It deserves a wider audience. American Movie is a hilarious documentary (don't let that word scare you) about an aspiring filmmaker named Mark Borchardt. Mark lives in Wisconsin, not exactly a hotbed of cinematic inspiration, drinks a lot of beer, watches a lot of football, and hangs with his buddies. He also wants to become a famous director. He's done some short schlocky horror films, but now he wants to film his masterpiece, Northwestern. To get the money to make Northwestern, though, he decides to finish and sell a direct-to-video horror movie he'd started two years before called Coven (which Mark stubbornly pronounces with a long "o").
It's hard to review this movie without reviewing the people it's about, so I'll just say that the film itself is well-done, if a bit too long (and it may feel longer because Mark becomes tiresome). If you like movies at all, you should see it. It's really about the twin American dreams of writing the Great American Novel (or Movie) and of rising from rags to riches.
The most entertaining people in the movie are Mark's friends, especially Mike Schank. Mike clearly didn't say no for most of his life, if you catch my drift. He's a couple tacos short of a combination platter, and you figure out why when he cheerfully relates a story of overdosing on PCP "and they kept me in the hospital for a month and they told me I was the worst case they'd ever seen." He also ends every sentence with a high-pitched nervous giggle. (And he talks a lot about drinking "vot-ka," which sent me and Tiffany into high-pitched giggling of our own.) And then there's Mark's sour old uncle Bill, who reluctantly finances Coven. He's morose enough to make me look like a ray of sunshine, which is hysterically funny at first, but ends up making you wonder sadly what happened to turn him into such a passive pessimist.
And then there's Mark. I'm about to get pretty harsh, so I should say up front that I do admire his determination to make movies no matter what the obstacles, to share his vision with the world even if said vision is of questionable value to anyone but himself. God knows it's more than I've done toward my cinematic dreams.
But if Mark seems at first like a plucky, ambitious (if talent-free) man with a dream, he gradually becomes grating and unlikeable. He complains about the stalled state of his life as though it had been done to him, but it was his choice to drop out of high school. It was his choice to have 3 children with a woman he doesn't seem to like very much. It was his choice to sit around for a dozen years drinking beer and smoking pot. He's earnest and determined to realize his vision, yes, but he's also self-absorbed and often nasty to his family and friends when they don't do exactly what he wants (he doesn't seem to care that they're not getting paid to help him with his movie, which most of them don't seem to understand).
Mark's the kind of person who thinks he's smart but isn't. He misuses and mispronounces words. He rattles off a hyperactive stream of pseudo-philosophical nonsense that he clearly thinks is earth-shatteringly deep. He thinks that big words and run-on sentences equal intellect. But he's not some inspired young filmmaker with something to say -- he's a loser. I dread the notion of some studio executive seeing this movie and thinking Borchardt is the next Blair Witch-type phenom and giving him a pile of cash to go nuts with. Don't we have enough morons out there making bad movies?
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