This week we start season 13 in earnest as we talk a month of documentaries! We watched American Movie, a film about being creative, the American Dream, and keeping the Surge nice and chilled. RIP to Uncle Billy!

This week on Myopia Movies, we're trading the usual fictional disasters for a documented one. Chris Smith's American Movie follows Mark Borchardt — Wisconsin's answer to Orson Welles, if Orson Welles had a day job at a cemetery and financed his art through a combination of paper routes and his uncle's life savings — as he attempts, against all reason and budget, to finish his short horror film Coven.

It's not a movie about filmmaking so much as a movie about willpower, and what happens when that willpower vastly outpaces talent, funding, sobriety, and — in at least one memorable scene — the ability to say the word "coven" without flubbing it forty separate times. Mark's business partner Mike Schank drifts through every frame like a man who found inner peace by accident and never bothered to explain how. Family members get roped into acting roles they clearly didn't audition for. A wall gets punched. A head goes through a cabinet, on purpose, for art.

We riff on a lot of terrible movies here. This is that rare thing: a great one about the terrible movies other people make — and somehow ends up more heartfelt than half the scripted stuff we cover. Grab a beer, don't invest in anyone's film school dropout uncle, and let's watch a man refuse, with genuine heroism, to give up on Wisconsin's most cursed haunted house short.

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How will American Movie hold up?

Directed by Chris Smith

Starring:

Mark Borchardt
Mike Schank
Tom Schank
Monica Borchardt
Ken Keen
Bill Borchardt
Chris Borchardt (Mark's brother)
Alex Borchardt-Hume (Mark's son)