True Dat

Maxim Online has a fun piece giving us a 15-year look back at True Romance. At the risk of sounding fossilized let me just say that I can't believe it's been 15 years since this movie came out. I remember seeing it for the first time in Framingham, Massachusetts and actually driving faster and more recklessly out of the theatre parking lot. It may be the first and only time that a movie caused me to drive dangerously afterward.

I knew I'd like the movie -- I'd just had my mind blown by Reservoir Dogs on video the previous year -- but I wasn't prepared for how seriously True Romance would permanently alter my world. More than anything it convinced me that I needed to break up with my girlfriend, leave the East Cost, move to L.A., and once I got there, it was the first screenplay I bought and memorized. I started talking like the characters even when I didn't realize it and found myself saying things like, "I'm basically a pretty resourceful guy" or "It fucks you all up," in casual conversation. For me, Tony Scott's slushy, steamy, car-without-doors winter Detroit was the Detroit, realer than real, and I'm pretty sure I started wearing multiple jackets just because Christian Slater did when he came back from killing his new wife's pimp Drexel.

Are there better movies out there? Sure, only a few thousand of them. True Romance isn't even the best Tony Scott movie costarring James Gandolfini -- that honor must go to Crimson Tide, which Tarantino came on to script-doctor just a year later. But I can't think of any flick that hit me at the absolute perfect point in my life, a surgically directed scud missile of pure pop culture penicillin. Even now, fifteen years later, I think I can safely say without hyperbole that there's not a week that goes by that I don't think about this movie in some way or another. Whenever I hear Soundgarden's "Outshined," or look at the Capitol Records building, or see Saul Rubinek in anything, I'm twenty-two again, driving fast and crazy, destination unknown.