How does a terrific film by an Oscar nominated writer/director with an all star cast end up going direct to video? Who knows, but I hope the persons responsible were tarred and feathered off the studio lot. On a must mention list of staggeringly overlooked films, Bob Gale’s Interstate 60 ranks pretty goddamn far up there for me, and how it slipped past both marketing fanfare and enduring notoriety is both beyond my comprehension and a full on crying shame. Gale also wrote a little flick you may have heard of called Back To The Future, which went on to gather a decent amount of steam, and if that story was packed with interesting ideas, wait until you see the kind of dense, highly philosophical and tantalizingly verbose scenarios he whips up here. Remember that old book The Phantom Tollbooth by “? If you do, you’ll remember it’s protagonist, a precocious kid named Milo and his grammatically scintillating descent into a world where meaning takes on a meaning of its own and every character he meets has a very specific thematic part to play. Well, Interstate 60 is kind of like if Milo grew up into James ‘Cyclops’ Marsden and continued his journey down the literary yellow brick road for a brand new, adult orientated set of adventures starring a whole host of Hollywood heavy hitters whose involvement still somehow couldn’t shake this piece out of sleeper-ville. Marsden is Neal, a young man at a crossroads in terms of jobs, relationships and his place in the world. After a bizarre accident puts him in the hospital, the mysterious duty doctor (Christopher Lloyd) gives him the keys to a sports car and sends him off on a strange odyssey along Interstate 60, a stretch of highway that doesn’t appear to exist on any maps. This is of course a journey of self discovery, with life lessons and painful truths blooming in thickets along the way like wildflowers on the roadside. He’s looking for answers, which he often finds but not in the way he thought or hoped, also searching for his dream girl, whom he finds in adorable Amy Smart but not without a deft test of character first. The cast is all out brilliant here: Chris Cooper is dangerously engaging as an unconventional bank robber, Kurt Russell painfully funny as the sheriff of a small county who has a cheerfully bohemian attitude towards narcotics, and a very important point to prove. Watch for a quick cameo from Marty McFly too. The episodic nature is fluidly soldered together by Gary Oldman’s recurring oddball O.W. Grant, a man with no genitals who grants everyone one wish by blowing green smoke out of his monkey shaped pipe. Such are the delightful eccentricities on display and more, but it’s never just about silliness and surrealities, there are important, enlightening ideas at play here, the script is almost too inspired to serve one film only, there’s so much going on. I wish this one would get picked up for re-distribution or something, it’s too great of a film to be exiled in obscurity the way it has been, there isn’t even a decent DVD out there. If you like your comedies smart, insightful and the right amount of weird, please go seek this one out. I mean, just look at that cast.
-Nate Hill
Podcasting Them Softly 