John Dahl's Red Rock West (1992) is a small-scale neo-noir treat featuring two now deceased character actors (J.T. Walsh and Dennis Hopper), plus Nicolas Cage and Lara Flynn Boyle, with small but notable roles by Dwight Yoakam and Timothy Carhart. Stylish and peppered with subtle humor, the film has an almost ancient primal-mythic arc but is set in the centemporary American West. Cage's character Michael, a Marine veteran and survivor of the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing, has a bum leg and a lot of choices to make; Hopper's character, Lyle from Dallas, is also a Marine veteran, but of the Vietnam War era; he has been hired to do something nasty in the town of Red Rock West. Boyle's Suzanne (pictured above) is married to Walsh's Wayne. Besides some mordant quips about marriage, Red Rock West rolls out stylish scenes, twists and turns, the kinds of things Oliver Stone later built upon in making U Turn (1997).
Dahl's subsequent movie, The Last Seduction (1994), features Linda Fiorentino as one of the most entertainingly conniving femmes fatales I've yet seen on a screen. More recently, Dahl directed several episodes of True Blood and Dexter.
Today's Rune: Fertility.
2 comments:
Erik, love "The Last Seduction" and will most definatly check out "Red Rock West". The cast of that one is awesome!
J.T. Walsh was one of my favorite character actors. He coincidentally died the same year as another great character actor, Charles Haddon.
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