----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Diffnstein writes: ""True Romance" was an awful movie. I see a deep and significant difference between it and "Reservoir Dogs." -- or another similar film, David Lynch's "Wild at Heart." In "Dogs," the violence serves no purpose and solves no problem. TR, on the other hand, glorifies and wallows in typical, reeking, "righteous" violence. Like Slater's manly execution of the drug dealer Gary Oldman (at the urging of Elvis no less! -- what an abomination!). And oh how we thrill to Patricia Arquette's killing of the hit man. And Christopher Walken's lingering sadism over Dennis Hopper. Typical violence as titillation, e.g. part of the problem, pornography. Not to mention the couple's happily-ever-after ending made possible by a suitcase full of cocaine. Sick, macho, amoral, pro-violence mythology." I agree in general, but found some of those aspects (more related to Tarantino 's script than Scott's direction) at least to be of interest. The fact that *Dennis Hopper* plays the only character with a sense of "morality" (for want of a better term) and that he enacts it by telling a racist joke just provides, I think, the clue to Tarantino's game--that is, see what will shock. What does someone feel coming out of the film on Arquette's closing line, "You are so cool!"? Suffice it to say that something goosed up Tony Scott's production and made it *his* best movie--that's faint praise enough. You are also right about GUMP--Does anyone bother to ask what happened to all the *other* shrimpers who were devastated by that storm sent by God just for the memory of Bubba? It seems to me that Tarantino's works, GUMP, and TRUE LIES (just to name a few) are all sides of the same die (to many sides for a coin to suffice), as symptomatic of our time as say, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and LADY IN DARK are symptomatic of the 1950s. --Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN