American Movie (1999)
Bluemark Productions

Description

t takes a village to make a movie, but when that village is Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin and not Hollywood, CA, the results are at times bizarre, comical, and very American. With the help of his mother, his 82-year old uncle, and a local cast of hilarious and lovable characters, filmmaker Mark Borchardt fights his way through internal and external roadblocks to achieve his goal--to make his movie, his way.

Mark's vision for his dream film is unlike most in independent filmmaking today. His inspiration comes from films as disparate as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Seventh Seal, as well as his experiences growing up amidst the grey skies, rusty cars, and ranch houses of Milwaukee's Northwest side.

AMERICAN MOVIE is the story of filmmaker Mark Borchardt, his mission, and his dream. Spanning over two years of intense struggle with his film, his family, financial decline, and spiritual crisis, AMERICAN MOVIE is a portrayal of ambition, obsession, excess, and one man's quest for the American Dream.

Tags

Sundance award winner

Collected reviews and ratings

10 San Francisco Chronicle | Edward Guthmann

What's amazing about ``American Movie'' is its heart and tact. There are no cheap shots here, no mocking of Borchardt, his movies or his working-class, beer-and-beef jerky milieu. Instead, Smith has made a film that's warm, funny and brave all at once. I was sad to see it end.
Read full review (Cinema)

10 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

Borchardt's life is a daily cliffhanger involving poverty, desperation, discouragement and diehard ambition. He's behind on his child support payments, he drinks too much, he can't even convince his ancient Uncle Bill that he has a future as a moviemaker.
Read full review (Cinema)

10 Washington Post | Michael O'Sullivan

The drive and talent of this Orson Welles manqué actually shine through the clouds of his own making, leaving Smith's heartfelt "Movie" as quintessential a story of American ambition as Welles' own "Citizen Kane."
Read full review (Cinema)

10 Combustible Celluloid | Jeffrey M. Anderson

A true testament to sheer will and perseverance winning out over circumstance, American Movie is a real-life Ed Wood (1994) with a real life inspiring angel in its subject, Mark Borchardt.
Read full review (DVD)

9.0 Amazon user reviews

Smith offers us a funny and overwhelmingly affectionate portrait; you may sit down expecting to laugh at Mark's pie-in-the-sky hopes, but you soon find yourself bursting with admiration.
Read full review (DVD)

9.0 Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

As Chris Smith and his collaborator, Sarah Price, follow Mark's not-quite career from crisis to crisis, from one dreary, working-class Wisconsin location to the next, we come to see that he's pursuing his dream with his full heart and all the capabilities he can muster.
Read full review (Cinema)

8.3 Entertainment Weekly | Lisa Schwarzbaum

Chris Smith's deadpan documentary -- which, with exquisite topical inevitability, won the grand jury prize at Sundance this year -- follows Borchardt, a skinny, bespectacled, unworldly 32-year-old father of three with Wayne's World hair and the odd-job resume of a 22-year-old slacker, on his roundabout quest to make a movie he calls Northwestern.
Read full review (Cinema)

8.0 DVD Verdict | Norman Short

The characters are somewhat endearing but watching this guy living with his parents and delivering newspapers at age 30, and getting drunk all the time instead of really trying to get his movie made makes it difficult.
Read full review (DVD)

8.0 filmcritic.com | Aileo Weinmann

In an odd sort of way, American Movie gave me the same kind of satisfaction that comes from really good down home cooking; neither needs false pretense to make you happy. In fact, it was so good, I’m thinking about going back for seconds.
Read full review (Cinema)

7.5 ReelViews | James Berardinelli

American Movie may seem to be about filmmaking (and, to a degree, it is), but it's actually much more about the man behind the camera, and all that he represents.
Read full review (Cinema)

7.0 PopMatters.com | Mark Reiter

How good is American Movie? Hard to say. It’s more endearing than brilliant and more poignant than insightful.
Read full review (Cinema)