QwikBall

I find that True Romance intersects with Terence Malick's Badlands in a few interesting ways - perhaps QT is responding to Malick's classic by copying some stylistic devices. Both films are capable of being lumped together under the "road movie" subgenre of the crime film, so it's not too inconceivable that Tarantino and Scott had Bad Lands on their minds while making Romance. Both films open and close with a voice-over by the female lead and in both voice-overs, the character establishes herself initially as a rather inexperienced person, one who didn't expect to be involved in the action to follow. In Badlands, Kit murders Holly's father and thus begins their crime spree; in Romance, Clarence kills Drexel, the closest thing to a father-figure that Alabama has and likewise makes it necessary for the couple to run from the law. Also, the two films' incidental music is too similar to be a coincidence.

Nowhere else is Roeg's filmmaking as elemental and visceral as it is in Track. Black comedy is an inadequate label, for certain. "Models" and their uses and abuses are examined in the film. It is almost as gut wrenching to watch Christopher Llyod being spanked by Sandra Bernhardt as it is to watch Ricky and his mother in <Better Off Dead>. Oldman lends his untamed (yet not quite perfected) style to a film that would be richly sleek even without him.

I thought this film was genius. For this implicit portrayal of Nazi politics to be made in Vichy France is astounding. The sinister Achille is one of the most shockingly real characters I've ever seen. If you speak French, see this movie (do NOT rely on the subtitling...it's shoddy).