June 9th, 2008
1. American Movie (1999)
Mark Borchardt has long had a dream of making a film called Northwestern, a coming-of-age story about growing up on the rough edges of Milwaukee. He even has a plan to finance the film by first selling copies of a horror movie called Coven directly to genre fans. But getting to that stage isn't as easy as he suspects. Director Chris Smith captures Borchardt at a crucial stage in the project, as he films Coven (pronounced, per the lugubrious Borchardt's preference, "coe-ven") between bouts of binge-drinking and stints working a paper route. Borchardt's resources are limited, to say the least, but apart from a few dark nights of the soul captured by Smith's camera, he remains upbeat about the project, helped by an eccentric support system that includes his doting mother and pal Mike Schank, a slow-speaking musician sidekick who nearly steals the movie. Avoiding easy laughs without overselling Borchardt's talent, Smith's film succeeds largely because it makes audiences root for Borchardt's dream of escaping the workaday drudgery around him through art.
2. The Cruise (1998)
Timothy "Speed" Levitch is a New York City tour guide with an uncanny ability to find connections between Manhattan's architectural history and his own daily struggle to get into sync with the universal life force. Bennett Miller's The Cruise is essentially an hour and 10 minutes of Levitch at work and on the streets, delivering a long, jazzy monologue with remarkable expressiveness. At first, Levitch's nasal voice and dippy philosophizing can come off as a little grating, but he eventually wins people over with his simultaneous eagerness and melancholy, as he jumps from waxing rhapsodic about the city he loves to describing the ways it cages its residents.
3. Sick: The Life And Death Of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997)
Until the introduction of experimental treatments that have recently extended the lives of some patients, cystic fibrosis was considered a "children's disease," and an excruciating one at that, characterized by a mucus buildup in the lungs that leads to frequent infection. CF-sufferer Bob Flanagan decided to fight the disease by using pain to seize control over his rebellious body, playing the submissive to all but his affliction. Along with his partner Sheree Rose, Flanagan created short films, art installations, video diaries, and performance-art pieces around extreme acts of sadomasochism. Kirby Dick's documentary Sick doesn't shy away from his most shocking stunts, from nailing his penis to a board to absorbing a steel sphere several times larger than its intended destination. And yet the film is weirdly palatable, even inspiring, because of Flanagan's sharp sense of humor about his determination to beat the disease in his own twisted way.
4. Crumb (1995)
Terry Zwigoff's groundbreaking portrait of the sexually and racially transgressive underground cartoonist R. Crumb is a testament to how art can be a lifeline for the seemingly hopeless. Throughout the film, Zwigoff forces us to consider Robert Crumb in relation to his similarly gifted brother Charles: How did R. Crumb escape the madness and despair of his dysfunctional home life to become a thriving artist and functioning member of society, while his brother was unable to escape his upbringing and ultimately died by his own hand? For R. Crumb, the answer was to unleash his personal demons on the page, which turned out to be a more socially acceptable avenue for his dark thoughts on race, sex, and the human condition. His harshest critics demonized him for it, but in the context of Zwigoff's film, Crumb's work seems like the healthiest possible outcome for him.
5. The Devil And Daniel Johnston (2005)
Whether you believe folk musician Daniel Johnston to be a savant pop genius or a falsely idolized fringe-dweller doesn't mute the impact of The Devil And Daniel Johnston, which goes further than any documentary since Crumb in locating the intersection of madness and art. Clearly an admirer, director Jeff Feuerzeig gets intimate access to Johnston's life and reveals a manic-depressive visionary who has startled people with his peculiarly catchy pop sensibility and his terrifying periods of violence and institutionalization. His impulse to create art seems to be his salvation from total psychosis, though in the end, only his family members can handle the latter, while the hip indie musicians who initially championed him gradually recede.
6. Dancing Outlaw (1991)
Dancing Outlaw is a PBS documentary that follows Jesse "Jesco" White of Boone County, West Virginia, in his quest to have a good time, impersonate Elvis, dance, and not kill his wife. There's a fine line here between redneck-baiting and anthropological study, but Jesco is ultimately a sympathetic character. Sure, he sniffs lighter fluid and threatens bodily harm on a regular basis, but he's made human on camera, too: Jesco takes the death of his father—a famous mountain-country dancer and his inspiration—really hard, and tries to make his life better. And he hopes to get out, too: "I might get good at this dancing and come into money. I might have a whole new life, next time you see me." He did, briefly: There's a sequel to Dancing Outlaw that follows Jesco to Hollywood, where he cameos on Roseanne.
7. Project Grizzly (1996)
Troy Hurtubise was attacked by a bear once, and doesn't want to repeat the experience without evening the odds. In the years since the attack, Hurtubise has dedicated himself to constructing an increasingly complex series of bear-proof suits and heading out to the Canadian wilderness to put his science-fiction-looking contraptions to the test, all in the name of "research." What exactly he's researching, apart from his own ability to confront his fears, remains one of several questions left unanswered by Peter Lynch's wryly funny but strangely admiring film.
8. Grizzly Man (2005)
In his documentaries and features, Werner Herzog has continually turned to the ongoing struggles of man vs. the forces of nature, and he nearly always finds nature the victor. Timed as the perfect rebuke to the anthropomorphic treatment of animals in March Of The Penguins, Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man testifies to the dangers of thinking wild animals are your cuddly friends. Drawing from a wealth of video footage, Herzog follows the late Timothy Treadwell, a self-styled naturalist who spent 13 summers camping among Alaskan grizzlies in an earnest yet tragically delusional attempt to "protect" them from harm. The film becomes an open debate between Treadwell's sentimentalized view of nature and Herzog's more pragmatic take on it; the issue is settled by a hungry bear, and its "half-bored interest in food."
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