good evening and welcome to another episode in the continuing saga called this four we've been going on and on for years and years and finally we've come to this my name's bob brown i'm the moderator of tonight's story and with me are two of our regular panelists to my right is marilyn campbell and to my left is janet stern and tonight we are going a little summary of the film well this is a rather hard film to summarize because not very much happens in the narrative sense it's the story of an elderly man played by harry dean stanton who lives in a very small dry arizona town that's partly boarded up and partly inhabited by other old relics like himself and he just follows his day basically he gets up he does his calisthenics he has his coffee he goes to a diner where he has another coffee he reads the news the newspaper and ineffectually does the crossword puzzle and he then even then that in the evenings he goes to a bar where he chats with other people at the bar and they exchange stories and basically that's it janet janet madison there's a little bit of a crisis september ok and i don't imagine that him was a character is supposed to be named and yet he looks like so that he is sort of all of a sudden facing the void and i think the second part if you will of the film after he tries to find because it's a little bit david lynch and yeah yeah he had to say i just saw the trailer and it felt very lynching and in fact when i first heard about the film i assumed because david lynch was in it that it was by david lynch in some way but it must be inspired by you know something like that and also inspired a little bit there are parallels with harrington stand this own life he also the never married doesn't know whether he has children or not did have a love and didn't you know mary and also a lot of the philosophizing that he does and he does a lot of philosophy izing that in his own very cranky way he does and that represents harry dean stanton selassie which is basically we are we are nothing and so i think the i would venture to say that the screenwriters set out to make a story of harry dean stanton life ye before like tom skerritt it plays a marine and all marine who he kind of cycles up to and they become very talkative with each other but also david lynch as we say connected him three films you know well that member we in case our audience hasn't seen it it's really worth watching we have checked the library has it he joked his he was a strange from his brother and he drove his motor powered lawnmower all the way from like indiana or you know i think you know it was further west it was like montana to wisconsin yeah it was kind of going back yes i was going east coming east and his because he was a strange didn't he didn't want his brother he knew that he found out that his brother was ill and he didn't this is directed by david lynch i went and dug into my archives some years ago i bought a box set of david lynch's most obscure short films including one called the cowboy and the frenchman which is about as bizarre as you can get and the story there was a david lynch was in paris and a producer there had an idea to have films made by none french people about their nationalities conception of what french is what a french person is david lynch said i don't think i have one and then he gets back to his hotel he says suddenly i've got an idea and it was to make the most cliched images of cowboys to the most cliched images of a french guy and just put them together in on a ranch oh my accident and harry dean stanton plays the kind of main cowpokes who is hard of hearing because at the age of thirteen and a half he had a thirty ought six shot right next to his ear which blocked out his hearing so throughout a lot of the film he's shouting at people including the french guy who speaks nothing but french and he says i say you get here but of course put in beer because then it was it was bizarre why didn't david lynch fashion but it goes into mixing them up so much that at the end harry dean stanton actually does play cowboy tunes on a samuel beckett is not french he only lived in france that remind me a little bit of waiting for godot if they all these people gather in the bar and have these philosophical discussions about death and and what is actual name is i don't think me what did you feel did you see it think it was a comedy or a swan a meditation it was it was very slow paced very little happens but it's just it's not tragic it's and and parts of it are funny well it's tragic if you are a tortoise lover said basically says how could i have kept that tortoise in my yard all these years he obviously had someplace he wanted to go and it was time for me to let him go and find it that's right and that's what that i did it was a risk i was keeping him from his mission ye 're doing it sort of together yes one thing i noticed about this film which was curious i don't know if it was deliberate was that the it was immensely diverse so for example there are there's an hispanic family in it he's he gets along fine with them he really likes them there's a black diner owner his waitress is black there's a gay to two gay gay not very long but a short in the lead where there are gay kids people all of whom have nothing but respect for each other so i think not entirely clear there's a there's an aversion to the fact that look it has been banned from one of the other bars in town or but he gets along no not ever went down oh no that's not my point was that all of these diverse people of diverse backgrounds get along there's never any sense or even even a twinge of indication that someone is less implied violence because there is i one point harry dames lucky you know lucky challenges the lawyer is making the will for but he's white but yes i know but that but that's not thought that that was interesting and i wondered if it was so tiny a town that one has to think that it was somewhat deliberate i think anyway how old are these filmmakers do you know what generation they're young they're young well young  no i think you're right janet because if you rolled along into any arizona small town you'd probably find hispanic people know but i don't think that you would necessarily find african americans or gay people  of nowhere and his relationship with the hispanic people this completely egalitarian it wasn't there was never a sense that he was lucky who would he be yet looking down on anyway him into his when he falls he collapses and he we we think oh that's the end of lucky because we don't actually see him hit the floor but then you hear the sound of rap he recovered he comes to if david lynch did the programming for you i mean this feels like or fifty five like when it was a movie ever at four fifteen when you first opened was it worth fifty five yeah it was always four fifty five i kept thinking  people so it's not a blockbuster and yet the five people who we were the among we were it was we and three others very engaged and a woman waited for us my husband in the to get up because she wanted to ask yeah i thought i thought the tortoise was also the other you know metaphor the grim winking coffee way and the tortoise is the metaphor for you know and you just keep just keep putting one foot in front of the other can't go in and that's the way lucky life has been with occasional outbreaks of her and yeah and despair there's one scene bob in which he happens to see a tied up dog barking by a pet shop  outside on the porch the dog and like he kind of goes over to pet the dog and then he goes in you think you've seen this picture up one hundred seventy thousand times but anyway he goes in and the woman says to him you know have you ever thought about getting a dog meaning you know you're a lonely person and this would be very nice for you and he said and he starts to look around the pet shop what's this what's is what's is he looks and finally he comes to the crickets and she said oh well these are really to be f reptile right and then nothing more is said or done but that night you see lucky in bed and crickets all over i like those little touches oh yeah i saw that this is available on to download through one of the services after it's had its trick over on what seems to be pretty much near the discussing what right life is all about people trying to make sense of their place in the world right well whether or not lawyers are horrible people who should be shot and bomb or it's not probably that the only character of he's even got gray hair it's not white and it looks natural i don't think it's died at all it's gray it's not white it's great shreya beige brown is like it's got a little whites partier but the rest of his hair is kind of like first i came out and i said this is just like waiting for godot where there's two for people in the midst of emptiness because arizona in the desert is pretty darned empty except for this war of cactuses and and and they are facing the emptiness of the universe anyway and trying to figure out where where their place as if you can have you know  confession and i might things were just interesting would it be possible for me to segue into another film with saw that we had is no longer here so ok and this is agnes fargas new film faces places which in french i think is you like lucky thing as they are eighty eight things are crumbling in the places that she visits with her young artist friend which is basically what the story is about they take their camera and they artist friend does pictures of the locals there's a curfew the things that go down the whole sides of buildings which makes people who are fading themselves very happy because there's some something that is left these are very much working people and you know down on their luck in many cases but the things that they see the places they go are crumbling too and so in in arizona and so in this town and so people are really trying to make sense of what is permanent what is do i even want to think that anything is permanent is that going down the wrong road is everything in permanent both films kind of raise that issue memory definitely memory i thought tha n that and that faces places was more upbeat than that is there visiting these villages of france where she seems to be looking for something that's historically french that something is you know the essence of french  exists maybe in the villages now rather than the cities which are very cosmopolitan and very multicultural and some of the villages actually look pretty don't prosperous and certainly the port she is at the end is of a huge poor and bustling so that's not down on its walk it's just that it's just that there's a sense in that these people in that place that that sort of job that sort of blue collar well paying job is disappearing in this world and that's a shame because these are you know sort of bedrock of a nation well i think it's a sense of what it is about the many ways he's living faced she's looking she's looking she's looking at the past places she's been in her life and revisiting them and seeing how the changed and found cases it's sad and some cases she finds things that remind her good things that's what's great about her movies she always finds things to look at in observance that are interesting in the here and now so it's not all looking back but i think there is a sense of loss and of being very late in her life i mean she got free from i could generation yes so she's having troubles as a filmmaker that's tough yes it is this film was here locally  road road trip with her young friend the graffiti artist who will and wires here one of the loveliest parts though is watching people see his pictures of them and he just loved that like this man does because it makes art so meaningful that intersection really becomes an intersection oh boy i wish we had more time to talk about these films but i'm afraid  varda film will come back yet and for me i may come to the garden yeah well we should hope yeah any last thoughts before we wrap up well my last thought is about the film columbus don't miss it this is the opposite this is a small town in indiana where all the great architects were invited to some sort of civic boosterism to make buildings there and they had it's a small town with the most astonishing buildings from by sar and all of these incredible things and it's a story too but you see how the difference is when you're living in a small town but the but the buildings are majestic well that's got to be it