Word: virgil
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TRUE STORIES The folks of Virgil, Texas, "don't want freedom/ We don't want justice/ We just want someone to love." Is that weird? Naaah. Not in this surreal funfest from David Byrne, rock's Renaissance guy. Lotsa laughs and neat songs...
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...
...little troublesome," he admits. Ask John Goodman, whose portrayal of the earnestly romantic Louis Fyne is a memorable one, what he thinks about Byrne, and he will smile and say, "That man uses a different dictionary." Spalding Gray, the gifted monologist who appears as the civic leader of Virgil, notes that "David's a paradox. He's the most absent-present person I've ever met. He has two worlds going at the same time...