Cheap True Romance (Unrated Director's Cut) (Two-Disc Special Edition) (DVD) (Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette) (Tony Scott) Price

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Customer Reviews of True Romance (Unrated Director's Cut) (Two-Disc Special Edition)

One of the all-time best action movies in the history of the Universe !!!!!!!!
What do you have when you mix a phenomenal cast with one of the best action screenplays of all time???? You've got True Romance. One of my greatest regrets is that I can never again see this movie for the first time. It is electrifying, hysterically funny, intense, gory, and above all entertaining from start to finish. I defy anyone to find two consecutive minutes that do not make you wince or laugh...or both, and the final shootout ranks among the greatest of all time. The screenplay was written by a 24-year-old Quentin Tarantino (with co-worker Roger Avary) while they were clerks at the Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, CA. and sold because neither had the money to produce the film. It is not nearly as famous as Pulp Fiction, but I think it is as good in many ways, and is an absolute must-see for all Tarantino fans. Patricia Arquette epitomizes every guy's dream girl....hot, nasty, shrewd, tough as nails, and (most importantly) absolutely loyal to her man. Clarence (Christian Slater) proves to be a quick study when it comes to mayhem and revenge....from comicbook store geek to crotch-blasting madman in very few scenes. The rest of the stars, from Christopher Walken to Dennis Hopper, Brad Pitt to Gary Oldman, Tom Sizemore to Val Kilmer, etc. etc. all give wonderful performances because they have the benefit of some of the greatest situations and scintillating dialog in their careers. You can tell that each is relishing his part. They must have had a ball making this movie, and it shows. Believe me the enjoyment is contagious....you will LOVE True Romance.

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Love, Tarantino style
Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino, he deserves credit for one thing: his work has consistently managed to illuminate a side of American life that most of us can scarcely imagine. For those us living in the world of sensible import cars, white-collar jobs, and quiet suburban dwellings, Tarantino gives us a glimpse of another, darker world, one populated by drug dealers, gangsters, cops on the edge, and assorted other colorful characters. Watching Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, or Kill Bill for some is sort of like entering a parallel universe, and while I can't be sure how true-to-life Tarantino's depiction of life on the other side of the law is, it always makes for some thrilling viewing. <
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>Which brings us to the less-ironically-titled-than-you-might-think True Romance, written by Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott, a romantic movie for guys who don't like romantic movies. Sure, it's based on a premise you won't find in any Jennifer Lopez movie--poor comic-store clerk falls for and marries the call girl hired by his boss to show him a good time on his birthday--and it takes place against the backdrop of Detroit's post-industrial decay before moving on to the morally decayed world of Hollywood. That said, at bottom True Romance is about love, and the wild-eyed idealism, Devil-may-care recklessness, and irrational devotion that go with it. <
>Sure, this is a bizarre, unconventional, and subversive love story, but it's a love story just the same, which is a large part of the movie's enduring appeal. <
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>Of course, this is also a love story written by Quentin Tarantino, so you can expect to see plenty of wacky characters and twisted happenings, and True Romance doesn't disappoint in this regard. While it was written before the release of Pulp Fiction made him American cinema's unofficial arbiter of cool, this movie showcases his signature style in all its fast-paced, hyper-violent, pop culture-referencing glory. Fittingly, Scott directs with a manic intensity and efficiency that keeps things moving along briskly, and with this unrated director's cut (perhaps the best three words in the English language), you get to see the film's ample bloodshed in even more unflinching brutality. <
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>It all starts with the meeting of the aforementioned comic-store clerk and call girl, Clarence (Christian Slater, actually showing a modicum of acting ability) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette, who's never looked better), in a run-down movie theater during a Sonny Chiba triple-header. From there, things progress quickly: the pair get married; Clarence decides to dispatch Alabama's ex-pimp (played in hilariously over-the-top fashion by a dreadlocked, ebonics-spouting Gary Oldman) and accidentally gets away with a suitcase full of cocaine; he and Alabama flee to L.A. with mobsters in pursuit and decide to sell the coke to an imperious movie producer. Of course, things go wrong somewhere along the line, leading to one of history's great climatic shootouts, rivalling even the mother of them all, the concluding church standoff from John Woo's The Killer. Througout the movie, blood flows liberally, the best and worst elements of human nature are put on sharp display, and tons of whip-smart dialogue is exchanged. Even Elvis himself, looking and sounding a lot like Val Kilmer, makes a couple of appearances. <
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>Hmmmm, what else is there? Well, there's Dennis Hopper as Clarence's doomed ex-cop of a father, delivering one of movie history's greatest monologues to a group of assembled mobsters as he reveals his extensive knowledge of Sicilian history and genealogy. There's Christopher Walken, playing Christopher Walken in a the role of an intense, steely-eyed mob counsel, and James Gandolfini as--what else?--a vicious gangster who likes his job a bit too much. There's also Brad Pitt as Clarence's friend's roommate Floyd, an unmotivated stoner who provides a measure of comic relief amid the often-dour proceedings. But through it all, the love between Clarence and Alabama is at the film's center, giving heart to what would otherwise be an exciting but fairly conventional cops-and-robbers story. And that, more than anything, is what elevates this movie above the plain: its creators' willingness to combine disparate elements and genres and come out with something legitimately unique in the process. Even now, more than a decade after its release, True Romance can easily be proclaimed one of the finest entries in the action-romance-gangster subgenre. <
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True Mediocrity
Tony Scott directed this 1993 screenplay by Quentin Tarantino regarding a Bonnie and Clyde couple who are on the run from crime syndicates and the cops. An interesting story undermined by the main characters who were simply too childish and incompetent to make the story either entertaining or believable: this defect being rendered worst by inexperienced principal actors who accentuated those defects as opposed to having compensated them with strong talent. <
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>The story's plot follows the course of juvenile delinquent meets juvenile prostitute; delinquent kills prostitute's pimp and runs off with cash and coke. Both juveniles are then hunted by the mafia who want their money back as well as the police who want some answers. Meanwhile, the juveniles on the run fall in love and talk about their silly little dreams involving comic books and the like. The screenplay fails with the main characters themselves played by Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette; they simply appear to be too inept to get themselves out of the predicaments they make for themselves: in real life such people would be killed immediately or quickly find themselves in jail. <
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>What keeps the film afloat are the many cameo appearances by the supporting cast such as Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, and Val Kilmer. As for the rest involving Slater and Arquette, it stinks! Slater's chronic problem with his acting is that he tries much too hard to be Jack Nicholson (especially in this film which is incredibly annoying) when all he has going for him in that department is a slight physical resemblance to the great actor. Slater's suave attempts don't come close to Nicholson's phenomenal talents by a long shot and he shouldn't try so hard whereby he might actually improve his talents in real acting as opposed to only remaining mediocre at imitating a greater actor than himself. <
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>The problem with this film is that the principal actors are lightweights trying to act out a shallow script/plot as to their characters. The audience therefore soon finds itself losing interest in the core of the story and clinging to the peripheral supporting actors/stories instead for entertainment. Some of those scenes are great such as when Dennis Hopper gives his last speech to Christopher Walken as to where Sicilians came from. Again, those great scenes and characters are peripheral very much like the solid debris of a ship randomly floating around on the surface while the frail hull has sunk to the bottom nowhere to be found. At that point it's just like fishing out survivors from what has become a wreck of a film too late for rescue.