The 1990s Was The Best Decade For Movies
Unfortunately, the full argument for that statement is beyond this article.
Suffice to say, everyone was hacking the three or four real artists from the ’70s, technology and technique were merging into a uniform aesthetic perfection and studios were still putting decent money behind a lot of original ideas.
You’d be wrong to argue against that but you can’t argue that the 1990s didn’t have some of the best crime dramas in movie history.
Of course, classics like all of Tarantino’s movies and scripts for that era, Heat, Usual Suspects, LA Confidential, et al are on a lot of people top-ten lists but there were dozens of other movies like A Simple Plan, Go!, Grifters, Cop Land and One False Move that are often overlooked.
This trailer for the new movie Arkansas kind of reminds of those “lesser” films.
Here is the set-up:
Kyle and Swin live by the orders of an Arkansas-based drug kingpin named Frog, whom they’ve never met. Posing as junior park rangers by day, they operate as low-level drug couriers by night under the watchful eye of Frog’s proxies.
Swin then settles into his day job by taking up a relationship with Johnna against orders to blend in while Kyle continues to question his night job by trying to figure out who Frog really is.
Their world is then upended after one too many inept decisions, and Kyle, Swin, and Johanna find themselves directly in Frog’s crosshairs, who mistakenly sees them as a threat to his empire.
And here is the hook:
“This is creepy.”
“Do you like creepy?”
Dialogue makes a crime movie for me. Every crime story has been told before, so to be different you have to do it with style.
It looks like actor turned first-time director Clark Duke has brought some style to it.
I’m definitely checking out Arkansas when it hits theaters on May 1, 2020.
