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I liked American Movie a great deal, though I didn't much care for Mark Borchardt as a person--he's a tragic figure because he's a driven guy, serious about his "art," trapped in the life of a trailer trash slacker (Let's list the characteristics: four kids between two women when not married to either, living with his folks, high-school dropout, mullet, Iron Maiden T-shirts, affable burnout buddy, tough-guy jailbird buddy, uncle in the trailer park, newspaper delivery dude/part-time laborer at a cemetary). He's also, like many driven and creative people, a petulant, spoiled, self-centered bully who needs a good beating.

Borchardt is manic to make films, and has been since he was a child. Some of the sequences featured show promise--and his short film Coven (included in its entirety on the DVD) is rather charming. This only makes his situation more painful to watch; if he had money, time, no other responsibilities, and a worthy script, this guy might make a good horror film. As it is, he drives himself and a small community of local volunteers nearly mad while filming on weekends and in between odd jobs. How he keeps his group of unpaid laborers interested in helping him with these projects is a mystery--the guy has a lot of gumption, a fierce desire to make it big, and through bluster and an off-the-hook Puritan work ethic he manages to hold his team together and get the job done. Along the way are many painful and many hilarious sequences.

I felt like I knew all these characters; anyone who went to Hereford High in the 1980s knew these characters. Borchardt reminded me of Robbie A., who could play Beethoven's piano sonatas on his flying V after hearing them one time, but who gave up a scholarship to Peabody for a job in a plumbing warehouse. He still works there, and has a kid with one of the Graul's Market Bakery girls. At one time he had bands with guys who went on to be Live and Blind Melon, but Robbie couldn't give up swilling a twelve-pack of Natural Light every day, and it cost him. I remember Robbie had a Marshall stack that covered one whole wall of his bedroom. On the floor under his bed were hundreds of vinyl metal records: Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force, Celtic Frost, Slayer, Megadeth, Metallica. Laboriously, Robbie would listen to these albums until he could play every note by heart, then he'd throw them sleeveless under the bed where his blind poodle Nicky would piss on them. The guy went through about a case of Vaseline Intensive Care every week, and these bottles were lined up on his basement steps like trophies in a whack-off contest. Borchardt's buddy Mike Schank reminds me of Ben Sawyer; my Mom found Ben on our porch one morning and thought he was a dead guy. He actually was only bombed on homemade blotter acid and cheap tequila. Ben went out to SF and was arrested living in a van on some guy's property--the guy didn't give Ben permission to squat there. When the cops picked him up he was living in Hunter S. Thompson's wet dream of a medicine cabinet. Last I saw him he'd lost about 80 pounds and his front teeth.



Yeah, I liked it. Not as much as Before Sunrise, but this film is without pretense and I warmed to it despite a bit of awkwardness early on. It ends as it should.