Film by Quentin Tarantino, with Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette.
Reviewed by Alan Brief THE FOLLOW-UP offering by the man who created "Reservoir Dogs" is a tense, engaging, violent film with dialogue to match. That's the verdict of the October winners of Socialist Outlook's 300 Club, pictured above. November's lucky names are Finn Jensen, who wins £50, and Debra Jones, whose splendid second prize is on its way. Sign up now to change your life. Send this coupon back to us today, at PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU.
It is brought to you with literally everyone who is anyone in Hollywood trying to pitch in with one of the cameo parts.
The film has wrongly been compared to "Wild at Heart" but in reality is only a road movie in the sense the two main characters flee the bad guys to arrive in Hollywood in a car.
The film is in one sense more of a reworking of "Bonny and Clyde" except the heroes here are not ever proper gangsters (and this film is a lot better.)
The plot centres on a very average man who works at a store and spends every birthTo: (Your bank) .... (Bank address).................. OT .... writing. Date ...Signed Your full name ........ Your Address .... Postal code...
day watching Kung Fu movies by himself. So pathetic is this spectacle his boss fixes it for him to be picked up at the cinema, enter Arquette. They fall in love, Slater decides to deal with her pimp, excellent bit part for Gary Oldman who manages to play the cliche of a dreadlocked scarfaced drug dealing pimp convincingly, and mistakenly picks up a case full of someone else's cocaine when he leaves the building. Cue mayhem. For those who disliked "Reservoir Dogs" this film is less violent, no-one spends the entire film with the only acting Please pay Socialist Outlook Supporters Fund (account number 701862897) at the Co-operative Bank Plc 78/80 Cornhill, London EC3V 3NJ (sort code 08-02-28) the sum ...(in words) £......(in figures) on the ...... day of..... (month) 1993, and thereafter every month, (your account number) until countermanded by me in ...Tel.... skill required being to die slowly from bullet wounds to the stomach. However what both of these films has in common is that the violence is very realistic.
Here after all is where the controversy over Tarantino's work stems from. What you certainly do have in his work is a stripping away of the glamour of violence especially that concerned with the Mafia.
Even in some of the earlier films, even the better ones such as the "Godfather", dying is quick normally clean and the lifestyle lived is with codes and honour. Tarantino upsets people because his films do not go in for either type of bullshit. Violence in his films has its own message, everyone in "Reservoir Dogs" lives violently and they nearly all die sordidly and slowly. So too in his latest film with an added touch of farce in the final shoot out. Furthermore he has an ability to get the viewer to accept acts they would not normally do, most clearly when Patricia Arquette brutalised by the mob finally manages to escape by skewering her tormentor's foot to the floor with a pair of scissors. In fact Arquettre has stated in interview that she only took the role because she believed it
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 52, November 13 1993, Page 13