Seen February 7, 2009: Gas Food Lodging directed by Allison Anders, starring Brooke Adams, Ione Sky, and Fairuza Balk, and with a bunch of supporting actors including James Brolin, Robert Knepper, Donovan Leitch (the one who is Sky’s brother, not her father), and others.

Skye and Balk play two teenage sisters, Trudi and Shade Morton, who live in a trailer with their mother Nora (Brooke Adams) in a dry, desert, go-nowhere town in the southwestern US. Shade is fascinated by an actress in a series of Mexican soap-opera-ish movies with fancy costumes and highly dramatic dialog. This diversion apparently provides her some escape from her plain reality. The three women are often at odds, with worries about money, about men and boys, and from being cooped up in close quarters, sometimes crossing boundaries in roles of mother or sister or daughter. Outside of their family circle each has to deal with other individuals from the town, from the past, from outside their immediate environment.

I wanted to see this for the main actors: in particular I’m a fan of Fairuza Balk and Ione Sky. In the end, though, that’s all I got out of it. I found it to be a rough collection of events and episodes and characters, none of which seemed to go anywhere or relate to any other element in the film. I don’t have a problem with slice-of-life films where there’s not much point other than looking at the subject characters. There are such movies that are among my favorites. There doesn’t have to be a point, but there has to be something. A theme, some cohesion, some transition. Maybe something else. Maybe something undefinable – but at any rate something that didn’t hit me in this movie. Nothing seems to click, e.g. Shade’s obsession with the Mexican films seems to have no influence on her or on the story. Everyone and every event passes by without really touching anyone except perhaps in physical ways. Nobody seems worth knowing, or helping. There’s occasional wistful voice-over dialog by Shade’s character that seems completely out of touch with the movie; its only affect was to make me wonder if maybe it was useful in the book on which this movie was based. I dunno, maybe it’s something in my genes. Judging by a brief scan over comments in the IMDB, it’s mostly women that like it, and mostly men that, like me, don’t get it. For that matter, I don’t even get the title.