Kristofferson Paid in Corn Tortillas

Lone Star (1996)
directed by John Sayles
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

I hadn’t seen Lone Star in years, but the movie famously reminds my dad of city council meetings from his years as an attorney in the southeast and southwest regions of the state. Thinking that watching Lone Star would give Elizabeth something to ask him about when we visited San Antonio, I prepared myself to cringe at the long-expired political grandstanding of independent film’s best-known carpetbagger. But Sayles is smart to begin with a murder mystery; the color and life he accrues in patient, watchful takes around his fictional border town add up to something considerably more intelligent than a stir of the superficial melting pot. Like a lot of movies, Lone Star would be worse if it wasn’t so funny, although the line I was waiting for - “Fuck the Alamo” – never came. It’s “Forget the Alamo,” apparently, which raised a good question about why I’d remembered an incorrect and far more aggressive variation, but as a line feels truer to the sympathetic history of South Texas that Sayles has in mind.