I saw Jerry Haynes, aka for local Dallas kids in the 1970′s, Mr. Peppermint, in the parking lot of the Albertson’s talking to an older man. At first I thought, “Hey, it’s Mr. Peppermint.” Secondly, I thought, “Wait a minute – he must live around here.”

Mr. Peppermint was the host of Peppermint Place, a local kids show in Dallas that showed in the area from 1975 to 1995. Mr. Peppermint, wearing his trademark white and red striped blazer, and his sidekick Muffin the Bear entertained me daily when I was a kid. Think of it as a local version of Captain Kangaroo, if you will.

Years ago when I worked at a bookstore (where I met Bizarro creator Dan Piraro) Haynes would drop by and browse the shelves. He was fairly hippie-ish, often with longish hair. Always quiet, he hardly ever spoke to anybody, which I never took as a sign of arrogance but more of shyness. He was just a very unassuming, very tall guy.

He’s also is the father of Gibby Haynes, the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers. I remember at the time that I learned this (from the newspaper, no less!) and they called his group the ‘B Surfers’. Ah…the naive quaint 1980′s. How we miss your censorious ways.

But back to my story.

So as I’m getting the grocerys in the car and getting one of the kids into the car, I see him walking behind the car. Where was he going? To his car, a green Ford Taurus. How un-pepperminty of him.

He gets in, I start heading home, he leaves and I get it into my head to follow him. I thought if he was going in the direction of my house I’d follow along, but if he diverted from my pre-determined course and deviated, I’d break off the chase, resolved to never know where he lived. But when he started driving I saw that he was going the way that I had intended to go in the first place. Very interesting.

So I gunned it and caught up with him. He drove really slow. And strangely, on the wrong side of the street.

But he kept going the same way I would have gone home. And he turned right where I would have turned right, and then he turned left onto a street near mine. Not wanting him to become alarmed, I broke off the chase at this point. But I picked it up again when I realized that the street he was going down existed for only one block, and if he turned there he probably lived on that block.

And he did. Driving down that street slowly, I saw him park the car and get out and go into a house not 3 blocks from mine. Six tenths of a mile. How crazy is that?

My wife and I rented this flick the other night, and it’s not good nor is it bad. It’s just kind of average, hence the two stars. I couldn’t really tell if it wanted to be one of those lighthearted romantic European romps like Cinema Paradiso or a screwball kind of comedy the likes of Jerry Lewis. I mean, it was alright, but that’s all it was. Licia Maglietta plays Rosalba Barletta, an Italian housewife who lives in a small town taking care of her family, a lovely bunch that includes her husband (Antonio Catania) who has been cheating on her for years and her pot-smoking kids.

She seems to exist in their world to feed them and clean up after them. Rosalba is so naive about life that she doesn’t suspect a thing is wrong with it until she takes a family vacation and while trying to fish her wedding ring out of a rest stop toilet bowl she is left behind by the tour bus and subsequently has an epiphany. (Unrelated side note: Maybe my wife and I are different, but I think we would notice if one of the other was missing from a bus while on vacation together. Ah movies, suspension of disbelief and all that.) Rosalba calls her husband (Antonio Catania) on the bus, and he naturally goes ballistic because she’s thrown the group off schedule by getting left behind. This is when Rosalba discovers that she’s little more than a doormat for her hubby, so she takes off for Venice – which she has never seen – for a personal “vacation”.

Enter the screwiness. Quickly Rosabla meets soft-spoken and elusive waiter Fernando Girasoli (Bruno Ganz) who, after a brief encounter at the restaurant where he works, takes pity on her penniless state (she somehow has no money of her own on her) and lets her stay the night at an extra room in his apartment. Fast forward, Fernando has a sad past that he doesn’t speak of, but Rosalba learns by spying on him. She quickly decides to extend her “vacation” by finding a job with a crazy florist, befriending Girasoli’s kooky (and I don’t use that word lightly) next door neighbor, a holistic masseuse (Marina Massironi) who wears jewels in the middle of her forehead and has plumbing problems, and permanently moving into Girasoli’s place on a strictly platonic basis.

Starring:
Licia Maglietta, Bruno Ganz, Giuseppe Battiston, Marina Massironi, Antonio Catania
Directed By:
Silvio Soldini
Release Date:
July 27, 2001
MPAA Rating:
PG-13 for brief language, some sensuality and drug references.
Distributors:
First Look Pictures
2 Stars

Everything comes to a head when Rosalba’s husband tires of his shirts being wrinkled and steps up his quest to bring her home by hiring a plumber/private detective named Costantino (Giuseppe Battiston) to find her. The man is a comedy of errors. He attempts to get into character with a trench coat and clip-on sunglasses, but he’s still a bumbling plumber. Costantino was my favorite character in this uneven film if only because he rose the level of humor here from average to just a tenth of a point above average. I pulled for him because even though he’s in a city of 60,000 people he knows he can find Rosalba, even if he’s got to look at the other 59,999 people first. He was the high point.

In the end, I have no strong feelings about this film. I’m only puzzled by questions like:

Why did the writers feel compelled to make a man named Fernando Girasoli a native of Iceland? “Hi, I’m Fernando and I’m from Iceland.” No wonder he moved to Italy.

Why did there have to be a scene where we are forced to see the sweaty man-boobs of the overweight plumber/private eye? And why would a decent looking woman like the kooky masseuse think that was hot?

But you shouldn’t try too hard to answers to these questions. Even with the added knowledge you’d still end up feeling neither good nor bad about the film.

I saw my first Jim Jarmusch film, Stranger Than Paradise, my 2nd junior year at Baylor in 1993. I was a film major at the time, and the stark cinematography and editing (the camera never moves in a scene and each scene is played from beginning to end with no cuts) was cool. I had always been a fan of those unsung actors, those, “Hey, it’s that guy that was in fill-in-the-blank” movies, and I originally watched it because it had Richard Edson (if you saw him, you’d probably recognize him), but the film drew me in, kind of like A Clockwork Orange. It was hypnotic and auteur cool. After that, naturally, I wanted to see more Jarmusch films.

Up to a point. Yes, I tried to see all of his films. Down by Law, Mystery Train, etc. Then came Night on Earth, what with its 5 cabbies driving around the world on one night and what happens to them, and I just plain lost interest. Maybe it was Winona Ryder and her “it girl” status at the time. Maybe I just didn’t care. Pulp Fiction had just come out, cinema was changing and more exciting, and the Europeanesqueness (is that a word?) of Jarmusch’s ethos just kinda bored me at that point in my filmic development.

It only got worse later. I didn’t care about seeing Dead Man, even though it paired the amazing Crispin Glover and verifiable screen legend Robert Mitchum, or Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai or any of those Coffee and Cigarettes films he’s been doing for almost 20 years. I was bored with Jimmy’s work. I didn’t care for his way of doing The Business anymore.

Starring:
Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Tilda Swinton, Julie Delpy, Chloe Sevigny, Jessica Lange
Directed By:
Jim Jarmusch
Release Date:
August 5th, 2005
MPAA Rating:
R for language, some graphic nudity, and brief drug use.
Distributors:
Focus Features
2 Stars

Bill Murray, on the other hand, had and has never followed the auteur path. He started out as an overt comic on “Saturday Night Live”, moved on to Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes and Ghostbusters. Then out of the blue came The Razor’s Edge and it hit people like a brick wall at the time : How could Bill Murray do drama? Is that even possible?

He was slammed for it and quickly got back into comedy. It was sort of downhill for him from there. Ghostbusters II, Quick Change, Larger Than Life, The Man Who Knew Too Little. He interspersed small gems, and some outright classics, in between these festering steaming turds of celluloid – Groundhog Day, Mad Dog and Glory, and the fabulous Ed Wood, but the verdict was in on Murray by 1997, and his career was DOA.

Then out of the blue Wes Anderson wanted Murray for the part of Herman Blume in his little film Rushmore, and the rest is history. Murray’s career since that touchstone has been one of highs (The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation) and lows (Osmosis Jones, Garfield) but he is now at the point in his acting career that he’s widely respected as an excellent and dependable character actor.

Put the two previously talked about people together, though, and it’s like watching water evaporate off of the sidewalk.

Murray, usually kinetic to a fault, plays Don Johnston, aged womanizer who made a killing in computers and now lives in retirement doing nothing but watch TV and have his ex-girlfriends walk out on him. On the same day that his current flame (Julie Delpy) is leaving him, he receives a letter typed on pink stationary letting him know that he and an unnamed ex-flame had a son 20 years previous and that the boy may be looking for Don. Enter Winston (Jeffrey Wright), Don’s neighbor and an amateur sleuth who takes up the quest to find the letter’s sender with a zealot’s zeal. “You have a son out there. Don’t you want to know who he is?” Don’s initial answer? No. Probably in in his mind it would be Hell No. Undeterred, Winston plunges in, demanding a list of women Don would have known in the Biblical sense roughly 20 years hence. Winston produces an itinerary, driving directions and hotel reservations for Don.

Tired of boredom, or I would hope, out of curiosity, Don takes off to unnamed locales across the US of A searching for his past and, as you can probably guess, something about himself that shows him that he matters in this world. Along the way he gets to see what happened to these women that he knew intimately and how they turned out, and possibly what might happened to himself in a parallel universe. They range from bizarre (Jessica Lange) to funny (Sharon Stone) to pathetic (Tilda Swinton). History comes back to bite Don again and again, but he continues on his quest for reasons, through Jarmuschian logic, that are his alone.

Really, Broken Flowers is not a bad movie, it just isn’t fulfilling. I understand the Jarmuschian logic that the outcome means less than the journey (Movie Trailer Guy Voice – “One Man…Alone…A Quest…of Parenthood….”), but after investing 2 hours of your life, and a hard-earned $16, you might be wanting a little more than is given to you. I won’t give away the end of the film, since I hate people who do that, but yes, you will probably be disappointed unless you’re one of those people that likes to go to a late night coffee shop in the Beatnik part of town after seeing your film and be snarky about what you’ve just witnessed ad nauseaum until late into the night. Bill Murray is really good in his minimalist way here, and I don’t fault him at all for my belief that the film fails. It’s just that I should have looked back to what interested that 21-year-old boy at Baylor and see if that was applicable to my current situation. Maturity should guide us in our choices, so here is a message to you, Glenn Vance, “What would Don Johnston have done here? Would he have gone along with Winston to see a Bergmanesque film about a man searching for his son? Don’s initial answer? No. Probably in his mind it would be Hell No.