DryvBy
Gold Member
In the 20th century, there was a band called Talking Heads and their music was weird. Not weird like "Weird Al", but weird as in weird art. Everyone's heard a Talking Heads song in their lives but most haven't seen the movie David Byrne created in the 80s called True Stories.
When I would go to Blockbuster as a kid, I'd see this movie and I don't know why but I really wanted to watch it. The cover was interesting to me and I enjoyed comedies. I had no idea who the Talking Heads were. I didn't even know what the movie was about. Fast forward to about 4 years ago, I finally ended up buying it on Vudu (which only has the SD quality so I eventually sprung for the Criterion Collection HD remaster). I told my wife I got a movie to watch, so we watched it.
She hated it. She didn't know what the point of the movie was, she hated the music, she hated that nothing really happens in the movie, and she hated how weird it was. I advised a couple of other people to watch it after. None of my friends appreciated it. They had the same complaints. I think they were experiencing the problem I have when I was a David Lynch film. There's parts I really love with Lynch and then I just don't get what it is I watched so I mentally default to finding it horrible.
However, True Stories is different for me. It's a really simple story that doesn't put a protagonist in the driver seat. If anything, the protagonist is the town itself. The story is a combination of those weird conspiracy/joke newspapers from the 20th century such as Bat Boy Found In Cave and crap like that. This small Texas town is full of these types of people while the world is moving on thanks to technology. If anything, the story is just about a town celebrating their towns specialness in the 150th anniversary of Texas.
It's a musical with the entire soundtrack by Talking Heads, but sung by various artists and actors, including John Goodman's romantic song. It's music strings together the oddness of the town and it's people. Byrne is the navigator, taking you from place to place to meet the people of Virgil, TX and how their lives revolve around the company they work for. The town has so many odd characters: a woman who has never left her bed, a husband and wife that haven't spoke in years, a man who can get radio signals from your nose, a church who is obsessed with the gospel of conspiracy theories. There's so much going on in this movie and nothing at all. The amount of twins they found to play parts in this movie is hilarious to me.
"Marriage is a natural thing. And I'm a natural man." -John Goodman
Has anyone else ever seen this movie and enjoyed it? It's one of my favorite movies and I'm actually watching it right now for the 10th time.
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