Truly incredible that a movie I watched in theaters when I was sixteen and had a ball with as a pure Will Smith movie star vehicle - He fumbles his way through buying lingerie! He tells mob boss Tom Sizemore (and one third of the cast of SOPRANOS) about which slurs to use! He flirts with super hot shady PI gal Lisa Bonet! - has become the most prescient blockbuster of the last 30 years (and it somehow came out…
“Simple matter of voltage.”
Is Gene Hackman the only performer in cinema history who could tell Denzel to shut the fuck up and you actually *believe* Washington was stunned silent in the moment? Like watching two acting kaiju just bodyslam one another over and over again.
[Source: Plex Streaming Server]
“I wish the sky wasn’t blue. I wish water wasn’t wet. And I wish I didn’t still love my wife.”
By all s, it’s amazing this movie exists at all. Legendarily troubled during production, with Tony Scott having to deal with a despotic Joel Silver*, diva Bruce Willis, and the fact that Damon Wayans apparently hated his new Shane Black buddy noir partner. LETHAL WEAPON cutter Stuart Baird apparently saved the entire film from an unwatchable workprint, but you’d never…
A stealth TOP GUN sequel, in which Maverick retires from the Air Force, escapes to Mexico to visit his controlling drug dealer surrogate father, and is then punished for sleeping with the man's beautiful, neglected wife, his ugly Americanism wandering into a hyper-macho culture that views all of his cockiness as nothing less than glibly insulting.
The TOP GUN part is sort of a joke, but also what this movie is totally about: a Peckinpah-level treatise on insidiously toxic masculinity,…
Bring me the heart of John W. Creasy. Only Tony Scott could’ve perfectly blended this brand of anti-real melodrama and savage violence (while peppering in a love for opulence he shared with Ridley). Possibly Denzel’s most potently realized screen badass (who could double as a movie monster, depending on your vantage point). An absolute favorite, and one of the closest approximations of Peckinpah the aughts studio system had to offer.
“You’re so cool.”
Quentin’s fantasized version of his own journey toward breaking into Hollywood. I miss Tony Scott’s hazy 3/4 close-up filled bombastic melodrama, where every squib was like a gushing geyser, sending crimson through the air. One of the weirdest, yet most perfect marriages of talent to ever emerge out of ‘90s cinema.
"Sometimes two people are just meant for each other. That’s the hook of most great romances. And like the hipster hepcat lovers on the run at the center of TRUE ROMANCE, Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino were perfect for one another’s freakout, weirdo pop sensibilities. There’s a vibrancy on screen that was absent from even the best of Scott’s filmography up until this point. The life that radiates from Tarantino’s wholly fictional yet still semi-autobiographical screenplay is translated via Scott’s…