Local Hero
Director: Bill Forsyth
Year Released: 1983
Rating: 2.5
Critically-acclaimed sleeper hit is more about quirkiness and bizarre incidents than an actual story as a man (Peter Riegert) from a Texas company (owned by Burt Lancaster) gets sent to Scotland to buy land by a beach for a research lab to be built on - only the film belabors this meaningless point for two hours, and at the end, the 'plot' amounts to nothing (it exists only to hold all the unrelated pieces together). It's supposed to be a 'slice-of-life' film, capturing out-of-the-ordinary incidents and the odd lives of people in a different culture, but most of those people are one-dimensional. It's all one big rambling cutesy stream-of-consciousness piece ... Slacker without the effective social commentary. Some of it works - I did like the parts with the rabbit, the eccentric scuba diver and especially the hilarious scenes between Lancaster and his therapist - but it's a hit and miss affair: you either fall under its minimalist spell or you don't.
