Night On Earth

This review is an excerpt from my book “Killer B’s: The 237 Best Movies On Video You’ve (Probably) Never Seen,” which is available as an ebook on iBooks. If you enjoy this review, there are 236 more like it in the book (plus a whole lot more). Check it out! NIGHT ON EARTH: The central conceit of this uneven entry is five taxi trips taken simultaneously in five different nighttime time zones around the world. The first vignette, set in Los Angeles, is a wry dialog between a tough casting agent (Rowlands) with an eye for talent and a tougher young cabbie (Ryder) with her own life agenda. Episode Number Two, set in New York, is a loud, raucous comedy about the difficulty of understanding anything different, whether it’s another culture, another person or another gender. The third, and shortest, segment, set in Paris, explores the question of who’s really blind: a bitter but insightful sightless woman, or the driver who can’t see past his own prejudices. Number Four alone justifies the entire price of a rental: a Rome cabbie’s (Benigni) nonstop, mile-a-minute confession about his, well, let’s say *unusual* love life to a priest with his own problems. Oddly, this comic film ends with a tale of tragedy set in Helsinki, when a driver sobers up a group of drunken buddies with his own sob story. “Night On Earth” is overall an ambitious, admirable and essentially successful experiment. (Who else works in the short story form on film? Besides Altman.) The high points outnumber the lows, and these highs fly higher than the lows ever go. The New York story, for instance, features characters so unique they must be real, and Rosie Perez’s baby voice and potty mouth allow her the ultimate last word when she turns on a guy and “curses him out.” If you simply skip the bookends and watch the three central segments, this is a fabulous film.