An octet or so of eighties rock has-beens--candidates for "Whatever Happened to...?" if not a full-fledged VH-1 bio--drive back and forth to each other's houses in the rustic, remote yet luxuriant environs of Coldwater Canyon. The writer-directors, Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, get exactly what these people's lives feel like: the lazy afternoons spent in comfort, by people who have forgotten how they got to be this comfortable and what they're supposed to do next. Not to mention, the disparity between cockney rock gods and their bourgeois lifestyles is always good for a laugh. But the filmmakers get at something more off-the-bullseye than the typical, Spinal Tap-ish take on this material: for example, the wistfulness, totally unstressed, of a once-known early-eighties actress who wakes up to discover that she's being offered the role of Christina Ricci's mom.
None of Allison Anders' other movies have added up to much in my book, and one of them--her segment of FOUR ROOMS--was a low-watermark fiasco. But, maybe with the help of Voss, she seems to have found her groove here: the movie suggests an affable, offhand, funnily perceptive riff on an Altman mosaic. The subtext of the movie is a fortyish L.A. woman's terror of the hungrier and tastier Eve Harringtons below them; each of the subplots has a comically avaricious man-eater. Among the more mature dames, Rosanna Arquette has matured into a lush, pleasing actress as she ripens into her indie phase; Ally Sheedy is a revelation as a frazzled-unto-muteness serial dater; and Beverly D'Angelo is a bolt from the blue as a rich, embittered, crablike widow. As her opposite number, an aging arena god with a fear of women over twenty, Michael Des Barres is sheerly amazing--a low-comedy Terence Stamp.
None of Allison Anders' other movies have added up to much in my book, and one of them--her segment of FOUR ROOMS--was a low-watermark fiasco. But, maybe with the help of Voss, she seems to have found her groove here: the movie suggests an affable, offhand, funnily perceptive riff on an Altman mosaic. The subtext of the movie is a fortyish L.A. woman's terror of the hungrier and tastier Eve Harringtons below them; each of the subplots has a comically avaricious man-eater. Among the more mature dames, Rosanna Arquette has matured into a lush, pleasing actress as she ripens into her indie phase; Ally Sheedy is a revelation as a frazzled-unto-muteness serial dater; and Beverly D'Angelo is a bolt from the blue as a rich, embittered, crablike widow. As her opposite number, an aging arena god with a fear of women over twenty, Michael Des Barres is sheerly amazing--a low-comedy Terence Stamp.