Review of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1994) by Joseph S — 30 Apr 2009

Before the prestige of "Milk" and "Good Will Hunting" Gus Van Sant bombed it big with this Tom Robbins adaptation, staring Uma Therman as a girl with mutated oversized thumbs, which later in life make her the road master general of hitchhiking, as well as a successful hand model. Burned out from years of crossing the roads back and forth, which she is preternaturaully good at, she takes some advice from her transvestite "agent" I think or benefactor anyway( after an unsucessfull date with Keanu Reeves as a native american artist with a asthma problem), decides to head to a ranch/spa for rest and relaxation. Little did she know the Ranch is run by a band of lesbian, feminisit, gun totting, peyote munching ranch hands who have dubbed themselves "the cowgirls" and who take over the ranch to subsoquently drive out patriarchal oppression.

Somewhere while all this is going on she meets a man in the mountains called "The Chink" though he is Japanese, it's Mr. Miyagi old Arnold himself, and sleeps with him... Then she has some corrective surgery, hears some spiels about the evolutionary importance of the apposable thumb("all life and history can be traced to the thumb...etc, etc.). Then the cow-girls, whose leader Rain Phoenix, Therman has fallen in love with, somehow manage to get the wooping crane(an endangered species who stop by the ranch on their migratory pattern) to stay on and defy thousands of years of flying back and forth. Which leads to a bloody confrontation between the US government and the gals...

Tom Robbins supplies the narration, and proves that even with an authors enthusiasm, even with a talented director open to fresh ideas, some stories just cant be transfered from the page to the screen, or at least shouldnt be. If you just want to watch something both oddly conventional and bizzare plotwise, "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues" is a decent enough distraction (and even contains a rare Robbins insight in the dialog here and there). But it's just a confused mismatch of tone and performance, dead pans joke which dont work and awkardly placed sentiments. Somewhere in there it's heart's in the right place, but theres so many poor scenes, it's hard to find the energy to look for it. Certainly a curio, but nothing to rush toward.