![]() These lines, I thought, could never have been written about the America created by the freeways. ![]() I recall Auden’s famous lines in “September 1st 1939” ![]() The suburban America I grew up in, the America responsible for freeway oases and tract homes, floats on the ice of permanent fifth-rateness, and whenever I encounter that standard, I feel comforted. Stephen Spender, I think it was, once expressed amazement that anyone could call Americans materialistic - true materialists, he observed, could never have built such a cheesy civilization. It would serve, it was enough, there was no need to do more. I couldn’t quite grasp the point then, but the same confidence was responsible for the look of the restaurant. There was no threat because she wouldn’t recognize one. I can’t help thinking that she displayed a peculiarly American confidence. She was so assured that they were pulling back without acting put off. The truck drivers were a little unnerved. She was friendly without flirting back, unthreatened without any hint of professional cool. They were probably doing it more out of habit than anything else, but they were lifers and their manner had an obvious air of threat. The truck drivers were constantly flirting with her. Even so, she still moved and talked with a kind of style - she had an air about her. She looked bored - but then it was such a foul day she’d probably spent most of her shift there. When she wasn’t waiting tables, she was sitting by the kitchen door, flipping through a newspaper. She didn’t look or act like anything special, just your average Midwestern girl. If I had it to explain again, I would have tried talking about the waitress there. I thought it was appropriate I found it comforting. I didn’t quite see it then, and Beth certainly would not have approved, but the truth was that I didn’t just like the place. ![]() I couldn’t explain it wasn’t an important question for either of us, but I couldn’t. The tacky details were there only to keep it from looking like a cafeteria. She was a connoisseur of kitsch, and by her standards kitsch had to be lurid, grotesque, and uncompromising. I tried to explain - all I could say was that I liked the kitschiness. I said, truthfully, that none of it bothered me there was even a way in which I liked it. The fake wood-grain Formica, the feeble little curtains, the cute place mats, the plastic plants that didn’t even bother to seem real - it was all so tacky, so devoid of locale, so American. She wasn’t being a snob about it she’d been in a lot worse places and would never pretend otherwise. A couple of truck drivers laughed to themselves in the middle of the room, and my friend Beth and I were in a booth in the corner.īeth wasn’t happy with the restaurant. The windows had iced over snowdrifts rearranged themselves in the parking lot. Overlong at 121 minutes (at the very least, those indulgent excerpts from "The Lady Eve," "The Seventh Seal" and "Spirit of the Beehive" could be cut), this film will thoroughly exhaust most viewers' patience.This was a bitterly cold day, the dead of winter. "Road to Nowhere" could be enjoyable if - like Lynch - Hellman was a more stylized filmmaker, but this conspicuously flat work not only lacks striking camera movement but doesn't even have a musical score. It's all quite confusing, and not interesting enough to worry about. Meanwhile, a story consultant and insurance investigator (Waylon Payne) is equally fixated on Laurel, and believes she is secretly portraying herself after switching identities to avoid capture. As shooting continues, Mitchell and Laurel becomes lovers and this compromises the project - smitten Mitchell begins skewing scenes toward his lady, much to the dismay of the screenwriter and other cast members (Cliff De Young plays her older co-star). Well, unless you count Sossamon's stunningly photogenic face. Scenes occur both inside and outside the fictional film without adequate warning, and this arty ambiguity is as about as far as the movie's pleasures go. This film-within-a-film aims to be a David Lynch-like puzzle in which alter-ego director Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan) casts troubled novice Laurel Graham (Shannyn Sossamon) in his erratic dramatization of a true story about a doomed, con-artist couple. Hard to believe "Road to Nowhere" is what lured director Monte Hellman back to feature films after a 22-year break.
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