A Quartet of Cult Objects
By Richard Corliss By Richard Schickel
They open in small theaters, with little publicity, to mixed reviews. The actors are little known, the subject matter is eccentric, the tone intimate. Sometimes, though, movies can elude their death warrants and flourish into cult objects through doggedness and word of mouth. They acquire "legs"-- staying power. Herewith, reports on four small films with long, strong legs.
THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY
One peaceful day in Botswana's Kalahari desert, where the Bushmen live, a Coca-Cola bottle fell from the sky. It must, they thought, be a gift from the gods. But this glass icon brought with it the compulsions of civilization: greed, jealousy, rancor. So the family patriarch determined to take the bottle to the end of the world and drop it off. On his journey he saw the strangest things: beasts with round legs (Jeeps), and a female with strange skins on her back (the village schoolteacher), and a squad of shiftless African guerrillas. The gods must be crazy!
Not so moviegoers in the U.S., France and Japan who have made a hit out of this 1980 comedy by South African Writer-Director-Producer-Actor -Cinematographer-Editor Jamie Uys. The film's pleasures are simple and obvious: an original plot, lots of slapstick and a lead performance by the Bushman N!xau, who registers every absurdity with the aplomb of an aboriginal Buster Keaton. There is a tinge of paternalism in Uys' attitude toward both the Bushman and the bumbling rebels, but he seems no racist; he tars all his characters, black and white, with the same broad satirical brush. With very little exertion, the spectator can convince himself he is laughing not only at a primitive with a Coke fetish but at himself and the whole gods- forsaken human race. By Richard Corliss
STOP MAKING SENSE
David Byrne is a riveting physical and emotional presence--a cult movie star who radiates otherworldly danger. Occupying the center of this glossy rock- concert film as leader of the avant-punk band Talking Heads, Byrne comes across as both stage-frightened and spellbinding. The dramatic contours of his gaunt face seek the shadows, where his most pounding, powerful songs (Psycho Killer, Burning Down the House) take form. The other band members, who appear to have been born on this planet, are along to provide white noise for the Showman from Outer Space as he surfaces in a big white suit or leads his troupe in odd calisthenics that turn into a Walpurgisnacht boogie. This ain't no party; this ain't no disco; this ain't no foolin' around.
Stop Making Sense, directed by Jonathan Demme, was recently declared Best Documentary by the National Society of Film Critics--a bizarre joke very much in this film's spirit. "David Byrne" is a fictional creation as fully formed as Darth Vader or Norman Bates; the movie is more meticulously composed than most Hollywood hits. It could as well be called Best Thing of Undetermined Species. By Richard Corliss
REPO MAN
Q. Can Otto (Emilio Estevez), the failed Los Angeles supermarket stockboy, find purpose, if not happiness, as a repossessor of autos on which the owners have failed to make payments?
Q. Can the Helping Hands Acceptance Co. provide a morally salubrious climate in which he can search for life's meanings?
Q. Is Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), the Captain Ahab of repo men, a proper mentor for Otto? Is the repo man's code, which Bud keeps muttering about as < he drives dementedly around looking for cars to grab, applicable to all the issues one encounters in this cockeyed world? Or is Bud just the most colorfully paranoid marble in the bagful that Writer-Director Alex Cox has rolling around his movie?
Q. Why is the list value of a decrepit 1964 Chevy Malibu $20,000? And why is everyone who opens its trunk instantly vaporized? Is it the great white whale of the freeways, or just another of the plot's red herrings?
A. (to all of the above) One guess is as good as another. Cox either stops short of the point of most scenes or rolls on past it. But there is something cheerful in the anarchy of his methods, something unpretentious in his allusions to the car's extraterrestrial dimension, something bracing in his aversion to the well made. No wonder adolescents have taken Repo Man for their own. Lifting its hood is like peering into a teen-ager's mind: miswired and noisy, Repo Man is capable of fast starts and amazing cornering. By Richard Schickel
CHOOSE ME
Mickey (Keith Carradine) is said to be a pathological liar. But after he ankles the mental hospital quite uncured of this condition, evidence accumulates that he really was a jet-fighter pilot. And a CIA spy in the Soviet Union. And a poetry teacher at Yale. The problem is not with him but with a world that refuses to accommodate improbable realities.
Nancy Love (Genevieve Bujold) conducts a radio call-in show, from which issues a stream of psychobabble to cool her listeners' sundry sexual fevers. She is suffering near-terminal repression, which lifts after a oneafternoon stand with Mickey.
That is a close encounter of an opportunistic kind. Mickey was really looking for Nancy's roommate, Eve (Lesley Ann Warren), a sometime streetwalker who bought a bar because it was owned by and named for another woman called Eve. She found the coincidence irresistible. So does Mickey, who was once engaged to the former proprietor. He wanders in one night and finds her replacement an entirely lovable facsimile. Eve is not so sure. And calls up Dr. Love for advice, not realizing that the woman (using an assumed name) with whom she shares refrigerator, bathroom and eventually boyfriend is her air-waves confidante.
That is the way things go in Choose Me. Writer-Director Alan Rudolph has structured his movie like a daring billiard shot, which culminates with all his eight balls landing in the right pockets. He shares the paranoiac's / conviction that the world is full of strange and secret connections, but he has bathed his movie in the glowing light of his discovery that these linkages are often benign. And his actors have caught his charmed spirit admirably.
By Richard Schickel