Border Radio (1987, Allison Anders & Dean Lent & Kurt Voss) (Patreon)

62/100

Seems heavily influenced by Stranger Than Paradise, but Anders, Lent and Voss turn out to have met working as production assistants on Paris, Texas, so I guess it's more a case of similar aesthetics derived from the same source. Here, though, there's no comedy of mutual incomprehension—just a bunch of cowpunk-associated musicians (plus one critic!) roaming around scrubby Echo Park locations, doing their best to ignore the film's vaguely noir-esque narrative. Viewed with any objectivity whatsoever, Border Radio barely passes for a movie, but it consistently tickled me nonetheless; this is the kind of extremely relaxed semi-improvisation that works for me, with nobody ever appearing to be even the tiniest bit anxious about having to invent dialogue on the spot. It's the kind of movie in which someone decides that one character should futz around with another character's cat, but the cat in question really doesn't care to be picked up, so the actor just kinda naturalistically copes with getting the shit scratched out of him while he's trying to steer the scene toward some kind of conclusion, and that's more entertaining than anything that might have existed on paper. I'd always assumed there's a lot more music in this than is actually the case, but what little we do see, along with the film's overall anti-social vibe, inspired deep pangs of nostalgia for a subgenre with which I'm not even particularly familiar. Goes nowhere slowly and I was along for the ride, though I'd speedily go mad were every film this ramshackle. For a précis of its attitude, just look at the end credits, which include "Many curses on: Those who tried to thwart us."