1. The opening credits are 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥. That Springsteen song layered over Demme's montaging is as good as it gets.
2. Demme doesn't get enough credit for what he does with the camera. Never showy, mostly still, but always delicately probing. Intimate close ups. Sensitive floating. Tak Fujimoto doing God's work with the lighting. I mean, it looks like a Shyamalan film, in the best way.
3. I wasn't old enough in 1993 to comprehend how many barriers this film was knocking down with regards to homophobia and AIDS panic and especially with putting a black man at the center of struggling with this (who is arguably the real protagonist), but it feels like it provided a tectonic shift in a…