American Movie

Saw American Movie, a documentary about the eternal, three-year quest to make a 34-minute film and the eternal, nine-years-and-counting quest to make a full-length film called Northwestern. The man behind this is Mark, a man in his late 20s who delivers newspapers and begs money from everyone he knows. He bemoans his father's stinginess but reveals later that he is 36k in debt to him already. He presses on, Ed Wood-esque, in the face of incompetence and roadblocks. At one point his long-time friend Mike (who is clearly reeling from some kind of harrowing, youthful drug adventures (some of which he talks about)) calls a halt to the filming because his soda is going to freeze if it's sitting there on the snow like that.

The film is an odd mix of sad, funny, and inspiring. I am interested in the idea of pursuing bad dreams and was smugly folding my arms through most of this, content to consign his film to a pipe dream, but then his actual film is shown and it's clearly amateur but it's not terrible by any means. It looks almost downright intriguing (heck, I added it to my to-see list.) When he talks about his films it's evocative and stirring but then he starts raving about how sitting around, getting drunk and dreaming is what the American dream is all about. At one point, drunk, he hurls a stream of invective at the factory-workers of the world. Of course though, a factory job would really not be that bad for him, it would just require giving up his dream.

The film fed into my interests and I think his dream is not bad per se, it's just that Mark isn't rich enough to actually pull it off and wasn't born in a time when digital film and editing software was cheap and ubiquitous. We are left with a huge dose of delusion keeping what is ultimately a small dream afloat. It's fairly depressing but then the mood is kept light by the gloriously absent Mike and Mark's hilariously dour and dodderingly ancient relatives (whom he lectures for not having ambitious dreams, naturally.) The whole thing is kind of a freak show which turns out to be the best hour-long trailer for a 30-minute short ever.