Month: June 2022

Christian Slater falls in love with Patricia Arquette, the prostitute his boss hired for his birthday, so he goes to pimp Gary Oldman and tries to get her released from his control. This simple act results in the vast violence and destruction that propels the rest of the film. I had always assumed this was another 1990s ultra-violent Bonnie and Clyde on the road clone, similar to Natural Born Killers, and while this film does share many of the same attributes, the majority of the action stays in Los Angeles and the Slater-Arquette coupling are less the perpetrators of the violence and rather just the impetus. It surprisingly has quite a varied cast with Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, and even Bronson Pinchot in a relatively meaty role all making appearances. 

Because of her unique British-French heritage, Violette Szabo, portrayed by Virginia McKenna, was recruited by the Special Operations Executive as an agent after her French husband died during World War II. An undoubtedly brave and heroic woman, this film importantly preserves a small bit of war history that is easily forgotten. McKenna gives a strong performance embodying the many facets of Szabo and her double life as a spy, but the narrative spends a too much time on her romances, both real and imaginary, to give full credit to the incredible acts she performed. 

Though he generally refuses to travel with passengers after an accident during World War I, 1920s mail pilot Christopher Reeve is forced to transport the owner of the plane’s daughter Roseanna Arquette. The passenger curse holds true when the plane crashes in a remote mountain area. I do enjoy survival films as a form of disaster story. Reeve is quite appealing and dashing as a troubled, early aviator. Arquette is often annoyingly shrill, which at least works early in the film when her character is at her most brattiest. The story itself isn’t particularly remarkable, though the mail pilot theme is unusual.

Unnamed protagonist Wiley Wiggins moves through a lucid, dream-like state experiencing and participating in philosophical conversations on the nature of reality. I can’t say that I really followed most of what was going on in the film or if I even kept engaged throughout. I can’t even say for sure if I’d actually could have seen the film before, but maybe that makes sense with such a topic. I’m not really a fan of philosophical discussions in general, but I did at least dig the fitting insertion of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy’s characters from the Before series.

Obsessed with her high school sweetheart Ken Wahl, married Harley Jane Kozak sends her single best friend Elizabeth McGovern to seduce him and then tell her what it was like. The plan of course backfires on everyone involved. It makes no sense that either of these women would be interested in a mulleted Wahl when their other choices were Bill Pullman and Brad Pitt. I had hoped that there would be some twist involving the big hookup but everything in the entire film is played straight and as boringly expected.