American Strays (1996)

I found a copy of this movie paired on the same DVD with the 1997 Gary Cole movie "Santa Fe". It was an apt pairing, because I found both movies to be extremely strange (though each was strange in its own original way.) Anyway, on to "American Strays"... As others here have pointed out, there is a strong Quentin Tarantino feeling to this movie, with its multiple stories and its quirky characters. Admittedly, with the movie jumping from one story to another every few minutes, the movie certainly never gets dull. But all the same, at the end the movie is somewhat unsatisfying. I think a big problem with the movie is that many of the characters are TOO quirky, coming across as live action cartoon characters instead of believable yet quirky people. Another problem is that while the movie tries to bring all the stories together at the end, there are two stories that don't really have a connection to the other stories that unfold during the movie. This movie really needed a few more rewrites before filming started. It's not an awful movie - as I said, it's not boring - but its unsatisfying edge will probably turn off a mass audience. In the end, the only people who will probably embrace the movie warts and all are those who are big fans of quirky low budget independent movies.

I think American Strays emerged when somebody got drunk in a film editing class and began splicing together outtakes. Bits and pieces from what could have been whole movies got thrown together to make one really disjointed piece of work.That's all I can say about American Strays. In a sense it's a good title for the movie because it is about strays as the bits and pieces are put together like so much flotsam and jetsam salvaged from an ocean wreck.A couple of the stories looked interesting like John Savage as the serial killer vacuum cleaner salesman, but in the end the whole thing is just a lot of mish-mash.

Quentin Tarantino gets under my skin, where Richard Rodriguez does not. Its a corner of myself I do not quite understand. If you have QT wonder, this could help.Tarantino places the viewer as a sort of museum visitor. He has this virtual video store of references, sometimes well arranged. You are not supposed to actually experience anything; you are supposed to slowly walk by while they blast something out, coming to meet you. Its cinema by advertising, experience by push.I like it better when a filmmaker builds something I can enter; it doesn't matter whether it is an escape or not. If he builds niches for me to enter and explore, if he invites or teases me in, then I commit, I invest, I experience and am changed somehow.This apparently trivial movie does that. Its just as brutally comic as the QT school, with its faux quaintness and engineered humor. It also avoids the challenge of long form film-making by assembling numerous small stories. It similarly is a pastiche of references from other, real films, films with actual identity. But it works.Three real stories here, all love stories. The suicidal loser who gets the sexy traveler; the outresourced husband who "finds" his wife and place again; and the two serial killers who find each other and ride off together. They are stitched by common local, similar upholstery and a temporally but not spatially shared climax.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Strayed persons in a strayed movie. Six or seven scripts, each ten minutes long, rolled into one pointless movie with no direction or redeeming value whatsoever.Well, maybe a few laughs here and there. But this has been done better, American Perfekt for example. The title says enough, I guess...