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- <text id=90TT0633>
- <title>
- Mar. 12, 1990: Cop vs. Creep
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
- Mar. 12, 1990 Soviet Disunion
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- CINEMA, Page 81
- Cop vs. Creep
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <qt> <l>BLUE STEEL</l>
- <l>Directed by Kathryn Bigelow</l>
- <l>Screenplay by Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Red</l>
- </qt>
- <p> Wit always plays on Jamie Lee Curtis' fine lips. So when, as
- rookie cop Megan Turner, she is asked why a pretty, peaceable
- woman would care to be a New York City police officer, Curtis
- smiles as she replies, "I wanted to shoot people." Since Blue
- Steel is a weave of police story and lady-in-distress melodrama,
- she will eventually get that opportunity. Her target will be
- Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), a Wall Street commodities trader whose
- romantic intensity fascinates Megan at first, before she
- realizes he is a psychopath. He murders at random and for
- pleasure; after a kill, he swathes his torso in the blood from
- his latest victim's sweater. "Death is the greatest kick of
- all," he confides to Megan. "That's why they save it for last."
- </p>
- <p> Director Kathryn Bigelow is Hollywood's suavest young
- stylist. Trained as a painter, she brings glamour, precision and
- thrill to every image. This film, bound as it is by action-movie
- conventions, hasn't the originality of her stunning horror drama
- Near Dark, and toward the end Blue Steel spins goofily off
- track. But it has a handsome time getting there, propelled by
- Curtis' sensible sensuality and Silver's bravura creepiness.
- These two help dramatize the danger any woman can find in the
- desperate intimacy of a big city. By the climax, Megan has to
- be thinking of Eugene and every other urban brute when she is
- again asked, "So what made you become a cop?"
- </p>
- <p> "Him."
- </p>
- <p>By Richard Corliss.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
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