Retrospective: True Romance/From Dusk till Dawn (Patreon)

I've been falling behind on the Patreon lately due to a million personal reasons, so y'all deserve a twofer at the end of the month: two Tarantino-scripted movies for the price of one.

True Romance is a fairy tale only a demented 20-something-year-old virgin could write. Tarantino has said that he wrote the script when he had never had a girlfriend, and you can tell. It's a blatant wish fulfillment fantasy by a dude who's never had to emotionally connect with adult women. Clarence finds Alabama, the woman of his dreams, who's paid to like him by her pimp, only to discover that she genuinely likes his affinity for grindhouse movies, Elvis records, and presumable lack of personal hygiene. It's essentially a fairy tale; a boy finds a princess who wants him exactly for who he is and sweeps her away from the evil Gary Oldman-shaped dragon, only to find himself involved in a cross-country chase from the mob. You know, the age old story.

Tony Scott's direction creates an interesting friction with Tarantino's script. Scott's bombastic Eighties-ness brushes up against Tarantino's Generation X sardonicism in a way that, while not exactly functional, is fascinating to witness. Maybe Scott should have gone the Natural Born Killers route and had Tarantino's script rewritten to better fit his style. It would have pissed Tarantino off to no end, but precedent suggests the results might have been fascinatingly weird, instead of just charmingly bemusing.

Tarantino works much better with Robert Rodriguez, and not just because Rodriguez lets him suck Salma Hayek's toes and shoots his vampire script with Tom Savini and Jim Williamson. Those things undoubtedly help, but they're more indicative of just how simpatico Tarantino and Rodriguez are. Rather than feeling like a tug-of-war between Rodriguez and Tarantino, From Dusk till Dawn feels like the joint work of both. Rather than ducking in and out of a couple movies like True Romance, From Dusk till Dawn tracks a classic mobster story as it stumbles into a vampire movie, letting its story change drastically but feel ultimately like a natural progression from one concept to another.

From Dusk till Dawn is a clear precursor to Sinners, if a more puerile version of it. It also has two distinct halves bifurcated by a bar and vampires, and stars a pair of brothers. The difference is that in From Dusk till Dawn the vampires own this joint and entrap the protagonists. Watch those two movies back-to-back some time; I think they would have made a better double feature than this and True Romance.