STAR TIME
*** (A must-see) Directed and written by Alexander Cassini With Michael St. Gerard, John P. Ryan, Maureen Teefy, and Thomas Newman.
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One of the most appealing things about Star Time–an eerie independent American feature that satirizes some of these notions about “family values” and television (showing only at midnight on Friday and Saturday this week and next at the Music Box)–is that it hasn’t been discovered yet. In the world of Entertainment Tonight it doesn’t exist, and it’s hard to imagine it ever will. Moreover, unlike most offbeat features, it hasn’t yet been previewed or “passed for approval” by the tastemakers in New York, and to the best of my knowledge has been shown at only one film festival, in Washington, D.C., last year. Apart from some recent midnight screenings at the Nuart in Los Angeles, it may not have received any other public screenings.
Thematically, Star Time crosses The King of Comedy with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and unexpectedly shows what these two pictures have in common. Stylistically, it’s somewhat less assured than either, but this undoubtedly stems in part from the fact that it doesn’t try for a realistic narrative. (Even the fantasy premises it sets up are occasionally violated; at one weird and wonderful moment worthy of Eraserhead, a certified corpse suddenly slaps a live character on the jaw, and no explanation is ever offered.) As reviewer Hal Hinson noted in the Washington Post, writer-director-producer Alexander Cassini “seems to be making up the rules for his fantasy-reality games as he goes along”–a practice that’s hard to defend according to conventional aesthetics, but that makes this movie a lot more enjoyable as a transgressive midnight offering.
Worse yet, Star Time proceeds allegorically, like an art film, and symbolically, like a dream. The same could be said of Batman and Batman Returns, but what makes this movie a truly maverick expression–not only unfashionable but unauthorized in relation to other current offerings–is that its pretensions aren’t backed up by stars and elaborate production values. All it has going for itself is taste, imagination, and intelligence. Once upon a time there was a semirespectable tradition of low-budget pretentious movies of this kind, but the major studios, wanting to make big-budget pretentious movies the only game in town, have pretty well succeeded in wiping out the alternative form, at least from commercial screens. Star Time has managed to sneak past the multinational thought police only by being programmed at midnight in a few independent theaters.
Apart from a few goofy flourishes, this is basically what Star Time consists of. It isn’t very profound or nuanced as analysis; its insights are more a manner of poetics than polemics. But to find poetics at all in this branch of filmmaking is reason enough to pay attention. I don’t know who writer-director-producer Alexander Cassini is, though the final credits inform me that the wailing saxophone solo in the title tune is his, and he also appears as one of the TV anchormen. I’d love to see what he does next–assuming that he gets another chance, which seems highly unlikely.
