Review – American Movie

Few films manage to successfully pull off genuinely, profoundly funny or sad, and fewer still do both at once. Thus this low budget documentary about the making of a low budget movie is a rare bit of cinema art. The film follows the exploits of auteur-wannabe Mark Borchardt and his group of lower class Wisconsin accomplices as they try to make a short horror flick called “Coven” (pronounced with a long O, because apparently pronouncing it correctly would have made it sound too much like “oven”). The absurdity of their inept, inherently doomed efforts are plenty amusing, but at the same time the pathetic hopelessness of their aspirations is also more than a little depressing. In the end this outing does for independent filmmaking what Decline of Western Civilization Part Two did for heavy metal music. Worth seeing