American Shopper, Severence, Aachi and Ssipak

The sun is coming out. Flowers are popping up. Gortex jackets are being shed right and left. The signs are clear. It’s time to go inside for a month and watch movies.

It’s taken me a few weeks to get inside as life always seems to ramp up at this time of year, but I finally made it. Always one to stick his toes in the pool before diving in, here are a few capsule reviews (plus one rant).

American Shopper, meta-mockumentary

An interesting movie, but I had to take issue with SIFF’s description as this, while documenting people doing absurd things, is nothing like BORAT. It comes from the opposite camp: the film doesn’t try and skewer the Aislers, it draws us close and makes us hug these strange people. That’s what I thought when I was watching it, anyway…

To make a long story short, we have a wan insurance salesman who has his Great Idea in Columbia Missouri and sets out to make it a reality. His great idea, this sport of Aisling: 3 minutes to run down some grocery aisles and pick up 15 preselected products, with points for style and originality – plus of course, the bonus object. All well and good. It gives a good chance to meet all sorts of kooky Midwesterners who are down for that – and the strangely lucrative $10,000 prize. So we go through the process a nice selection of characters – my favorite, Mike Miller, a struggling former actor who has been through some hard times. And we follow these characters through this ridiculous sport to the logical conclusion. And with some impressive shots. They had a crane, dollies – a bunch of stuff your average independent doc crew isn’t going to have in Missouri.

Then I do a little research. I google Aisling. No mention on the first 10 pages. I look up American Shopper and find that it’s a Mock Documentary. What!? “Foul,” I scream at the computer and quickly call Stacey to tell her how we’ve been played. The little midwestern guy is an actor… from LA? The whole thing is a conceit? Mike Miller laid his soul on the line and they we’re just laughing at him the whole time? Wait… all the cast, the regular people, knew it was a farce? That’s what the website tells us. So the real people were acting, too?

Apparently, the only people not in on the joke was the audience. I’m not sure why this upsets me so, but it does. Can a movie be part documentary, part fictional as the American Shopper website claims? Can I trust anything in this film? Suddenly everything, from Mike’s lonely midnight shopping cart practice, to the Thanksgiving montage, to the cautious grocery store manager – everything is suspect. I can imagine producers taking them all aside, manipulating everything. And I don’t like it. I believed in Aisling, but I was punk’d and I think documentary film makers are going to need some sort of label of authenticity in the not too distant future. Or maybe we need a new category for reality TV, Borat, American Shopper, and all these other movies that are going to start trying to cash in on the new market for documentaries.

Severence… knows it audience

I’m not surprised it got distribution. It’s not a great movie, but I thought it set out to do what it intended with aplomb. The characters from The Office, hunted down like animals. It’s funny; it makes you jump out of your seat and cover your eyes. Good fun all around.

Aachi and Ssipak – full of crap

This movie also made you jump, but I had to hold Stacey down to stop her from leaving. Not to say that it’s not stylistically impressive. It was like a Ralph Steadman drawing of homicidal little smurfs with automatic weapons and diapers on their heads chasing addictive popsicles that are given out as rewards for pooping. Because poop powers the world.

It made me laugh. But I got tired of the shenanigans long before they stopped. The animation was great, and a lot of the imaginings great fun. I especially liked the Diaper Gang’s carnival horse/in-line skate transport.

It certainly pushes the envelope. Like an envelope full of poop. But I would probably have enjoyed the great images more as one or two drawings… in a book I could close and set down next to the toilet.