Word: virgil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...modest about it, True Stories is a divine comedy for the '80s, with Narrator Byrne acting as a hip-nerd Virgil to the moviegoer's Dante in this travelogue of the surreal landscape called Virgil, Texas. It also represents the first big-screen flowering of the decade's dominant hip sensibility. Like Letterman with his "Small-Town News" and "Stupid Pet Tricks," Byrne is fascinated by the seemingly banal. Like Lynch's Blue Velvet, True Stories rides the subterranean currents of bizarre behavior that bubble under Smalltown, U.S.A. "It's a strange world, isn't it?" the characters in Blue...
That nothing much happens during our three days in Virgil -- oh, there's a Felliniesque fashion show and a parade and a talent show and later a wedding -- is O.K. by our Narrator. He wants us to observe the eccentric rhythms of people's minds and movements. A girl in a white dress careers down the empty highway, emitting bird cries, singing in her own language. Civic Leader Earl Culver (Spalding Gray) uses tomatoes and peppers to illustrate a dinner-table harangue on the fragmenting of capitalism; the lobster centerpiece revolves and glows. A middle-age executive, alone...
...developed the screenplay, Byron stripped the narrative of interstices and "intrigue" so that there would be less interaction among the main characters, and the vision of Virgil would be filtered through the Narrator's unblinking eyes. It is through his outsider's eye that the good people of Virgil are viewed. Yet an unusual symbiosis takes place. The Eastern sharpies in the film's crew and the hard-caked rurals whose town they invade get along just fine. Earl Culver and Louis and the Lying Woman and the rest, while remaining very much their idiosyncratic selves, easily form the newest...
...film has no box-office stars, no sex appeal and no traditional production values. It is photographed in hues that look like a dishware party -- color by Tupperware -- and its biggest scene is a talent contest that concludes a sesquicentennial Celebration of Specialness in the mythical town of Virgil, Texas (pop. 40,000 and growing). Kind of a downtown Our Town, you might say, full of high boho spirits and jokey asides that illuminate with fondness as often as they satirize without malice. But do not doubt it for a second: True Stories is the most joyous and inventive rock...
...thing that pumped and pulsed against his palms, pushing them back and forth. (nonononononono)." The Burlesque Locution: " 'Good ahfternyoon, deah lady,' Richie said in his best Baron Butthole Voice. 'I am in diah need of three tickey-tickies to youah deah old American flicktoons.' " The Fancy Juxtaposition: epigraphs from Virgil and Mean Streets. The Self-Deflating Jape: "I am . . . the only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women . . . rape all the men . . . and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!" And, most discouraging of all, the Unconscionable Length: 1,138 pages...