Call Letters from Home
Border Radio (1987)
directed by Allison Anders, Dean Lent, & Kurt Voss
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Border Radio begins like a low-budget crime caper, and ten minutes were enough for me to decide to do something else that morning. I began again another day with the expectation of just getting through. Time is all Border Radio needs. A true ensemble picture, it revels in its ever-widening circle of musician cast members, who come and go with an amateur's uneasiness diffused by a comfort in the familiar: the clubs they play, the houses where they live, the people they see on Friday nights. Instead of crowding the threadbare narrative, the cast hangs on the line like Sunday on a fishing pole.
The four years it took three directors to complete Border Radio ratchet down the opening rush to studies of ambient sounds in Echo Park, the cadence and faces of conversations, and the refraction of light on surf, on sand, on the white walls of cozy LA bungalows. At some point, Anders, Lent, and Voss became more interested in their own milieu than the movie. They sacrificed a better film, but instead of a bargain basement rental, Border Radio became exactly what it was: friends and a life they were proud of - enough to share - and something special in ways only the unconsciously personal can be.
directed by Allison Anders, Dean Lent, & Kurt Voss
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Border Radio begins like a low-budget crime caper, and ten minutes were enough for me to decide to do something else that morning. I began again another day with the expectation of just getting through. Time is all Border Radio needs. A true ensemble picture, it revels in its ever-widening circle of musician cast members, who come and go with an amateur's uneasiness diffused by a comfort in the familiar: the clubs they play, the houses where they live, the people they see on Friday nights. Instead of crowding the threadbare narrative, the cast hangs on the line like Sunday on a fishing pole.
The four years it took three directors to complete Border Radio ratchet down the opening rush to studies of ambient sounds in Echo Park, the cadence and faces of conversations, and the refraction of light on surf, on sand, on the white walls of cozy LA bungalows. At some point, Anders, Lent, and Voss became more interested in their own milieu than the movie. They sacrificed a better film, but instead of a bargain basement rental, Border Radio became exactly what it was: friends and a life they were proud of - enough to share - and something special in ways only the unconsciously personal can be.
posted by NPK at 12:50 PM
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