Back to the small screen

I'm going to do what I can to not refer to The Station Agent as a little film.

I make no promises, though.

The Station Agent is an excellent film, introducing us to three lonely people who come together in touching and hilarious starts and stops to make for a wonderful friendship.

We come into the story via the main character, Finn, who inherits an abandoned railroad station house when his employer, landloard, and friend passes away. Fin doesn't drive, so he walks to the depot, taking days to get there and never changing from his ubiquitious black suit. Once he gets there, he avoids contact with anyone, rarely initiating conversation with anyone and answering with little more than single-word answers.

Our next character enters the picture as a motor-mouthed java jockey whose snack truck is parked in the depot's old parking lot. The final piece of the trio enters when she runs Finn off the road twice in one day.

All three are lonely but showing it in very different ways. Through the catalyst of Joe's incessent friendliness, the three open up to each other, reluctantly engaging in the moments of both triviality and honesty that make up the strongest friendships. The development of the friendships isn't without its occasional missteps and hurts, however, and those are the things that make the film truly revealing and wonderful.

And - in a way less than mature comment - it has a midget.

Or a dwarf. I think he's technically a dwarf.

And then there's Donnie Darko. This is one seriously dark and messed up film. I grabbed it from the library's stacks because I'd heard so many good things about it - some from Kevin Smith, I'll admit - from lots of film folks. Don't know that I actually know anybody who's seen the film, at least not anybody who'd mentioned it to me.

Donnie Darko's a seemingly simple story that ends up being pretty complicated. The titular Donnie is having some emotional instability and apparently seeing a six-foot tall, sicko rabbit from the future. And it's not the kind of six-foot tall rabbit like in Harvey. Nope, this is the kind of rabbit that tells Donnie to shatter water mains and burn down houses. It's a solidly sicko rabbit - from the future.

And, honestly, that's about as linear as the storyline gets.

Donnie's a young man with problems who happens to find a girlfriend while being told that the world is going to end on Halloween. The movie tells the story of how we get there and back again.

It's not exactly all sunshine and daisies with Donnie doing some pretty dark things and experiencing a near tragedy or two along the way. And in the end there's not a lot of clarity to the story either. Things happen without much scientific or even pseudo-scientific explanation, and the film never seems to worry about that fact, though some more clarity can be gained by watching the outtakes - many of which were supposedly included in the director's cut that was released last year.

This lack of clarity ultimately weakens the film enough that I'd recommend seeing that director's cut rather than the original version that I saw. It's certainly a dark film. Not a bad one, but a little slow, a little dark, a little confusing.

And - in a fact not entirely unlike my last comment from the Station Agent review above - it's got Patrick Swayze in it.

In honor of that last note, my favorite Patrick Swayze films...

1. Road House - with new DVD release
2. To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
3. Red Dawn
4. Donnie Darko
5. Dirty Dancing