Movies: The Official "Movie of the Week" Club Thread III

[Pink Mist]

I may be a little late getting this review in for An Elephant Sitting Still. I'm on vacation until after labour day visiting some family and I think a bleak and depressing four hour film in Chinese may be a hard sell for family movie night. Fantastic film though, loved it when it came out so I'm looking forward to rewatching it to see how it holds up

 

[kihei]

My next pick is Guy Madden's The Forbidden Room, currently available on MUBI.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

An Elephant Standing Still
Bo (2018)
“My life is like a dumpster. Garbage keeps piling up.”

A quartet of interconnected lost souls wander a grey urban landscape in China that’s wasting away around them. Jobs are lost. Even the school is moving away. There is no future here, only an empty, painful present. Everyone seems to be in varying grades of simmering anger and guilt, a spectrum among the four leads ranging from boiling over to bubbling below the surface. This is a smorgasbord of misery — bad parents, bad relationships, looming violence, dead dogs. The only bit of solace is the tale of the titular elephant in a far off town that remains still despite beatings and other coercion, a tale that draws the interest of the quartet gradually pulling them together (at least physically – emotionally everyone remains sadly siloed).

This is a deeply, profoundly sad movie but somehow, someway it doesn’t manage to wallow in it. It’s ever present but not oppressive or exploitive. (I think of a director like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu as someone who loves to bathe in misery to an off-putting degree). Is authenticity the word I want? Maybe. Inarritu is a mere tourist while writer-director Hu Bo tragically lived there. Bo killed himself before the film was even released. It doesn’t feel like a wild projection to connect Bo’s real-life personal struggles with the heartbreaking tone maintained throughout this 4-plus hour opus. Knowing that adds an undeniable gravity to the entire ordeal.

Not to minimize the personal tragedy, but there’s a artistic tragedy here too. Bo’s filmmaking is fully engaging. The slow moving camera builds a constant tension. There are multiple moments where a character sees something and he hangs on their expression/reaction and then almost painfully slowly the camera turns or pans to show us what they see. It’s an incredibly effective technique. And I’ve seen movies under two hours that feel far longer than this, which again clocks in at more than four hours. It’s almost a magic trick of engagement and pacing.

 

[Jevo]

An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) dir. Bo Hu

The story of four people who's life intersect and they for one reason or another starts wanting to see an elephant sitting still in a circus in Manzhouli. Wei Bu is a student who inadvertantly kills a bully by pushing him down the stairs, while the bully is threatening him and his friend. Yu Cheng is a gang member, he has an affair with a close friends wife. When the friend catches them redhanded, the friend jumps out the apartment window right in front of Yu Cheng. Yu Cheng is also the older brother of the bully Wei Bu killed, and he starts a search for Wei Bu. Huang Ling is a friend of Wei Bu, and Wei Bu also has a crush on her. He wants her to flee with him but he refuses. She has an affair with the vice-dean at the school, and she finds out someone has videotaped them having sex and spread the video online. Wang Jin is an old man who lives with his son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. His son pleads him to leave the apartment for a nursing home. Wang doesn't want to, and his best defence is his beloved dog which can't go to the funeral home. Out for a walk his dog gets fatally attacked by a stray dog.

An Elephant Sitting Still has many reveals, deaths, infidelities, violent acts, you'd almost think it was melodrama of some sort, but there's nothing melodramatic about An Elephant Sitting Still. Nothing is played for cheap emotional points. Any emotional reaction is genuinly earned here, and nothing that happens in the film ever seems truly surprising, at least not the bad kind of surprise. Everything seems like logical turns of events in the way they are presented.

All four stories are fundamentally about love, and how the love we should be getting from those closest to us sometimes isn't there. All four main characters lacks the basic love from their immediate family. Wei Bu acts out of love for his friend, and for his love for Huang Ling, but neither are able to fully reciprocate his love. Huang Ling loves the vice-dean, but his love for her is ends as soon as he sees any kind of consequences for himself. Wang Jin loves his dog and his granddaughter, and they love him back, but he gets no love from his son and daughter-in-law. Yu Cheng is a damaged person, he sees the errors of his ways, but sees no real way to abandon them. The only person he really cares about is his girlfriend, who is falling out of love with him. Their failing relationship is the cause of many of his actions in the film. He has no love for his younger brother, despite his younger brother looking up to him, but in eyes of Yu Cheng he looks up to him for all the wrong reasons. He looks up to him because he sees the respect that his criminal ways gets Yu Cheng, but he has no interest Yu Cheng's value as a person. Hu Bu manages to create some genuinly moving and touching personal stories, even if the movie is very grey, and here I'm not just referring to the visuals. The ending is somber and it's quite clear that despite the characters making to Manzhouli, it was just a fleeting obsession, it won't change their lives in any way. None of them have any bright future ahead of him, all of them are facing a worse future than they did when the movie started.

Stylistically An Elephant Sitting Still is an interesting movie. It's very much it's own. It probably isn't inovating any techniques, but how it combines techniques is something I haven't seen before. In most scenes only one character is in focus, one of the four main characters. If more than one main character is in a scene both are in focus, but rarely are other characters in focus, and it really forces the viewer to focus on the main characters, even if they aren't the ones who are active in the conversation. It's jarring at first, since you naturally tend to focus on the one who is talking, but the film doesn't allow it. The camera is also always handheld and quite wobbly. Hu Bo also often films his characters from behind. Stylistically it actually shares a lot of similarities with Son of Saul who uses many of the same techniques for some of the same reasons, but the end result isdrastically different in the two films.

Hu Bo unfortunately committed suicide shortly after completing An Elephant Sitting Still aged 29. He was undoubtedly a big talent, possibly a fresh new voice in the realm of slow cinema. With An Elephant Sitting Still he showed a great talent for incorporating both visuals and emotional engagement in a way that few can. Somehow An Elephant Sitting Still escaped my knowledge until now, but I'm very happy it was brought up here. For me it ranks among the best films of the last half of 2010's, maybe even more once it settles in for good.

 

[Jevo]

Imitation of Life (1959) dir. Douglas Sirk

Lora Meridith runs frantically around the beach at Coney Island looking for her daughter Susie. Susie is being taken care of by Annie Johnson, a homeless black woman on the beach with her kid Sarah Jane. Lora initially mistakes Sarah Jane who's so pale she passes as white, as someone being babysat by Annie. Lora is a widower who recently moved to New York to make it on Broadway, but she's not having much success. But despite that she decides to give Annie and Sarah Jane room and board in exchange for Annie's work as a housekeeper. On the beach Lora also meets Steve Archer, a charming prospecting photographer who helps her find Susie, and who also plays with the kids. Lora is just about to agree to a marriage proposal by Steve, when she finally gets a break on Broadway, and soon she's a leading lady in the biggest plays in town, and Steve falls into obscurity for her. The success grants lots of money and a nice house, still with Annie and Sarah Jane living there. But Lora doesn't see much of her family, and Susie wishes for more attention from her mother. Sarah Jane rather wishes for the opposite. She would rather no one knows who her mother is. She'd much rather prefer to pass as white, so she doesn't have to deal with the discrimination she faces whenever people realises her parentage.

Imitation of Life is interesting. Lora is without a doubt the main character, but her story is not the most important in the story. That's the Sarah Jane and Annie story. Sarah Jane and Annie's story have by far the biggest stakes, and is what elevates Imitation of Life to something special. Lora's story is not bad, but also not particularly special. Sarah Jane and Annie's story is different, special and daring, especially for its time, where it serves as a huge indictment of race relations at the time. The Civil Rights movement was making huge strides in race relations at the time, but there was still much left to be done, and being white was a clear advantage. Can you even fauly Sarah Jane for wanting to be white? It's terribly agonising watching her abandon her mother the way she does. But it's so easy to understand why she does so. She sees the discrimination, and feels it. She sees how much easier it is for white people than for black people to do what they want. In her eyes the life as black person is a limited life where you always have to watch your back. A life as a white person is life of possibilities. But you also understand why Annie is so hurt by it. It's a tragic story, and juxtaposed with the very ordinary "white people problems" that Lora and Susie have. Do I want to focus on my career and self-realisation or do I want to be more present for my children? Can I match my career and my love life? Do the guy I like also like me? Problems many people face in their lives, but also deeply insignificant in comparison.

Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore as Sarah Jane and Annie respetively steal the show in this film. Lana Turner may be the star, but they outshine her easily in this film, and I get the feeling Sirk had something to do with that. Sirk's direction is great. He's certainly genre concious and knows that he's making a melodrama, and knows when to have fun with that and when not to. Lora and Susie's stories are practically satires of the genre when viewed in contrast to Sarah Jane and Annie. In general the movie is very self aware. I like Annie's character, but she's certainly an example of the mammie stereotype, and the movie knows that, and it also knows how offensive the stereotype is, and that means the movie can use Annie to show how bad these stereotypes are. It's a very dangerous road to take because you can easily misstep, but I think Sirk pulls it off.

I found it interesting how Lora is told by Allen Loomis that she has to perform certain favours if she wants to chance in Broadway. Sexual exploitation of women in the entertainment industry certainly isn't something new. The only that is played for laugh in that scene is Lora's initial naivete. Everything is deadly serious.

 

[Pink Mist]

An Elephant Sitting Still [大象席地而坐] (2018) directed by Hu Bo

In northern China we watch the lives of four interconnected characters who are trapped in a life of hopelessness and despair. Yu Cheng is a small-time gangster who is sleeping with his friend’s girlfriend when his friend jumps out of their high rise apartment window when he finds out. Wei Bu is a student who accidently kills a bully who is picking on his friend. Wang Jin is an elderly man whose family are trying to sell his home so that his granddaughter can go to a better school and whose beloved dog was tragically killed by a stray dog. And finally, Huang Ling is a teenager having an affair with the school’s vice-dean who had one of their sexual encounters filmed and circulated online.

There is a lot of despair to go around in this film, but it never seems to wallow in the sadness or self-pity. Every now and then there are (brief) moments of happiness within all the suffering as the characters (and viewers) feel respite, most notably of course as all the characters make the journey to visit the eponymous elephant. But it still is an extremely bleak and sad exploration of material conditions and suffering. One of the first things you hear about this film is that is the first and only film by director Hu Bo who tragically killed himself before the release of the film in part due to a dispute with producers over creative control of the film. Unfortunately, the sense of despair felt in the film feels genuine and authentic because it was to the director.

The second thing you hear when this film gets brought up is its nearly four-hour long runtime. Yes, the film is undeniably long, and its bleak content can make it at times hard to sit through, but it never feels like the runtime is four hours. Hu Bo performs a masterclass in editing and direction to create great pacing in the film so that it feels much shorter than it is.

It truly is a tragic that Hu Bo passed so early as he was a major talent. An Elephant Sitting Still is one of the best films of the 2010s, and perhaps even in the 21st century, so it is hard not to think about what he could have produced after this film. But at the very least he can be remembered for this great accomplishment in filmmaking as it is certainly not a film that will leave my mind.

 

[Pink Mist]

Stylistically it actually shares a lot of similarities with Son of Saul who uses many of the same techniques for some of the same reasons, but the end result isdrastically different in the two films.

Interesting comparison and thing to pick up on because both Hu Bo and the director of Son of Saul were students of Bela Tarr

 

[kihei]

Imitation of Life (1959) Directed by Douglas Sirk

Okay, I'm going to be that guy. Yes, director Douglas Sirk is drawing attention to the destructive and hypocritical nature of racial prejudice and the havoc it wreaks on people's lives. Fine. Full points. Yes, I know that Sirk's reputation, once abysmal, has now been redeemed and is placed at the auteur level. Well, not fine. I hate his movies. Yes, man, that era's technicolour was really something, wasn't it? But Imitation of Life is the kind of movie where I have to avert my eyes because the acting is so broad and some of the dialogue is so over-the-top and the whole thing is just completely beyond overwrought. The cast doesn't help--Lana Turner and John Gavin are photogenic non-entities, Sandra Dee might make a good cheerleader but not much else, and Susan Kohner seemed to me like the last actress God made before She finally got Natalie Wood right. Honestly, though, I don't think that Olivier and Streep in their prime would have been much more likely to make anything of these turgid roles. Most of Imitation of Life made me squirm, but the final thirty minutes or so from Sarah Jane's bitter rejection of her mother, through the tear-jerking death bed scene, and concluding with the manipulative funeral sequence, including Mahalia Jackson belting out a spiritual and grief-stricken daughter clutching at the casket-draped flowers---I mean, that must set the all-galaxy record for pure, unadulterated schmaltz.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Imitation of Life
Sirk (1959)
“It’s a sin to be ashamed of what you are.”

Lora, an aspiring actress, loses her young daughter on a busy beach. She’s found by Annie, a black woman with a daughter of her own who’s also in need of work. They strike up both a business (as a maid) and a friendship. We get a bifurcated tale from this point on, the first part focused primarily on Lora and her professional aspirations, the second shifting more to the two growing children, one of whom is light skinned enough to pass as white, and their efforts to distance themselves from their mothers. Complications ensue.

This is high melodrama from the master of the form, Douglas Sirk. It’s not a storytelling style I have a lot of personal affinity for so I’m toeing a line of not being dismissive because I tend to not care for this approach and trying to be thoughtful and appreciative about what transpires. So one obvious positive is the space and sympathy it gives the Annie and Sarah Jane relationship — a loving mother who has a daughter who is so fed up at a young age with racism that she decides to essentially deny her own mother’s existence. That’s painful and power and it did have some impact on my otherwise calloused heart. But not enough.

The open and straightforward acknowledgement of the demoralizing hurdles Lora would have to face entering showbusiness is worthy of singling out as well. We never see that nastiness but there’s some squishy subtext there hinting at what may have had to transpire. A bit progressive for the time.

I did run into a few problems though. First is that while in general I appreciate a broader story with multiple characters on multiple tracks, I found Lora and Susie to not be all that compelling. It’s all reheated leftovers. They’re both so centered on Steve, a character who I didn’t find to be nearly as lovable as everyone in the cast seems to think he is, to say nothing of the fact of it being a woman-focused story that ultimately hinges on the love of a man. That ol’ chestnut.

Speaking of cliches, though the Annie and Sarah Jane half is far more engaging, it does hinge on a pretty big, classic Hollywood stereotype — a noble, loving, flawless mammie. Again, I know melodramas like this often hinge on big and sweeping. Is Sirk in on it? It wouldn’t be the first film of his loaded with some greater meaning and subtext for things not exactly depicted or spoken aloud at that time. So that’s in his favor. But to the negative it still steers so hard into the stereotype of the noble and spotless black character whose sacrifice redeems all the white people it made it hard for me to swallow. Perhaps it was an important portrayal in that time and place but a tough one for me to fully embrace in these modern times.

Sarah Jane, however, is a fascinating character. Despite the personal cost, there’s an argument to be made that she is right. It’s a cold one, but it’s there to be made. That type of movie isn’t the goal though. This is a heart-render, not a think piece. Racism exists, but it isn’t really explored.

Individual scenes worked for me — Annie and Sarah Jane’s final heartbreaking interaction in the dressing room is the standout — but as a whole my black black heart was unmoved by the inevitable, weepy, tragic ending. Guess you don’t appreciate your long-time maid until she’s gone. The Lora-Annie relationship was always portrayed as friendship, but the work association is ever-present as well.

I do very much dig the way Sirk lights faces. It’s an intense almost film-noir type spotlight on the eyes and cheeks, but all in full color.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Susan Kohner seemed to me like the last actress God made before She finally got Natalie Wood right.

This line: 5 stars.

 

[Pink Mist]

Imitation of Life (1959) directed by Douglas Sirk

A widowed aspiring actress named Lora (Lana Turner looking and acting like Jenna Maroney from 30 Rock) moves to New York City and loses her child at the beach at Coney Island. She finds her being taken care of by a black woman named Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) and playing with a fair skinned child named Sarah Jane who is the mixed-race daughter of Annie. When Annie reveals she is homeless and looking for work, Lora takes her in to the live-in maid and caregiver as she tries to make it on Broadway.

I have a lot of problems with this film. My main complaint though is that though it has two main storylines only one of them is actually that interesting. The interesting plotline I’m referring to of course is the relationship between Sarah Jane and Annie and Sarah Jane’s desires to strip herself of her black identity in the late Jim Crow era. This struggle over racial identity was for the most part powerful and progressive considering the era the film was released. In some respects it reminded me of John Cassavetes film Shadows which was released the same year and which I watched recently. If Sirk’s film just focused on this storyline this may have been a great film, but unfortunately, he did not. Instead we have an A plot in which Lora tries to make it on Broadway and find love with old family friend Steve Archer (a very bland John Gavin, no idea why all the ladies in the film were head over heels in love with him) who her annoying teenage daughter also has a big crush on. And I get that this plot could also be considered fairly progressive as it is about the struggles of single motherhood and the sliminess of the theatre and film industry depicting the infamous “casting couch”, but I just kept getting impatient with this storyline and kept wanting it to go back to Annie and Sarah Jane’s story.

Part of the problem with the film in general, and with Lora and Steve’s storyline in particular, is the soap opera acting. The acting is just so broad and over the top that it took me out of the film and found it hard to believe that this is an acclaimed film. Don’t even get me started with Sandra Dee and her unbearable performance I had to sit through.

This is only the second Sirk film I’ve watched (the other being All That Heaven Allows) and I’m not sure what his appeal is. I was actually planning on proposing Imitation of Life for this thread since I wanted to try Sirk again since he is acclaimed by some but coincidently @Jevo beat me by a week.

 

[Jevo]

My next pick is Inside Llewyn Davis

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

My next pick is Inside Llewyn Davis

I've been wanting to rewatch this one for a while. Thanks for giving me the excuse.

 

[Pink Mist]

Port of Shadows [Le quai des brumes] (1938) directed by Marcel Carné

Along a lonely foggy road, a soldier hitches a ride in a truck to Le Havre. The soldier, Jean (Jean Gabin) is a deserter from the French Army and he is trying to start life anew and waits out hopping aboard a ship to South America in a bar in the outskirts of town. While in the bar Jean spots a dame in a beret and a see-through trench coat (costumes by Coco Chanel) and immediately is attracted to her aura. The woman, Nelly (Michèle Morgan), is on the run from her godfather (Michel Simon) who is in love with her and some local gangsters who are looking for her ex-boyfriend. Against his best wishes, Jean becomes entrapped into the underbelly of the shadowy port city as he falls for Nelly. Who said noir was just an American genre in the 30s and 40s? Because Port of Shadows can go pound for pound against the grit of many of the classic noirs of American cinema. A really great cynical story about a couple trying to find love in a foggy and desolate place and trying to escape the past that haunts them. The sense of fatalism in this film is overbearing as we known their love is doomed from the start and this is punctuated by Carné’s use of the oppressive fog of Le Havre which entraps the city. Excellent work by Carné in developing the atmosphere of the city and the port, there is nothing like the grit and shadows of a port city.

Jean Gabin is superb as the deserter and as a man who is a ball of fury waiting to be set off if push comes to shove (ok seeing grown men slapping each other is absurd, but I’m not going to question how they do it in France). Also, nothing more badass than watching tough guys play bumper cars. Michèle Morgan’s entrance into the film is iconic and immediately oozes sexual chemistry with Gabin. Not hard to see why he would die for her. Speaking of dying for someone, who also wouldn’t kill themselves and give Jean Gabin the clothes off their back and all the money they own after meeting him for the first time?

 

[Pink Mist]

My next pick will be The Birds directed by Alfred Hitchcock

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Port of Shadows
Carne (1938)
“Sorry. I’m a bit rough.”

Jean is a military deserter, on the run and waylaid in Le Havre, waiting for the papers that’ll bring him freedom. He ain’t the only one. This is a town of transients and lowlifes. There’s Zabel — who is a good friend, but a worse enemy. There’s a friendly drunk. A suicidal artist. There’s the almost unearthly beautiful Nelly, a runaway, and the gangster Lucien who loves her. Oh and Zabel loves her too. There’s a persistent air of inevitability and doom amid the grim. But Jean meets Nelly and they are in near immediate love. It’s a doomed love, but real. Romantic and realized. Jean has a darkness, but his heart is kind, as evidenced by Nelly and the dog that he can’t seem to shake. Can’t shake fate though.

This is Casablanca of a different stripe.

Beautiful film. Moody. Foggy. As good visually as some of the best noirs.

I was just listening to a movie podcast that coined a term I liked — prestige dirtbag. These are movies about damaged, lonely men grinding out something resembling an existence. The context for that conversation was the general oeuvre of Paul Schrader. Michael Mann is another filmmaker who came up. Carne is FAR more poetic than either of them, but the base ingredients feel the same here — a study of a man content to a lonesome life, but somehow, reluctantly pulled into something bigger than him.

Jean Gabin is a cheat code for a role like this. Not to harp on the Casablanca thing again, but it’s equally tough to not draw a parallel to Humphrey Bogart as a secret romantic with a gruff exterior.

Also, I adored the score which I feel like Carter Burwell had to have listened to a lot before he sat down to do the music to Fargo.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Random: Watching season 2 of Patriot on Prime. The main character is a bit of a lost soul. He's wandering through Paris and a dog has randomly attached itself to him ... sounded familiar.

 

[Jevo]

Port of Shadows (1938) dir. Marcel Carné

Jean is an army deserter hitchiking to the port city of Le Havre. He intends to find a ship overseas. He resides in a small tavern on the edge of town, and gets some civilian clothes. There he also meets Nelly, a young woman who has run away from her Godfather, a man who is in love with her and wants her for himself. Nelly is also haunted by Lucien, a local gangster looking for her ex-boyfriend who has disappeared. Jean protects Nelly from both her godfather and Lucien and the two fall in love, but he still intends to get on a boat out of the country.

Judging by Port of Shadows you'd think Le Havre is constantly foggy, and inhabited by rugged Frenchmen with a cigarette hanging in the edge of their mouth, handing out backhanded slaps. Sadly I fear it's not like that if you go in real life. The real place is much more boring. Port of Shadows creates a fantastic atmosphere for itself. It's a joy just to sit and smell the tobacco from the tavern in your living room. Few movies creates as great an atmosphere as Port of Shadows. It also helps that Jean Gabin might be the most french looking person to have ever existed, and he's perfect as the rugged Jean. The role is as if it was made for him.

 

[kihei]

Port of Shadows (1938) Directed by Michel Carne

Port of Shadows isn't a very good movie, but it is watchable as hell. It got me thinking about which movie was the first film noir? Generally I think that honour usually goes to The Maltese Falcon, but Port of Shadows has to get some credit as a precursor to the genre. Most of the external sequences seem shot in a photogenic misty fog that emphasizes shadows and underscores the rather dour story being told. The movie is a sort of tough guy romance with a central pairing of Jean Gabin and Michelle Morgan who is literraly half his age. The characterization in the movie is haphazard--some of the characters seem to have wandered in from different sound stages--and the overall logic of the film seems really contrived. But Gabin is fun to watch in action. He has been compared to Humphrey Bogart, but every French actor of merit in history who has ever been in a noir has been compared to Bogart at some point whether the comparison fits or not--Gabin, Jean Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon (a much prettier tough guy), Vincent Cassel, Yves Montand, Jean Louis Trintignant. To heighten the comparison in this instance, Port of Shadows does have a slight John Huston/Howard Hawks feel in terms of subject matter.

The dialogue was more interesting than in most NA films of this nature. Some philosophical musings here and there, lots of cynicsim, a mention of Cubism for christsakes, most of it coming from Gabin, the Army deserter who is not so much world weary as simply a hard-bitten realist. He falls for the dame, of course, and they have a night in bed before he lets her know he is leaving for Venezuela. Not very sporting when you are sleeping with a 17-year old, but those were different days. Naturally all this is going to end tragically because no other way would make sense, and I got the sense the scriptwriter was pretty locked in to his story even though the psychoogy seems all wrong in places. However, I was surprised when the guy who I thought was already murdered ended up pulling up in his little sports car and shooting our hero dead. Missed a curve there somewhere, I did. What ex-boyfriend of hers got killed earlier, then? Port of Shadows is one of those movies where little details like that ultimately don't seem to matter much. I never even mentioned the dog because the dog ain't worth mentioning (oh, oops).

subtitles

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

American Movie
Smith (1999)
“This time I’m not going to fail.”

Mark Borchardt wants to make a movie. He’s a high school drop out. By many estimates, a loser. He’s dabbled in some low-budget small horror flicks, but has long had an idea for a serious movie, his opus. That’s what he wants to do, er, well, maybe he’ll do another horror short in the meantime as he builds up to that bigger undertaking. He’s not a movie moron. He has a solid knowledge and desire. More carpentry skills might have helped. He definitely lacks for means though and a few personal foibles (to put it nicely) seem to handcuff him in ways he doesn’t fully grasp. Director Chris Smith follows this multi-year quest, documenting the ups-and-downs and this creator and his dream.

The strength of American Movie is the strength of all great docs — you can’t make this shit up. You can’t make these people* up. You wouldn’t buy it as a fictional creation. It would almost be cruel to fictionalize it.

Speaking of cruelty, here’s the thing I learned after watching this — it’s divisive. And from the interactions I’ve had with folks on this topic, I feel like I’m in the minority. Is Smith making fun of his subjects? I absolutely laughed — when the constant mispronunciation of coven is FINALLY addressed I laughed loudly and mightly and the cabinet smashing scene is a sublime piece of comedy — but I found the overall tone fair. There’s comedy because the subjects are comedic. Is there judgement? I didn’t feel it, at least to a detrimental effect. I saw and felt sympathy, an appreciation for the dedication and effort. Tim Burton’s Ed Wood came to mind. Both climax in a similar manner — the screening of a film their creators will become known for.

Many others see mockery. I don’t, but if we do want to go down that road, it isn’t exactly like Mark covers himself in glory. He’s clearly taking advantage of his elderly uncle and he is, at best, a disengaged and distracted father to several kids. That’s the downside to his tunnel vision. He’s not the most sympathetic protagonist.

I’ve worked on and in several small budget film productions (I exist on the IMDB and everything). Not extensive experience but enough that I realized that life isn’t for me. It can be hard, tedious, time consuming work even on a small scale and frustrations can only multiply when dealing with certain personalities involved in the process. I’ve met a few Mark-like movie dreamers. Some are more charming than others. But there is a common drive and masochism that I didn't have and I respect that they do.

Folks who I know in that world generally don’t like this movie. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say they identify with Mark and they see (and maybe feel) that mockery. It’s a wagon circling reaction more than a there but for the grace of god go I cautionary tale. Not me though. I see (and definitely) feel how hard even the smallest of film undertakings can be. The sheer fragility of creation. It’s a grind that vacillates between foolishness and odd nobility, even when you keep mispronouncing the title of your own movie.

Movies are miracles. I feel like someone said or wrote that somewhere but I don’t feel like researching. If not, I’ll take credit for it.

Mark Borchardt was probably never going to make great art. But damn if in some sense, he became it.

*As a fellow Midwesterner, I feel like I can say "these people" in this context. I am prone to the occasional bristling at how "the coasts" portray us folks in "fly over country" but this didn't feel untrue or exploitative on that front either. For what it's worth.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Pondered several spooky season possibilities before settling on Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.

 

[kihei]

American Movie (1999) Directed by Chris Smith (documentary)

American Movie is modestly produced documentary about Mark, a young man whose consuming dream is to make a movie, any movie, a dream he clings to against all odds and with great commitment and fervour. He is aided and abetted by a ragtag crew of friends and family, all of whom get infected by his dream and want to help him realize it. American Movie is like a home movie in the best sense of the word. It is personal, funny, poignant, and, I would argue, unjudgmental, but it packs a bit of a punch nonetheless on a surprising number of different levels.

As I was watching this documentary, I immediately thought of a roadblock that I was going to confront when writing about it. About the most socially unacceptable thing you can do, short of outright racism anyway, is to call people “stupid.” To do so immediately sets one apart as an insensitive, mean-spirited, decidedly un-nice bully who people want to punch—in other words, instant ostracism from good company. Well, there are more than a few stupid people in this movie. Mark for starters whose stupidity is laced with a little cunning. Then there’s Mike, Mark’s woebegone friend who appears free of 99% of his original brain cells. And then there is the neighbour who volunteers as a battering ram in the funniest scene in the movie. I don’t count the hilariously addled grandfather who has senility as an excuse, nor Mark’s mom who does what moms do, love her son. So, a big question in the movie is, okay, some of the characters are stupid, but is the director hyping this a bit to get laughs. It’s a big question, but I think, after thinking about it a surprisingly long while, I give Chris Smith the benefit of a doubt. He found a “you can’t make this shit up” situation, and played it pretty damn straight.

It would have been so easy to make this cast of characters look bad, maybe even to laugh at Mike and his hopeless out-of-sync-with-reality expectations, but Smith doesn’t do that. He doesn’t really overstate anything or nudge anything or subtly show disdain. Rather he paints this family as a sort of collection of everymen and everywomen with a dream. There is humour galore in the movie, but it is earned naturally. This crew does and says funny things. Whether it is the screwy but shrewd Grandpa, the neighbour risking a fractured skull, or a totally unequipped guy desperately struggling to make his movie and realize his dream of being a film director, you kind of feel for these people. With the exception of one sort of snarky friend, whose negative take on things is oddly funny in itself, this whole collection of family and friends seem like well-intentioned good people trying to help out a friend who they sincerely like—ignoring as Mark certainly does, his dodgier tendencies. Many of the characters may be dumb but they are essentially decent, and the movie shows that, too.

Mike does manage to realize a tiny sliver of his dream, and I was elated for him that he did so. The movie is also about the desire to create something of importance, the pull of art and specifically the magic of movie making. These are people with limited means who have had hard lives, but they are not losers. Rather they are examples of resilience. The overall message is “follow your dreams”--especially when you have nowhere else to go anyway. Human will can work wonders. And don’t let a lack of talent stop you. Look at Ed Woods—there are film courses in prestigious universities devoted to his works now. Part of the human struggle is to express oneself, one’s needs, desires and dreams. At this, Mark is pretty damn successful.

 

[Jevo]

American Movie (1999) dir. Chris Smith

Mark Borchardt is a film director. He hasn't finished any movies yet, but he's started quite a few. He's trying to secure funding for his dream project Northwestern, a low-budget horror, by making an even lower-budget horror short film called Coven, pronounced like Covid, not like how the word is actually pronounced. Borchardt is financing Coven by borrowing money from his 82 year old Uncle, who lives in a run down trailer, but who has 300k in his bank account due to having nickled and dimed everything his whole life. Burchardt is passionate and knowledgeable about filmmaking, but incompetent as a director and doesn't have any real plan for getting to a finished film. It doesn't help that his crew is composed of friends and family, most of whom are not qualified for the job that Borchardt has them do. One particular friend is the best friend Mike. The two bond of shared alcoholism. While Mike is in AA Borchardt alcoholism only seems to get worse over the course of the film. Borchardt has moments of self-reflection, but his undying tenacity and confidence always seems to take over in the end, and somehow he manages to finish Coven. I doubt it's very good, but that doesn't stop Borchardt from instantly dreaming of moving on to finishing Northwestern. He just needs to sell 3000 VHS tapes.

Borchardt is like a less successful Ed Wood, in the sense that Ed Wood actually managed to make several films. Or like a character from Spinal Tap. There's probably many like him, but most of them haven't had a film made about them, so we don't know them. It's almost hard to believe this is a movie of real people, because most of the film just seems so perfectly bizarre it has to be fiction. But it isn't. It's hard not to laugh at the absurdity that's happening on screen. But at the same time I don't know how I'm feeling about laughing at these people. Many of them have real problems, that they might not be dealing with particularly well, and it's all on display. I can't help but feel the movie feels exploitative of it's subjects. Borchardt has no doubt embraced the film, probably because he knows it can benefit him, but he's not the only one on display. Borchardt is probably equally as exploitative as the film is, but he's not exactly a role model. It wouldn't be so bad if I felt I was laughing with them, and not at them. But only very rarely am I laughing with them, most of the time I'm the only one laughing.

 

[Pink Mist]

American Movie (1999) directed by Chris Smith

Mark Borchardt, an independent filmmaker from a working-class town in Wisconsin, struggles to finance his feature length film Northwestern and decides to try to complete an unfinished short horror film called Coven (pronounced like Covid) in order to fund his epic. American Movie follows Borchardt and his rag tag community of collaborators, primarily best friend Mike Schank, a good-hearted recovering alcohol and drug addict who is writing the score for Coven and helps out with the filmmaking; Mark Borchardt’s mom, doing what moms do and helping her son achieve his dreams; and Mark’s uncle Bill who is a frequently drunk and senile old man who has provided Mark with $3000 to produce the film.

I have seen commentary that people film this film to be exploitative of its subject, as in the film is mocking Borchardt and Schank, and at times I can see that argument. But I didn’t really find the film to be mocking or mean spirited. I found it to be a really engaging character study of a filmmaker and his collaborators trying to achieve their dreams against all odds, and I found it actually quite inspiring at times. The subjects aren’t totally sympathetic, but there I don’t notice disdain in the tone from Smith or are we meant to laugh at the subjects – they’re just comedic people. I really enjoyed this film, I think it was a really touching portrayal of amateur filmmaking and the drive to achieve artistic vision.

 

[Pink Mist]

I also watched Coven after watching American Movie as a bit of a double feature. And well, it is about what you'd expect. Not great by any means and obviously made by amateurs but there are some interesting and clever shots now and then - it's not god awful bad. It's also an interesting accompaniment to the commentary from American Movie regarding Mark's relationship to alcohol. Probably the first time I've ever watched a making of documentary before I saw the actual film though.

It's alright, it's ok.