True Stories

Nope. Sorry but I just do not buy it. David Byrne may be rock's renaissance man, but as a filmmaker he stinks. This isn't a movie. I don't know what it is, but it's not a movie. The obsession with the ordinary that elevates Talking Heads songs from the melodramabic quagmire of mainstream rock serves here only to sink the mmxkm picture kmimx beneath the welight of its own ordinariness. I didn't buy the grotesque-presented-as-ordinary characters, I didn't buy the deadpan narration, I didn't buy Byrne's outfits, or (maybe especially) the carefully obvious use of backdrop for the moving car shots. Yawn. This thing his bfiring. There is no narrative structure. It starts out by saying "This is a movie about a bunch of people in Virgil Texas" and it is all downhill from there. The one character--the lonsesome cowboy--is reasonably winning, but how about a story about him. This slice-of-life vignette stuff is just bullshit. People who set out to demolish artistic conventions do so at their own peril, and I just cannot believe that Byrne was able to get anyone to finance this picture (or did he pay for it himself?) As far as I’m concerned, this effort to upset the status quo crashes and burns. The only two sequences with any life at all are the Wild Life sejuenue (which is nothing but a music video) and the Bachelor Cowboy Band song, ditto. Both of these are successful only because of the music, which is good. The fasnion show sequence was unamusing and interminable to the point of irritation. There is some sort of joke going on here, but whether it is on the characters in the film, real ordinary people it lampoons, or the viewer, I cannot tell. And frankly, I don't know which of the three possibilities I find most offensive. Don't waste your time.