Watched: 07/04/2026
Format: Criterion
Viewing: First
Director: Wim Wenders
As a forewarning, I really don't have anything new or novel to say about this movie. It won Cannes in 1984 and is one of those movies that gets discussed *a lot*, I guess. But I've avoided those discussions because I'd never seen the movie and was fundamentally avoiding spoilers.
I haven't seen that many Wim Wenders movies, but of what I've seen - I've been a fan/ I'd watched the beginning a couple of years ago - just the first 45 minutes of a lengthy runtime, as Wenders movies tend to go, and had no idea where it was going. Which - fair.. Paris, Texas (1984) should have been a slam-dunk for me, but I just never got to it until after our mid-day Fourth of July activities ended and before we put on fireworks from New York.
Starring Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell and Natassja Kinski - it's a movie that reminds you that a deeply compelling movie doesn't need FX, a cut every two seconds, a needle-drop every ten minutes or fifteen subplots. That's not to say Paris, Texas is representative of movies in 1984 - one of the years that defined the modern movie. I'm not really sure it points to much more than what was happening in independent film in the 1980's that would inform indie movies for the next fifteen or twenty years. Character driven, mood driven, and trying to show something about the human condition.
