February 16, 2019

True Stories (1986)

Finally saw David Byrne's True Stories thanks to the new Criterion release. I'd been wanting to see it for years. It's definitely now one of my favourite movies. It's bizarre and hilarious, just packed with insane ideas. It's also a sincere love letter to small-town weirdness and individuality. David Byrne and John Goodman (in his first major film role) stand out the most, but the whole cast of actors and non-actors is really good. The cinematography is beautiful, with lots of bold colour and lighting choices.

The excellent special features on the disc show how the film started as a series of drawings, and then they created a structure that allowed for all the disparate images to be featured, if not exactly 'connect' in a traditional plot sense. The structure is similar to another favourite of mine which came out around the same time, Tampopo, which also features a main story with lots of semi-related detours as part of a general theme.

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