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Q. Is Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), the Captain Ahab of repo men, a proper mentor for Otto? Is the repo man's code, which Bud keeps muttering about as < he drives dementedly around looking for cars to grab, applicable to all the issues one encounters in this cockeyed world? Or is Bud just the most colorfully paranoid marble in the bagful that Writer-Director Alex Cox has rolling around his movie?
Q. Why is the list value of a decrepit 1964 Chevy Malibu $20,000? And why is everyone who opens its trunk instantly vaporized? Is it the great white whale of the freeways, or just another of the plot's red herrings?
A. (to all of the above) One guess is as good as another. Cox either stops short of the point of most scenes or rolls on past it. But there is something cheerful in the anarchy of his methods, something unpretentious in his allusions to the car's extraterrestrial dimension, something bracing in his aversion to the well made. No wonder adolescents have taken Repo Man for their own. Lifting its hood is like peering into a teen-ager's mind: miswired and noisy, Repo Man is capable of fast starts and amazing cornering. By Richard Schickel
CHOOSE ME
Mickey (Keith Carradine) is said to be a pathological liar. But after he ankles the mental hospital quite uncured of this condition, evidence accumulates that he really was a jet-fighter pilot. And a CIA spy in the Soviet Union. And a poetry teacher at Yale. The problem is not with him but with a world that refuses to accommodate improbable realities.
Nancy Love (Genevieve Bujold) conducts a radio call-in show, from which issues a stream of psychobabble to cool her listeners' sundry sexual fevers. She is suffering near-terminal repression, which lifts after a oneafternoon stand with Mickey.
That is a close encounter of an opportunistic kind. Mickey was really looking for Nancy's roommate, Eve (Lesley Ann Warren), a sometime streetwalker who bought a bar because it was owned by and named for another woman called Eve. She found the coincidence irresistible. So does Mickey, who was once engaged to the former proprietor. He wanders in one night and finds her replacement an entirely lovable facsimile. Eve is not so sure. And calls up Dr. Love for advice, not realizing that the woman (using an assumed name) with whom she shares refrigerator, bathroom and eventually boyfriend is her air-waves confidante.
That is the way things go in Choose Me. Writer-Director Alan Rudolph has structured his movie like a daring billiard shot, which culminates with all his eight balls landing in the right pockets. He shares the paranoiac's / conviction that the world is full of strange and secret connections, but he has bathed his movie in the glowing light of his discovery that these linkages are often benign. And his actors have caught his charmed spirit admirably.
By Richard Schickel