Trouble in Mind (1985)

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This movie captures the neon world of the late seventies new-wave/punk era near-perfectly and is unique in the fact that it is the only movie to do so! The acting, specifically Carradine, Bujold and Morton, is top-notch, the music, by Mark Isham, is moody, jazzy and noir-perfect and humor abounds throughout. The story is cartoonish, but that is part of its charm.The interesting cast does a fine job. Lori Singer as Georgia is the right blend of beauty, innocence, and vulnerability which nicely contrasts with Wanda's tough (but, yes, good-hearted) exterior. John Considine as the completely corrupt lawyer Nate is fine also, and the other supporting cast chips in as well. The story centers around Kris Kristofferson, starring in one of his few really good movies, as a disgraced cop who gets paroled back into Seattle society after serving time for murdering a crime lord for harassing an old flame of his, Wanda, played by Genevieve Bujold, whom he reunites with after he gets out. Wanda owns a popular diner haunted by weirdos and hangers-on over which Kristofferson takes an apartment she offers to him out of gratitude. Into this mix comes Coop, played by Keith Carradine, a young married with the requisite financial problems all working class young marrieds face: New baby, new expenses, a wife to support.... A great 80s American film meant to spotlight the mix of innocence and sleaze that's America at its core, "Trouble in Mind" delivers the goods.Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

I really wanted to like "Trouble In Mind" and maybe someday I will; but I have to say this film is a muck-in fess. As I was watching it I realized it's some sort of misguided attempt at remaking Bladerunner, albeit as a lame, no budget Robert Altman comedy. As you may recall, Rudolph was a protégé of Robert Altman and he seems to have picked up a few things from that master. Namely, muddy sound recording and a heavy finger on the Zoom button. You know there's a problem with a movie when the best actor is Divine and all you can think about when the ingénue comes on screen is pushing her off the Seattle Space Needle. If this film taught me anything, it's that Evil is determined by hair height and Keith Carradine looks terrible as Ziggy Stardust. A few random thoughts (much like the script): The future looks a lot like the '80's. Kris Kristofferson is downright peppy compared to the pace of this movie. Genevieve Bujold is on crack. A shootout for a climax should never be staged as comedy. A bizarre dwarf like woman with Big Hair steals the movie. Do not attempt depicting "the future" on a low budget. What was up with the black guy who lived in the clock tower? Events in your screenplay should contribute to the story. Maybe it was the lousy video transfer I watched that made me actively dislike this film...and maybe someday I will see it again and it will grow on me (I think that could be possible) but right now, this movie is lodged in my mind, and that's trouble.

This film is perhaps the ONLY film to "document" what life was probably like for the vast majority of young people in working class America in the late seventies and early eighties, when a true sense of bizarreness reigned in big cities all across the country. This was the world that David Bowie, Kiss, disco and cocaine had made for everyone who had to "get out of the house at night". It was also a statement about how rough life was for anybody trying to make their way in the world during that period, where inflation was rampant and jobs were VERY difficult to come by.This situation leads one of the characters, Koop, played by Keith Carradine, to join forces with a paranoid but educated and shady black guy by the name of Solo in a diner owned by Genevieve Bujold's character, Wanda. Also frequenting the diner, which he also lives over, is ex-cop Hawk, newly released from prison, played by Kris Kristofferson. The two clash, as Koop descends into a life of crime with Solo, trying to feed his wife and baby while Hawk develops an eye for his young wife, played by Lori Singer.The mood of this movie has many parts: equal parts weird, compassionate, exposition, self-consciously fashionable, and stylish. It captures the zeitgeist of the period between 1975 and 1982 perfectly...the desperation of young people, especially POOR young people, to get a taste of the glitzy good life and to simply survive in a world that it is too easy to realize really IS cold and cruel! Alan Rudolph's art director should have won an Oscar for his work on this film, as it captures the presumed time it was set in perfectly. Rudolph himself deserves kudos too, for giving the world a chronicle of the weird world of new wave-disco era, big city America. Bujold, Carradine, Morton, Singer and even Kristofferson are good in it as well.This is the middle one of three great movies Rudolph produced in the mid-to-late eighties that he and his repertoire company, (usually just Bujold and Carradine,) can be justifiably proud. These are "Choose Me", "The Moderns" and this one. "The Moderns" must be seen to be believed. As good as the mood setting is in "TiM", "The Moderns" walks all over it.Enjoy.

The person who compared this film to Bladerunner is not only doing this film a disservice, but is so far from the mark as to be untrue. The chief protagonist is a cop true, and though initially spurned, he does get the girl in the end, but that's about where it ends...From the opening strains of the muted trumpet, and Marianne Faithfull's beautifuly broken voice, this film is a masterpiece, it's moody, quirky, low key and not without a little menace, especially when Hilly Blue "puts the anchor" on Solo, "they should all blow each other's balls off, make my life easier..." to quote Lt. Gunther.It's everything that Bladerunner isn't, if anything it's set in some alternate vision of a disfunctional 50's & 80's combined, down at heel low life's, trashy outfits, too much drab neon & hairspray, allied with a little mob glamour and modern art.I guess I just feel for the characters, Hawk's hunger for a life he never had, the Zen stillness of Wanda, the wild eyed innocence of Georgia and the weirdness that is Coop, Solo freaking out as a Bhudhist, and last but not least, Divine in a suit... "let everybody get what they deserve..."It's not a fast movie, or an ensemble piece, but at some deep level it resonates."what are you looking at?" "you a cop?" "you know damn well I'm not a cop" "that's what I'm looking at then, a woman who isn't a cop..."It's the film I watch when I get down, I've lost track of the number of times I've watched it, I caught it first at the ICA West Bank in London, on it's last showing before they started a series of Mexican masked wrestling bario movies :) I bought it recently on DVD in a shop in Schipol airport after being delayed in Amsterdam for two hours, I'd been looking for it for years at that point... Even Amazon had it on back order.It's really a wonderful movie, from icy lake to mountain road, I always come away from it happy, I guess you can ask no more from a movie than that.