Wow! Such a good movie.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

It's clear to me in reading the negative reviews that those people really missed the point of what this whole film was about. To this day, this movie remains one of my favorite documentaries of all time. The more you watch it, the more you realize that there is a little Mark Borschardt in all of us, a wild-eyed dreamer. While the realities of his life are stark and his relationships with his family and children seem dysfunctional, he is an entertaining figure with idealism that is larger than life.

This week I watched American Movie (1999). Honestly, if this wasn't an assignment I would have turned it off within the first five minutes, but once I finished the film and learned more about Mark I was glad that I watched it. The beginning is a little long, but the characters grow on you through the film. At the end I wanted to know if Mark eventually found success. The editing was atypical and I see why the film was loved by Sundance. The editing was artistic and the shots were formulated to follow an indie movie format(?). The pacing of the film was very interesting as much of film was designed to follow almost a "home-movie" type of narrative. Some parts of the film were just "real time" events and others were in the moment type shots. Some shots seemed superfluous whilst others would hold for long periods of time for no reason. I think that this was the perfect way to tell this story. The "extra" pieces made the film seem intimate. The point of the film, I felt, was persistence, as if the film-makers were trying to convey the idea that if you want to make it in the film industry then you just have to be persistent. The perspective of the film was told by Mark, his best friend Mike, and other people close to Mark. At different points in the film we would speak to different characters to see what their perspective was on what Mark was doing and whether or not he would ever really make his film or make it in the industry. The payoff of the film came at the end when we realized the final outcome of Mark's dreams and hard work. My final payoff came after the movie when I looked up Mark Borchardt on IMDb.com. All in all, I enjoyed the film and found it to be a big inspiration as an aspiring filmmaker.

American MovieThanks to crowd-sourcing your movies online, your film's financial investors are now faceless strangers without legal representation.But as this mockumentary confirms, in the late-90s', aspiring auteurs were indebted to their families.When Mark's (Mark Borchardt) feature film project is put on hold due to a lack of funding, he redirects his focus to an unfinished horror movie of his called Coven.With his senile uncle Ben backing the short-film and his best friend (Mike Schank) serving as sound-engineer, Mark and many of the townsfolk begin to make one of the worst movies ever made.Marred by his alcoholism, lack of organization and ongoing custody battle with his ex, Mark's cinematic debut is threatened at every angle.One of the first and funniest found-footage documentaries to follow around down-and-out losers, American Movie is inventive, inspiring and awkwardly uproarious.Nowadays, however, the hardest part of movie-making is choosing which bestseller to adapt.Green Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

This movie provides an excellent insight into the world of movie making, a world that requires no special training, just the desire to to do something creative. Movie making is one of the few areas left where formal credentials are not required. Case in point is the subject of this movie, a young man who starts out with nothing and years later creates a commercial product. It's really quite impressive. What I did not like about this documentary is that the young man and his associates are portrayed as being marginal and dysfunctional characters when in fact they are business people trying to put together a commercial product, and just because they don't dress or sound the part does not make them any less deserving of respect. Then again, maybe that's a strong point of the documentary. Whatever the case, this documentary should be a must see for anyone who has an urge to create but does not know where or even how to start. If this young man could do it, why not us?