Another day, another dollar. Right?

The 1995 release of Tank Girl - The Movie would go on to become one of the most infamous cases of “comic book done wrong”. And a bitter reminder to future generations about how bad things can get when American middle-level producers try to stick the cool-by-association label to their output, acquiring the rights to any obscure “cult” phenomenon and then proceeding to butcher it senselessly.

Following a sky-high rights auction (at one point Mr. Spielberg himself chipped in) and some dubious expectations from Tank Girl fans, it ended up a) being a huge flop and b) bankrupting the magazine that featured the comic book as well.

To which I can only say: “Wow. Really?”

From the look of things, it’s a cheap, sad affair. Production values were trying for a campy, wink-wink two-dimension feel, maybe. But everything falls horribly flat. Come on. It looks like a Christophe Lambert vehicle from the mid-Nineties. And guess what? It plays out exactly like a Christophe Lambert vehicle from the mid-Nineties. Damn you. Damn you all to hell.

And yes, the very diverse and very large “featuring music by…” cards at the end should have warned us to stay away. Instead, we caught it on cable, were fooled by the cute intro and stayed there, unable to move.

Like they say - avoid female directors. They ovulate.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “Ice T is a gangsta ass kangaroo. Calling him a ripper didn’t change the fact that that nigga was a damn kangaroo neither.”

Where do I stop, where do I begin.

Harold Becker’s Sea of Love.

I adore this movie. Really. I love it way more than I ever loved people in my own family. It kept me company for years, fed my then-budding heterosexual tendencies and pretty much worked as a how-to handbook for future interactions with the male end of the spectrum.

That would explain everything, wouldn’t it.

Pacino at the time had been missing from the big screen for four years following the Revolution débacle, and his presence was not grounds for hype-building in itself - hence, the emphasis on the plot, rather than the NYC setting, or the fact that this is a solid procedural cop thriller, but also presents a fairly bleak view in terms of both genre and gender roles. But I digress…

Trailer does a bang-up job at setting up Ellen Barkin as the potential killer; remember, this happened a couple years after Fatal Attraction became a box office mega hit, not to mention a huge source of anti-female backlash, as Susan Faludi memorably argued. From that point of view, insisting on the is-she-or-isn’t-she angle proved both “right” (it’s the key element of the plot) and inspired (it’s also the key “personal” arc for the Pacino character).

Oh, and I love the almost-subliminal use of “Sea Of Love”, which turns out to be the biggest clue the killer leaves in his/her wake, not to mention the leitmotif of the whole damn score (down to the Tom Waits cover on the end credits). But how sneaky, haunting and straight-up gorgeous is Barkin’s voice repeating “what are you looking for…”, over and over? This is the stuff conceptual artists were made of back then.

Looking back, it was the beginning of my lifelong romance with the writing of Richard Price. And that was good.