"American Movie" is Chris Smith's marvellous documentary about making a
film or rather about how not to make a film and it gets by on a surfeit
of charm regardless of just how charmless its central character is. He's
Mark Borchardt, aspiring writer/director of a horror picture called
"Northwestern", whose ambitions and whose love of movies far outweigh
his talents. Mark can talk the talk enough to convince his uncle to
finance the picture and enough to get a bunch of his friends to work on
it. You could say this is a movie about celebrity or at least the dream
of it. As a film maker Mark may never achieve that but glimpses of some
of the shorts he made show that in a some other time or place or in some
alternative universe he could possibly have been Tarantino or Romero
and at least Chris Smith has allowed him his fifteen minutes of fame,
(not that he deserves it). "Northwestern" could have been the ultimate
cult movie; instead "American Movie" has built up a cult all its own.
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