Bagdad Cafe: the second selection of the Sunday afternoon film club my wife and a friend have initiated. The site, Dedham's Riverdale section, overlooking the Charles. Present, besides founders, a couple we had met before and an older lady from down the street. The talk: Canadian politics of the late sixties, travels in girlhood with a favorite uncle, the value of single sex schools. Very affable, though I felt my opinions turning a little argumentative. Down, boy.
The film, about a stranded German woman in the Mojave Desert, was a hoot. We loosened up even more as we laughed, commented, urged on the characters. How wonderful the way acting people can transform the way they seem. The stiff and portly Marianne Sagebrecht, much like a porcelain doll, glowing with sweat, at the beginning was by the end relaxed, loose, dancing and doing magic on stage, glowing with inner radiance.
After the film, we asked, 'Why have we not heard of the film before?' Our children were small when it came out in the late eighties, and perhaps we had not been able to afford video tape players. The movie, however, was a real treat, we agreed.
With this, we entered the ranks of cult movies enthusiasts, the informal community which had posted many online responses to the film. Almost uniformly, we spoke of coming across the film by accident, then of being perplexed by its first few minutes, then of being 'strangely drawn in'. We admitted it's a movie not perhaps for everyone, but a winning tale, nonetheless--this seemingly haphazard account of odd characters finding ways to befriend each other. Virtually plotless, character-driven, with an appeal hard to convey, it's a movie we reported we were all were delighted to have found.
Now some of you say it's a treat you give yourselves regularly: 'For me, it was like a great book that you just can't put down, and that you want to read over and over again to see if you missed anything, or merely to recapture the warm feeling you got the first time through.'
I may join you all in the once a year club. Our Sunday movie club just expanded.
The film, about a stranded German woman in the Mojave Desert, was a hoot. We loosened up even more as we laughed, commented, urged on the characters. How wonderful the way acting people can transform the way they seem. The stiff and portly Marianne Sagebrecht, much like a porcelain doll, glowing with sweat, at the beginning was by the end relaxed, loose, dancing and doing magic on stage, glowing with inner radiance.
After the film, we asked, 'Why have we not heard of the film before?' Our children were small when it came out in the late eighties, and perhaps we had not been able to afford video tape players. The movie, however, was a real treat, we agreed.
With this, we entered the ranks of cult movies enthusiasts, the informal community which had posted many online responses to the film. Almost uniformly, we spoke of coming across the film by accident, then of being perplexed by its first few minutes, then of being 'strangely drawn in'. We admitted it's a movie not perhaps for everyone, but a winning tale, nonetheless--this seemingly haphazard account of odd characters finding ways to befriend each other. Virtually plotless, character-driven, with an appeal hard to convey, it's a movie we reported we were all were delighted to have found.
Now some of you say it's a treat you give yourselves regularly: 'For me, it was like a great book that you just can't put down, and that you want to read over and over again to see if you missed anything, or merely to recapture the warm feeling you got the first time through.'
I may join you all in the once a year club. Our Sunday movie club just expanded.
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