Border Radio

I just saw this movie for the first time tonight, and I loved it. It is beautifully shot with some great performances. It's funny, dark, and real. The music is great. As for the film being a "historical document," it does encapsulate part of the L.A. music scene in the '80s, but the movie is actually pretty timeless and still stands up today without ever seeming like a caricature of the times. This is one of the finest low-budget indie films I have seen. It really doesn't even need to be qualified that way. It is just an enjoyable film that works. Chris D.'s performance is especially poignant and Luanna Anders is perfect. If you love L.A., punk, or just a good story, see this film.

This is a breezy hang-out film featuring a handful of dreamers and goofballs of the mid-80s SoCal punk / proto-grunge scene. The stakes are never very high and nothing much of consequence happens, but it has a low-key charm if you know these kind of people.

It shares some of the same DNA as Clerks, River of Grass, and Bottle Rocket, though it is not as funny or clever as those later films. Good Sunday afternoon watch that doesn't demand a lot of engagement. That it has a nice soundtrack probably goes without saying, given the talent involved.

Had Border Radio not been released on the prestigious Criterion Collection label, I doubt many people, even the most hardened cinephiles, would be aware of its existence. It's less a cogent film and more a peculiar oddity from an era that was brewing in American film, which was the do it yourself (DIY) movement that basically involved a slew of young directors seeing films and becoming inspired enough to make their own works with the technology readily available to them. Being that home video has begun and VHS camcorders were becoming more common and affordable, unknowns turned acclaimed directors like Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, Kevin Smith, and Jim Jarmusch took their inspiration from certain films, and even films made by one another, and used it as the gas to fuel their latest projects.

One of the few female directors from that time period, Allison Anders, who seems to get lost in the shuffle to her more successful male counterparts, helped kick off the DIY movement more or less with Border Radio, a perplexing eighty-minute film that functions less like a film and more like a rambling musing on rock and roll, punk-culture, and the aimless and desolate landscape of a border community. This particular film concerns a trio of of Southern Californian musicians, who hold up a nightclub they performed at for $1,000 for a presumably unpaid show before hightailing to Mexico just as soon as they arrived. They are also in search of Jeff (Chris D.), a rocker who goes missing around the same time, resulting in a search for him by, not only the criminals, but Jeff's ex-wife.

This plot is a lot easier to understand on paper than practice; Border Radio is about as disjointed as a film can be, essentially playing hopscotch with the idea of a conventional and linear narrative. Distracting us from the occasionally plodding and unclear characters and story is the abundance of natural beauty that directors Anders, Dean Lent, and Kurt Voss convey quite nicely through black and white, Super 16mm filmstock. The result is a film that feels like a shoddy home movie, only adding to the kind of yesteryear punk style that would make an older, wiser Richard Kern crack a faint grin, especially after the masterpieces he created after working with Sonic Youth.

Border Radio is a tricky film to understand in that it's unconventionality and lack of a cohesive narrative bleed through it like an unattended to flesh wound. It's never really that funny, never completely interesting, and always seems to leave you at arm's length with all its characters and their situations. Having said all of that, its coldness is a key element in punk filmmaking, at least the kind I've seen. It's a film with an attitude and unwillingness to compromise its style for anything in the way of substance - sort of like the DIY films of the 1990's, which sort of just stumbled their way into being considered smart, observant comedies thanks to those who went out of their way to rent them at the videostore countless times. With Border Radio, there's no mean-spirited comedy, no melodrama, and no real menace or spice to its recipe; it's too busy living a cold and unashamed life to divulge into anything of that magnitude.

Directed by: Allison Anders, Dena Lent, and Kurt Voss.

Originally scripted as a grim film noir homage, a series of financial dry spells stretched out the film's production schedule to three years, whereupon the screen story underwent as many dramatic changes as any of the hard-living bands from the music scene the film adopts as its backdrop.

Star Chris D. insists in the DVD's supplemental features that the original script's noir aspects are what attracted him to the project, but it was only once he became involved that the thing took shape as a "rock movie," with the added participation of D.'s friends (and sometime bandmates) like John Doe and Dave Alvin. Alvin went on to create an eclectic and memorable score for the film (now out of print, sadly), with players culled from friends and colleagues from X, Los Lobos, The Blasters and other local heroes.

Not every film could survive three filmmakers AND active contributions by everyone in the cast, but then it's a rare project that manages to pack this much simpatico talent onto one movie poster.

Additional DVD extras include deleted scenes, a potent "trailer" (including several moments not in the finished film) set to a driving musical score, and a pair of loose, enjoyable commentary tracks. Another welcome addition is Chris D. and The Flesh Eaters' vintage ain't-no-WAY-this-is-running-on-MTV music video for their classic "The Wedding Dice" (comically mangled by Chris Shearer in the film itself).

Had it followed its intended "straight noir" course, BORDER RADIO may well have survived as an interesting curio; but as it turned out, the film stands as a fitting elegy to an era, both in its depiction of a musical phenomenon's sunset and for its unique collaborative approach to film-making. That both still feel like breaths of fresh air twenty years on only stands as a testament to their legitimacy.

Like so many of the "lost" bands of the music scene it salutes with unabashed affection, BORDER RADIO is ripe for rediscovery.

I've become a fan of the criterion collection over the past few years or so. I consider the institution a staple in the film industry, both in recognizing and preserving pivotal pieces throughout the years. In fact, seeing the criterion collection symbol on a DVD cover sparks my interest in films that I probably wouldn't think twice about watching otherwise. An example of this is Border Radio. I anxiously awaited a screening of this film because of its importance to indie film explosion, and I am a big supporter of indie flicks. But as I watched it, I realized that this is a very good student film. But it's too amateur and unseasoned to earn any comparison to better indie flicks and better Hollywood flicks. The film is sloppy in its structure. After establishing the characters, the film takes the shape of a documentary where these characters are interviewed, one-on-one. The idea itself isn't a bad one, but the filmmakers don't give a reason for doing so. Why are these characters are being interviewed? How does it contribute to the story? The characters themselves have absolutely no redeeming qualities and the filmmakers don't give us a way to relate to any of them. The acting is horrific, and better directors in better movies have proved that non-actors can produce good and sometimes great performances. The actors in this movie all look like film students although we know some aren't. The best performance was produced by the Mexican who sang and drank a corona for 1 short scene. The story itself is dull and cliché. If another film student makes a movie that has to do with somebody owing a club owner money, I'm going to scream. More importantly, the film has no premise! Most films have a premise without trying. This one has none, no moral of the story, or no point to the story. These things are learned in film 101. In fact, these things should come natural in any form of storytelling. The only thing that makes this film worth anybody's time is its photography and some of the music. There are some great landscape shots and a beautiful scene where the daughter is circled on a music merry-go-round. Ultimately, this film is a perfect example on how some indie flicks get much props simply because their indie flicks. How this gets the criterion treatment, I have no idea. This is simply a bad movie made my amateur filmmakers still searching for a voice. It took them 4 years to make this movie and, despite how low-budget a film is, it should never take 4 years to make an 83 minute movie with non-actors and a bad script. I do appreciate a movie with good intentions and I would assume that these USC film students had good intentions to make a non-Hollywood film about real people; but those intentions fall massively short. The ridiculously high acclaim that some indie flicks get because they're shot with shoe-string budgets with plot less stories has to stop (in the same way the acclaim some Hollywood flicks get because they have big stories and a predictable storyline has to stop).