Gas, Food, Lodging (1992)

I have seen Gas, Food, Lodging (Allison Anders) mentioned somewhere and I wanted to see it. Even though the locations of the film (Laramie, a small, dusty town in New Mexico) were extremely sympathetic, little else in the movie impressed me. The beginning was a bit promising: this could almost be a Hal Hartley movie, I thought to myself while I watched the strange landscapes, the trucker café and two sisters quarreling, the lines and pace kept at an enjoyable level of laconic deadpan. Hartley delivered good kind of cheese, but in my book, Gas, Food, Lodging is the bad kind of cheese. A daughter wants to get her mother a date (her sense of romance is inspired by campy Mexican movies she enjoys in the local cinema). They live in a trailer park and the older sister is kind of wild. The story never took off for me and most of the turns felt positively badly directed and scripted. During some moments, I had an unnerving sense of having seen the scenes somewhere else, in another movie, but with an identical structure. One enjoyable thing here is to see Hank from Twin Peaks playing the don juan. Ugh, scary.