The Straight Story
Rental and DVD (£19.99)
FilmFour/VCI Cert U
****
A David Lynch film, but the only surreal note is the opening credit: Walt Disney presents a film by David Lynch. I'd love to hear Lynch's pitch for this in Hollywood. "This old bloke goes to see his brother on a lawn-mower." "OK, Dave. Any severed ears, any dwarves speaking Atlantean?" "Nope."
This is a film as simple and uncluttered as its title, and for those of us who battled through 90s Lynch - the endless excess of Wild at Heart, the incomprehensibility of Lost Highway - it is entirely a good thing. This is Lynch back on track and it couldn't be more straight and narrow.
The Straight Story is paced as gently as its lead character's speed. It observes the countryside and the weather changes and it's not afraid of silence. Richard Farnsworth, in the lead role, gets a very rare chance to play a lead character in his 70s - he's 79 playing 73 - and he's presented with the kind of dignity you usually find only in Oriental movies. He's stubborn, but he's no cantankerous grumpy old man.
On his ponderous journey from Iowa to Wisconsin, based on a real journey made in 1994, he encounters people - a pregnant runaway, a distraught woman who has run over a deer, a clump of cyclists, a family who let him camp out while the mower is repaired. Gradually, parts of his past life are revealed and his presence puts others' lives in perspective.
If this sounds horribly sentimental, it's a trap that is consistently, if narrowly, avoided. Farnsworth's trip looks lovely and lets you enjoy the scenery at a natural speed (compared to a Sinclair C5, this is luxury travel). Lynch allows a little comic relief in twin cycle repairmen who are like Tweededum and Tweedledee and the only mistake is putting some background battle noises on a war veterans' conversation. Straight and damn fine - it's the kind of movie Twin Peaks' Agent Cooper might have made.
Happy Texas
Rental
Buena Vista Cert 12
***
An amiable and engaging comedy and further evidence of the greatness of William H Macy, who turns a minor role as a sheriff discovering his latent homosexuality into a monument of broken-hearted stoicism. Lead characters, Jeremy Northam and Steve Zahn, break out of a chain gang and steal a car belonging to a couple of gays on their way to present the Little Miss Fresh-Squeezed Pre-Teen contest.
You can imagine the rest of the plot but writer Ed Stone and first-time director Mark Illsley pull some surprises and throw in a few nice lines: "He was lookin' at you the way a fat man looks at fried food", frustrated Ally Walker is told. Walker turns in a memorably likeable performance as the bank manager drawn to the apparently gay Northam and Zahn, whose dim stoner was one of the best things in Out of Sight, is fun again as the con who gets serious about preparing his charges for the pageant. The real theme is the effect of small town attitudes.
Romper Stomper
DVD (£17.99)
Medusa
Cert 18
***
Man of the moment Russell Crowe made his name as a demonic tattooed Mein Kampf-reading neo-nazi in Melbourne in a provocative and uncompromising 1993 release, debuting on DVD. It begins with a ferocious skinheads v Vietnamese battle with baseball bats and knives.
Writer-director Geoffrey Wright, a former critic, gives the film a terrific adrenalin rush and Crowe's malevolent stare puts him in the league of Tim Roth and Ed Norton for scary, intelligent swastika-fans. Oddly, while other members of the gang turn out to have been abused children or suffered absent parents, Crowe is given no backstory at all, he just seems malevolent by nature. One scene coupling classical music (Bizet here) with the old u/v inevitably recalls A Clockwork Orange but mostly Romper Stomper is its own animal, not as thought-provoking as France's skinhead saga La Haine, but undeniably powerful and disturbing.
