Golden Eighties

sydney5.0

wow men really invented capitalism just so they could get horny at the mall

KYK4.5

chantal akerman's IN THIS ECONOMY? the musical. also, troll move to cast a pop star (lio) in a musical and not give her any singing parts.

nadine5.0

this would make a perfect double feature with david byrne's TRUE STORIES - both films look at the shopping mall through a lens of awe and wonder, but still remain critical of the economic apparatus that led to the mall's replacement of other, less insidious venues for communal commerce. for consumers, the shopping mall is a refuge from the rain; for the people who work there, it can be a suffocating prison. but a delightful social microcosm still manages to operate within its confines. the mall itself (or at least the type of mall that exists in this film) seems to already be a species under threat of extinction; the locally-owned business that inhabit it are constantly under threat from outside forces of economics and government, as well as the ever-present need to Expand, like the film's characters feel the forces of temptation and former lovers wear away at at their relationships. i was also reminded quite a bit of ONE FROM THE HEART in how both coppola and akerman use choreography to eschew traditional narrative structures and, through movement and dance, transition from one narrative thread to another. characters constantly almost-but-not-quite bump into each other, and the narrative uses that as an excuse to change the course of its flow (note that both of these films predate SLACKER and soderbergh's visual "hyperlinking,' which function similarly, albeit through conversation in linklater and physical objects in the case of soderbergh).