Know Your Mushrooms

Mushrooms focuses on the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival and one of its luminaries, Larry Evans, an excitable older gentleman Mann has breathlessly described as the “Indiana Jones of mushroom hunting.” Alas, Mann seems to find Evans much more interesting than audiences will; if he’s the Indiana Jones of mushroom hunting, then Mann is grading on an awfully lenient curve. Mann uses Evans and the Mushroom Festival as a springboard to discuss the subculture of mushroom enthusiasts, fungi-mad obsessives who travel far and wide to find rare and exotic varieties. The festival ends, terrifyingly enough, with countercultural types dressed as mushrooms grooving en masse to hippie music, an image more disturbing than any found in the Saw series.

Mann remains one of the documentary world’s most distinctive, playful directors, with a fizzy style that has more in common with Frank Tashlin and cartoons than cinéma vérité. Mann is up to all his old tricks here, recycling campy old film clips, piling on goofball animation, and doling out Mushroom “Fun Facts.” Yet his collagist, pop-art approach strains mightily to make non-hallucinogenic mushrooms seem interesting. Early in the film, Mann asks Evans why mushrooms are so fascinating. By the end of Mushrooms’ 73 minutes, neither Evans nor the film has come up with a convincing answer.

Key features: An interview with Mann, deleted scenes, a video by Evans, and a lecture from mushroom expert Gary Lincoff.