What makes it different from others?

Absolutely Fantastic

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Alan Rudolph's second best film (just after Welcome to L.A.) is a jazzy mood piece with romance, rhythm, superior acting and a driving force behind it. That's why R. Altman had this guy working for him. Genevieve Bujold at her most vulnerable and intelligent, Leslie Ann Warren, with real sex appeal and moxy, Keith Carradine his most relaxed since Nashville, Rae Dawn Chong peppy, flirty, and valuable with T.P. music letting them all ride down that street of Eve's Bar.I don't know anyone who's seen this who didn't dig it. With all the junk movies of the 80's, this is right there. Surprise ending, out-of-synch acting styles that blended (SCRIPT and DIRECTOR helping) that is like an ocean breeze on a Saturday night. You just never know!

Although I have to say it's . . . a little disconcerting to rate a movie#1 and I think top 10 lists are like. . . film festival programming, itseems to be an impossible job to make one that is at all sound... Ihave to say nonetheless that this is my favorite movie of all time.Aside from the entertainment value and the sweetness what reallyis profound about this movie is it's view of love/romance. It's veryantiromantic or anti hollywood romance tradition in its wisdom tosuggest that love isn't a matter of finding "the one" as keithcarradine says in the movie "there might be plenty of other peoplewho would fit the bill but we're here and they're not" it's about 2people making a decision to lose it for each other . . . At the sametime AR's films really do seem to have this "one and only" theme,e.g. The Moderns. So. .. it's kind of dialectical or what have you, too. It's too bad his earlier film "Remember My Name" is pretty much offthe map. Starring Geraldine Chaplin and Anthony Perkins it wasanother of his really interesting movies. Just about everything elsesince from him has been such a disappointment. I didn't manageto see "Afterglow" I'm sorry to say. "Trixie" was just a piece ofgarbage. I don't know what happened to this guy . . . sigh

Director alan rudolph is what is commonly termed an "eccentric. his films are decidely off-center, with characters ruled by quirks and odd obsessions, a committed stable of actors who appear from film to film, a sense of narrative stucture i would describe, charitably, as "loose" and funny, overlapping dialogue- all characteristics he learned from his former associate and master robert altman. when his films don't "work", which is a little better than half the time, it is like poor altman...the debts are too obvious and the deficits as well. but when the mystical alchemy of such a loose, character-driven structure do come together, such as in this film, the result is peerless (even when one of the peers in question is altman, one of the best directors the world has ever produced). choose me has a plot, rife with conicidence, fit for a screwball comedy but its tone, and the charcters in it, wander through it each in his/'her own romantic/personal reverie and the machinations of the plot seem less like a constructed device and more, as keith carradine's mickey states at on point, "just like a dream".carradine, genvieve bujold, lesley anne warren, patrick bachau and rae dawn chong populate this world, each sad, each lonely and each bearing a burden of loss and pain, meeting and making love, and attacking (sometimes violently) as if according to some inner romantic logic only they hear. ther'es pain, there's loss, there are past mysteries and dark actions only hinted at and, strangely enough in the end...there is hope. which is what love, at its heart, truly consists of. red neon, teddy pendergrass, rain-slicked streets at 2am, a first, unexpected kiss, old movie posters, tough guys bested by tougher guys, an unending cascade of full red, hair, a sudden gunshot and an ending as weird and uncertain as love itself followed by the smile of one who, against all logic succumbs to hope. the most romantic movie ever made. period.

This film has always struck a special chord with me, although not all of the friends I've recommended it to over the years have liked it. I think you have to be a city person who's gone through some hard knocks in love to really embrace it. The scenes featuring Rae Dawn Chong aren't so special...(she's the weakest link)...but the scene where Bujold chats with Carradine after sex while getting dressed for work, the scenes with Dr. Love on the radio, the scene where Warren comes home from work to find that her roommate has stolen her boyfriend...these all have an immediate, bittersweet quality that's very haunting. Overall, the acting is flawless, and the whole film is an original. I only wish it were longer.