Handle With Care

Director: Jonathan Demme
Year Released: 1977
Rating: 2.0

Several people in a backwoods town are "connected" by their respective fascination with their CB (citizens band) radios, and the area's biggest mischief maker is the key CB operator (Paul Le Mat), who lives with his father and doesn't seem interested in working a real job. It's a clever concept done in an Altmanesque way, but it's too fractured to ever congeal as a film - there are several very good scenes with the random players involved (trucker-with-multiple-wives Charles Napier's subplot is fantastic), but not even the final sequence in which all the CBers, running around the woods looking for Le Mat's Dad (and a lot of cattle), can tie everything together. Demme appears to have lost his taste in the "low-key and quirky" of late, turning to so-so documentaries and inexplicable remakes....