True Romance

True Romance (1993) is about a comic shop clerk and an escort meeting and running, with a suitcase of cocaine. Clarence and Alabama marry the night they meet. He goes to see her former employer and comes out with the wrong suitcase: not money but drugs. They run to Los Angeles with the mob behind them. Quentin Tarantino wrote the screenplay. It was one of the first he sold, and he made Reservoir Dogs with the money. Tony Scott changed it in two places. Tarantino had told the events out of order; Scott put them in straight chronology. And in Tarantino's ending Clarence died; Scott let the characters live. Tarantino later said Scott's ending was better than the one he wrote. The scene between Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken is the most discussed thing in it: an interrogation, one table, two actors, and a man deliberately choosing his own death. Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini and Val Kilmer appear in small parts. Pitt's character on the sofa does almost nothing and is one of the things people remember. Hans Zimmer's main theme is an arrangement of a melody taken from a Terrence Malick film. It failed commercially and became a cult film later. It runs 120 minutes. Good for: nineties crime, Tarantino's writing, and cult film. Less good for: the violence is very harsh, one beating is unbearable, and the language is coarse.