![]() ![]() Whether the would-be filmmaker is able to achieve his dream remains up in the air, though a look at the finished product Coven reveals flashes of wit and an eye for the sort of harsh, gloomy compositions he professes to admire (as well as some admittedly Ed Wood-level writing and acting). There are so many moments in American Movie that linger in the memory: Schank’s maniacal screeching during a sound effects dubbing session Uncle Bill’s repeated attempts to nail his single line of dialogue Borchardt camping out with his kids in a University of Wisconsin editing suite. Smith has marked out this fertile territory as his own, and it will be fascinating to watch him continue to explore it in future projects. While it may not sound like a crowd pleaser, American Job deserves wider recognition for its dead-on depiction of an all-but-ignored aspect of contemporary life. That film, while a work of fiction, used documentary-style realism to hilarious deadpan effect as it traced one man’s odyssey through the day-to-day tedium of minimum wage employment. But anyone who has seen director Chris Smith’s debut feature American Job (all six of us) will recognize it immediately. This is a Middle America of scratch-off lottery tickets, 7-11 coffee and Pabst Blue Ribbon twelve-packs – terrain rarely glimpsed in contemporary cinema. This is a non-traditional gathering, to say the least, but the warm feeling is evident nonetheless, particularly when Borchardt drunkenly gives thanks to Schank for coming over and making him smile.Īll of this unfolds against the melancholy backdrop of Borchardt’s hometown, Menomonee Falls, which emerges as another central character in the documentary. In one of the most oddly moving scenes in recent memory, Borchardt shares a Thanksgiving dinner with Schank, Uncle Bill and a few other Coven castaways. Some viewers will no doubt find the fried, giggly Mike Schank and increasingly decrepit and fatalistic Uncle Bill to be figures of derision and mean-spirited laughter, but they’ll be missing the point. The film’s surprising emotional depth derives from Borchardt’s relationships with his family and friends. But where Diary evoked fear and loathing for its subjects, American Movie maintains an openhearted, empathetic perspective. ![]() This aspect of American Movie calls to mind another documentary about the making of a low-budget horror movie, 1979’s little-seen Demon Lover Diary (which detailed the harrowing production of Demon Lover, coincidentally retitled Coven for video release). The pitfalls of no-budget filmmaking provide some of the movie’s most uproarious moments, such as a Coven scene in which Borchardt’s character shoves his support group sponsor’s head through a non-breakaway cabinet door. So, with the help of his gentle burnout friend Mike Schank, his Eeyore-like octogenarian Uncle Bill, and a cast of master thespians, Borchardt sets out to film his macabre tale of a support group from Hell: Coven. If he sells 3000 copies at $14.95 apiece, he’ll take in $45,000, with which he’ll be able to do his dream project justice. In order to properly bring Northwestern to the screen, he decides, he must first complete a direct-to-video horror short. He conceives Northwestern not as a horror film, but as a down-and-dirty look at the economically deprived, fast-track-to-nowhere world he inhabits. He doesn’t mention the splatter and gore, but rather the gray skies, dead trees and grim, bare-bones settings. His influences include George Romero’s Living Dead series and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but what’s interesting is the way Borchardt describes what he admires in those pictures. The disparity between his vision of himself as a successful filmmaker leading the good life and his mundane reality of delivering newspapers and vacuuming crypts at the local cemetery forms the emotional core of the documentary.Įver since acquiring an out-of-focus Super 8 camera as a child, Borchardt has been making movies. Words spill out of his mouth faster than the speed of thought they emerge as a sort of mangled poetry, perfectly in tune with the bleakness of his surroundings. ![]() An often hilarious and thoroughly moving portrait of a man, his community and his dream, American Movie is without a doubt one of the year’s best.īorchardt is a true blue believer in the American Dream, and he clings to it with feverish tenacity. That’s Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Borchardt describing his years-in-the-making epic Northwestern, but his words could just as easily apply to the extraordinary new documentary American Movie, which details Borchardt’s failed attempts to launch production of Northwestern and subsequent determination to complete the 35-minute horror film Coven. You get to see Americans and American dreams, and you won’t walk away depressed after seeing this. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |