Gas Food Lodging

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ashley h Gas Food Lodging is a boring film. It is about a waitress who lives with her two teen daughters in a trailer park in New Mexico. Brooke Adams and Fairuza Balk give horrible performances. The screenplay is badly written. Allison Anders did a terrible job directing this movie. I was not impressed with this motion picture. Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member Interesting character study of a single mother and her two, differently tempered, daughters trying to find their place in the world while living in Laramie. I didn't quite connect with this emotionally but appreciated the touch shown by Anders in her first time directing, walking the edge between despair and hopefulness, while also avoiding the melodramatic trap that would have degraded this film in the long run. Great use of the natural landscape, contrasting the big wide open spaces with the smallness, both in experience and mind, of some of the members from that town. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/20/23 Full Review Tom M Great indie film. Fairuza Balk is brilliant and supporting cast is very good. Awesome soundtrack. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 11/21/20 Full Review glenda l We found it very entertaining. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member The characters of Allison Anders's affecting "Gas Food Lodging" (1992) will never know what it's like to be at peace - they'll forever be laboring, forever be too co-dependent to ever live their respective lives completely detached from one another. Dwellers of the kind of small, American town populated by few but visited by tourists on long road trips and hungry truckers aplenty, all they know how to do is live in the moment. Day to day existence is a struggle unlike any other. Because none of them are going to go to college and none of them are going to one day make something of themselves. They're going to be tied down to the food service industry and are perhaps going to get married and have kids out of boredom and obligation. Such aren't cynical notions - presented to us in the film is a character study so immersed in the mundanities of blue collar life that such depressive things don't much seem to be out of the ordinary. "Gas Food Lodging" revolves around the hardships endured by single mom Nora (Brooke Adams) and her two young daughters, the older Trudi (Ione Skye) and the blossoming Shade (Fairuza Balk). Floundering in her raising of them in a trailer park in a minuscule midwestern town, Nora attempts to look for love whilst waitressing, with Trudi using promiscuity and class cutting as methods of escape and with Shade utilizing Spanish matinees as vehicles for introspection. The film transitions between the plights of the trio like minor Altman, and maybe even like the latter's "3 Women" (1977), they sometimes appear to be a single person represented through different identities - Trudi and Shade are essentially embodiments of Nora in her younger years, with Nora standing as the woman her daughters have great potential to become in their middle-age. Not that Anders is going for intellectual convolution - it's that these characters are so well-defined that we can arguably envision who they were and what they'll become. The characterizational definition, effective and sometimes heartbreakingly truthful, makes the viewing of Nora and company's sufferings remarkably compelling. Whether "Gas Food Lodging" is a coming-of-age film is debatable - while we definitively see Shade mature throughout the course of the movie, the conviction that Trudi and Nora are other versions of her are enough to ward off trappings of the subgenre. But I'm also fairly positive than I see the film as being more than it is. Anders in no doubt set out to craft a gritty slice-of-life, and yet I cannot quite stop myself from coming to my analytical conclusions. But watching "Gas Food Lodging" either from an escapist disposition or otherwise doesn't much dissuade it from being the riveting kitchen-sink imitating drama that it is. Anders is compassionate toward her characters and her ensemble undoubtedly understands them. Adams, Skye, and Balk all bring a humanity to their portrayals that distinguish the family as being one everlastingly fighting to reach self-actualization, their flirtations with lash-outs and bad behaviors only effects of their trying to understand who they are. We could watch them go through the motions in the expansive limits of an epic and never lose sight of our caring for them, warts and all. Because hope is always at the forefront of "Gas Food Lodging," it never becomes the disillusioned feature that it could be. One day we hope that Nora will find a man she really loves, get a decent education, and break out of the small world she's found herself trapped in her entire life. That Trudi, despite her being a consistent fuck-up, will learn how to overcome her self-doubts and turn into the success she probably never will be. That Shade, who we immediately decide has a shot at breaking free from her dysfunctional upbringing, will thrive in a place that isn't her pint-sized hometown. Maybe it's all wishful thinking. But we root for these people enough to keep these fragments of optimism, and that's crucial for "Gas Food Lodging's" effectuality. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/03/23 Full Review Audience Member As meditation on growing up poor and female, this double edged sword challenges stereotypes of class, gender and race as portrayed on film. Director Allison Anders gives us a private look into a corner of American life not usually discussed on the big screen. She tells not only her story, but the stories of all the unrepresented single women and people of color struggling to make their way in American. Life shattering circumstances occur every day in this look at female coming of age in the 1990s. Great performances all around with nuance and conflict. Anders must be held among her Sundance peers (Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen) as one of the premiere filmmakers of the American Independent Film Movement. Film schools take note, teach her stories, share her films. Studios #HireTheseWomen! Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/19/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Gas Food Lodging

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