A day in the life of a Chicago cab driver is examined as he picks up fares from the good and bad parts of the city and emotionally connects to many of his passengers.
21 Nov Chicago Cab (1997)
Illegal Shorts
A filmmaker needs to decide early in the game who is going to capture her.
The normal choices are short form or long form, usually cast described as stories about people or ideas with stories. (There’s an in-between choice having to do with situations that is increasingly popular.)
The first choice usually means small arcs based on characters, motivations and such.
This movie, like a few others, decides to go all the way to the left of the spectrum, farther away from the long form than you usually go. I didn’t could how many stories there are here: a couple dozen.
But they are not stories, but story fragments: a woman has just been raped, an irate customer is just about to kill a dishonest salesman, a woman has just been is seduced.
That’s one trick: that we don’t see many stories that are complete, most are story fragments that drift through.
It is all about defying the laws of storytelling, so naturally we have lawyers drift through as well.
The fold is that we watch the watcher, the cab driver. That brings us into the thing closer. Also, almost none of the stories are conveyed visually, instead they are told. The telling of a story coming from a story is the other side of watching the watcher and brings the story closer to us.
Posted in 2005
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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