Flicks - Burden of dreams

My two favorite films, so far, of Year 2000 share many qualities, including the fact that their lives on video are easily eclipsing the blips they registered on the theatrical release radar. The film I knew was a classic at first glimpse is Chris Smith and Sarah Price's remarkable __American Movie (Sony Pictures Classics, VHS and DVD). This profoundly humane documentary records resilient Wisconsin filmmaker and movie lover Mark Borschardt's quest to overcome his loser status (32 and divorced with two kids, he works at a cemetery and lives with his parents) by making Northwestern, a stark, black-and-white look at trailer-trash life, the production of which is halted when the money fails to show.
Along with his cadre of lifelong friends, including his best buddy, doughy recovering party guy Mike Schenk, an unshaken Borschardt decides to resurrect Coven, a 35-minute horror opus he long ago started but never finished. (Amusingly, he pronounces the title as "CO-ven," which is what you'll be calling it, too. By the way, the DVD is replete with lots of deleted scenes and the completed Coven, which reveals Borschardt's promising camera eye and questionable improvisational skills). Using funds provided by another of the film's unforgettable characters, his quirky, elderly Uncle Bill, Borschardt's plan is to complete Coven and direct-market it on video, thereby giving him the means to finish Northwestern.
It's here that director Smith gives us a harried look at the shooting and editing of a film that no other movie about moviemaking has ever really offered. In its funniest scene — and American Movie is a platinum mine of laffs — Borschardt, as the lead in Coven, attempts to capture on celluloid himself smashing another actor's head through a pantry door but finds the effort hindered by a hilariously embarrassing display of on-set naiveté that leaves his fellow actor dazed and slightly injured.
But American Movie's greatness hails not just from seeing Borschardt overcoming on-set difficulties and his own fucked-up-but-likable personality. It's incredibly moving in many unexpected ways but particularly in how it portrays Mark's family and friends. The Borschardts apparently consider Mark's cinematic obsession as the sign of a deranged mind; one of his brothers says he can't conceive of the audience that would pay to see Coven. Yet, there's his confused Mom, taking time out to run the camera or act as an extra. And Mike, with his priceless nervous laugh and his litany of acid burn-out stories, toiling endlessly on Coven. Finally, every scene Mark shares with his once sharp but now feeble Uncle Bill is marvelous, a peer at the unique interactions between a couple of true characters separated by a generation.
Rarely do movies portray so well an artist's — particularly a frustrated, even sometimes an inept one's — hunger for expression and comfort. However, by the end of American Movie, we're so in tune with the desire of everybody around Mark to see him complete his project, that the payoff is ecstatic.
Director Chris Smith deftly delivers moments illustrating the determination and heart that go into even the most seemingly insignificant movie produced independent of the Hollywood system. Thereby, American Movie arguably vanquishes almost every other film ever made about filmmaking.
My second favorite film of 2000 comes real close. Werner Herzog's My Best Fiend (Anchor Bay, VHS and DVD) chronicles the masterful German director's unbelievably volatile relationship with the late actor Klaus Kinski, whom he'd known and worked with for three decades. Stories of these two massive megalomaniacs locking horns on troubled sets were already part of filmmaking folklore, thanks largely to Les Blank's landmark 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams (Flower Films, VHS), about the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.
My Best Fiend lifts some portions from Blank's work but mainly gives us Herzog, speaking English throughout with a dignified German growl, as he leads us on a singular, bizarre tour through his life with Kinski, including his first exposure to Kinski's acting onscreen. He takes us to the Berlin apartment they shared, where Kinski broke up a party by smashing into the room and declaring that his acting was not merely great, "it was epochal!"
And he takes us back to the jungle, where he relives the shaky times Kinski threatened the completion of both Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo with his volcanic temper (which so frightened the South American Indians working on Fitzcarraldo that they gladly offered to murder Kinski); his overzealous quest for realism (he smashes a supporting player in the head with an ax and almost kills him); and his deafening belief that he was sent by God to instruct the world on the art of acting. By the time we get to the final shot, a rustic portrait of a gentler Kinski, we realize that Herzog — a man who obviously thrives on chaos — feels immeasurably enriched in having known his friend, this fiend with two faces. You'd be wise to rent the incredible Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo (both also recently remastered and re-released for DVD and VHS by Anchor Bay) before seeing My Best Fiend, but see it you must.
Dean Treadway's documentary on past and present Atlanta drive-ins, Film Geek: The Drive-In Show, can be seen this month on People TV, Atlanta's public access station. He's also the co-host, along with Aron Siegel, of PTV's "Film Forum," Atlanta's only live movie review show, appearing Tuesdays at 8 p.m on Channel 12 on Media One in Fulton.__