part of the film may have actually been the classic music that we all loved back in our childhood. The special effects were pretty good at times, but that really didn't matter because everything else about the movie was worse that hideous. Conversations were poor, entire scenes made no sense, and as far as I could tell the movie didn't even comes close to living up to the video game. This all leaves me with one question, how can it take four directors to make a movie this bad; a monkey could have made this.


The Real Deal

I admit I have been quite harsh on this film, but lets face it the movie was absolutely awful. Early on in the movie I had high hopes for this film being a goodbad movie, but I could only laugh at how bad everything was for about the first half. After the half way mark the movie went from a goodbad to a badbad. There is truly nothing worse than a badbad movie. And what a way this was to start off the whole idea of making movies after video games. This is the one that started it all and it must be what a lot of filmmakers have decided video game movies should be. There have only been a couple that have reached what I would call good. Hopefully they will figure it out one day and realize that people who play video games are actually interested in watching good films as much as playing good video games.

This is that music you were looking for.

The Skinny Version

Should you see it? Only for a laugh. 331,102 out of 1,000,000 Stars
Not a Sharon Movie!