Gas Food Lodging
by Allison Anders
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Brooke Adams, Fairuza Balk, Ione Skye, James Brolin, Robert KnepperDirector: Allison Anders
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 101 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-09-23
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures
Movie Reviews of Gas Food Lodging
Movie Review: A Young Woman's version of "The Last Picture Show"
Summary: 4 Stars
My initial impression of "Gas Food Lodging", midway through the film, was that it didn't have much to say to me. I saw a younger teenage daughter in a broken home, a nice well-meaning mother who is exasperated with the older teenage daughter, the older daughter who seems destined for trouble, and some supporting cast that lead me to wonder what was in the town's water. Things happen and more scenes of disfunction appear. I began to see that some things were connecting while others were falling apart. Still no redeeming message until the very end. At that point all that had happened came together in a most beautiful yet poignant way. The message was delivered and the film, from my perspective, was endowed with purpose.
The next day I thought more and more about "Gas Food Lodging". I understood it as a "coming of age" story of a teenage girl. She saw the redeption of everything in her life coming in the form of expected love. However, every expression or exanple of love that she witnessed was broken or never real in the first place. Things kept descending along with her faith that all would be well if everyone could just let it happen. Her search to find the answers failed until the answers found her.
Once the impact of the movie finally sunk in, I was reminded of "The Last Picture Show" of 20-some years earlier. In that book and movie we saw a teenage boy realizing his coming of age in a small Texas town in the middle of nowhere. Sonny also had trouble finding structure as everything around him seemed to fall apart. His outcome was not as reassuring as our young heroine's but it, too, ended with hope emerging from tragedy. Being a teenager is no easy task especially when there is a lack of good role models. It's easy to get lost, misguided, or trapped in solitary confinement. "Gas Food Lodging" leads us in all those directions and then shows us a future of hope. Nicely done.
Summary of Gas Food Lodging
American independent director Allison Anders made her name with this keenly observed tale of a single mother and her two daughters stuck in the truck-stop town of Laramie, New Mexico, barely a fly speck on the never-ending desert horizon. Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk star as sisters Trudi and Shade, who couldn't be more different. Trudi rebels against her mother and her soul-numbing life through sex and develops a reputation among the boys for being easy. Shade is the "good girl" who escapes through the overripe Mexican melodramas in the town's largely vacant theater. Brooke Adams, a loving mother hardened by rejection and a demanding job as a truck-stop waitress, tries to hide her loneliness and disappointment and set Trudi on a better path, but as with so many relationships in this film, conflict brings out the worst in them. Anders, a single mother herself, drew on her own experiences to enrich her adaptation of Richard Peck's novel Don't Look and It Won't Hurt, and she brings a haggard understanding to the strained relations between mother and daughter and the bleak desolation to the lives of three women trapped by circumstance, economics, and landscape, but she also reaches deep into the characters to expose their yearnings and steel their resolve. No knight in shining armor for these women, but Anders allows them to make their way through the emotional landscape with pluck and determination. --Sean AxmakerDrama DVD Video
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