Miniature Movie Review: TRUE ROMANCE (Tony Scott, 1993) (rewatch)

True Romance (1993)
Stars Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, and Dennis Hopper
Written by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary (uncredited)
Directed by Tony Scott

Features a hilarious comic turn by then-up-and-comer Brad Pitt. And Dennis Hopper's scene with Christopher Walken is his best ever (which is saying something).

Rating: 9/10

BONUS! You can read the entire original script for the film here.

Rock Improvisation - Links And Examples

As is often the case now in the Age of the Internets, I'll get an idea for a post, do a quick Google search on the topic, and find an article where someone has said everything (or almost everything) I wanna say about it. So anyway, here's a link to the article (on, in this case, improvisation in rock music), from the excellent Perfect Sound Forever website:

Improvisation?

I also found some useful information from the following text; I of course take exception to the characterization of the Grateful Dead's improvisations as "ponderous", but I gotta give some respect to any author that's able to discuss the Dead, John Coltrane, and Black Flag in the space of two pages and say something significant about each one.

From "The Path to Freedom" in Free Jazz and Free Improvisation by Todd S. Jenkins

For those of you who still have no idea of what the hell these guys are talking about, here's of few of my favorite examples of rock improvisation, courtesy of YouTube:









Johnny B. Goode (Live in Berkeley, CA 5/30/70) - Jimi Hendrix

Heroes In The Wind - Robert E. Howard

I was just looking at the Wikipedia entry for Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan by Robert E.Howard, which I see is being put out under the Penguin Modern Classics imprint. Wow - the guys that my D & D-playing friends and I used to read in high school sure have moved up in the world. First Tolkien gets a multiple Academy Award-winning film made based on his work, then Lovecraft gets a volume of his fiction published by the Library of America, and now Howard has his own Penguin Modern Classics volume. I guess it really is respectable to be a geek these days.

Anyway, here's the book's table of contents, according to Wikipedia (the notes in brackets are mine).

Acknowledgements
Introduction (John Clute)

Prelude
"Recompense" [poem]

I Black Dawn
"The Shadow Kingdom" [a Kull story]
"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune" [Kull]
"Kings of the Night" [Bran Mak Morn]
"Worms of the Earth" [Bran Mak Morn]
"The Dark Man" [Turlogh Dubh O'Brien/Bran Mak Morn]

II Dark Interlude
"The Footfalls Within" [Solomon Kane]
"Pigeons from Hell" [a Weird West story]
"Graveyard Rats" [a Steve Harrison story]
"Vultures of Wahpeton" [Western fiction]


III High Noon [all the stories in this section are Conan tales]
"The Tower of the Elephant"
"Queen of the Black Coast"
"A Witch Shall Be Born"
"Red Nails"

Dennis Hopper 1936 - 2010

This is a couple of days late, but I didn't want to let the holiday weekend to end without taking a moment to recognize the passing of one of the great talents of American cinema, actor, director, and writer Dennis Hopper. Though he'll probably be remembered best for his higher-profile work in films like Apocalypse Now, Cool Hand Luke, and Rebel Without A Cause, I personally will always recall him first in his magnificent (Tarantino-scripted) scene with Christopher Walken in Tony Scott's True Romance (which you can watch here), which just might be the greatest moment in the history of American movies, full stop.

My sympathies go out to Dennis' family and friends. He will be missed.

Miniature Movie Review: ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010)

If you wanna do The Heroine with a Thosand Faces as a film, that's a fine, perhaps even an admirable, thing to do. Just don't call it Alice in Wonderland. Rating: 6/10