December 2002 Archives

American Movie: The Making of Northwestern is a movie documenting amateur filmmaker Mark Borchardt's attempt to film his opus Northwestern. As hard as it is to believe, this is a real documentary, filming real people doing unbelievable stuff, trying to get a movie made on a skeleton budget. Several times I had to double check that this wasn't a fictional movie, as the characters as just too bizarre to believe!

Mark Borchardt is a loser in the game of life, who has been making hack horror "films" (and I use the term loosely) since he was first given a camera when he was in his early teens. Chris Smith, the director of American Movie and producer Sarah Price, follow Mark for over two years, as he tries to get his epic film of ordinary Midwest life made. They document the early filming, the break to finish up his current horror short Coven (included on the DVD) to generate money for Northwestern, to starting back up on the epic, which never does get finished during this documentary.

It's hard to relate to any of the people in this film. It also doesn't help that a central event in the film is the Packers slamming the Patriots in Super Bowl XXX in 1996! Mark Borchardt is an unemployed dreamer who talks big, thinks small, and drinks alot, imagining himself to be a film visionary, while his friends and yes, even synchophants, all float around him in a hazy group. Some of the scenes of the film on Coven are hard to watch, especially the one where one of the actors gets his head repeatedly slammed into a cupboard door, trying to break it, only to find out they didn't score the wood enough!

I'm not sure if I can recommend this movie. It is an interesting look at filming a shoestring budget film, but the movers and shakers in this film are just so far beyond normal it is hard to relate to them. It might be different if these guys showed some talent, and you could pull for them to get the film off, but they just don't have any! But there are some good scenes and it is a fun movie to watch. Rent it, I guess!

Branded to Kill is Japanese director Seijun Suziki's brutal pean to a killer. Sort of a followup to his brilliant Tokyo Drifter, which I really liked, it tells the story of a Yakuza (the Japanese Mafia) hit man who makes a mistake and then spends the rest of the movie trying to avoid getting bumped off in return. It is a subject matter often visited by Suzuki, but I think he's done it better in other movies.

Jo Shishido is an expert hit man, called in when things get tough. The movie opens with him involved in a protection job, trying to keep a VIP from getting whacked by a rival gang. He succeeds, but only just barely, losing his partner in the proces. As he is getting older, he begins to wonder if he wants to keep doing it.

He gets hired by a women to knock another person off, but the job gets bungled through no fault of his own, and for slightly nebulous reasons, the mob turns on him and begins to hunt him down. His girlfriend is tortured, and a movie of it happening is shown to him. He tries to rescue her and the movie sinks into a strange miasma of violence, sex, and gunfire. To be honest, I gave up at this point!

While Tokyo Drifter showed some incredible visuals, I think one problem with Branded to Kill is the black and white format, which hampers Suzuki's style, and leaves almost nothing else to pay attention to. None of the main characters is at all likable, as violence and sex play an integral part of their lives, with almost no redeeming qualities. Even the lovers smack each other around and spend much of the movie screaming at each other. It was an uncomfortable movie to watch, but they may have been planned, I guess. It just doesn't make for a fun or even interesting evening at the cinema!