Winnebago Man

"The Internet is like the modern day freakshow.  Except you don't have to pay the nickel to get in.  It's like meeting the three-headed boy or something."  Such are the insights of a probably not quite self-aware hipster as he waits in a Disneyland-sized line to catch his glimpse of the infamous Winnebago Man at the Found Film Festival in San Francisco.  Though just because he isn't quite self-aware and a hipster doesn't make him wrong.  We're all guilty of it; scouring the archives of YouTube and eBaums World for videos of drunken "celebrities" eating cheeseburgers off the floor, Jersey Shore wanna-be's putting themselves on display, hopeful sportscasters going...eh, boom, or regular folks generally making fools of themselves.  In that way we are all Homer Simpson.

And so we have the Winnebago Man.

Winnebago Man is Jack Rebney, a broadcast journalist who quit his job at CBS over what he perceived (seemingly presciently) as the dumbing down of broadcast news and ended up working for the Winnebago company making industrial films for RV tradeshows and dealers.  Evidence seems to suggest he hated it.

Jack Rebney is also the star of one of the viralist viral videos of all time.  In fact, the video pre-dates the term viral video, YouTube, and even the Internet (at least as we know it) itself.

In 1989, during a shoot for one of these promotional videos, he apparently had the mother of all One of Those Days.  During the shoot, the videographers kept the cameras rolling during in the outtakes as Rebney became more and more frustrated and angry with...pretty much everything.  He cursed when he forgot his lines.  He swore when a demonstration of a feature on the latest Winnebago model didn't work correctly.  He cussed at the flies buzzing around his head in the blistering Iowa heat.  To borrow a line from A Christmas Story, "He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oil or clay.  It was his true medium; a master."

The videographers found it so hilarious that they made copies of the outtake tapes and gave them out to their friends.  In the years to come the tape was copied and re-copied and given to friends of friends of friends, until it had become a sort of primitive, underground precursor to what the Internet and YouTube were one day to be.  Rebney became the Winnebago Man or simply, the Angriest Man in the World.

Of course, once the Internet and YouTube were born it was inevitable that someone would upload it.  There are many permutations available on YouTube, but this is probably one of the more definitive ones.  Over seven minutes of furious profanity laced rage.  Here it is.  View at your own risk.  Seriously it's almost nothing but curse words.

Filmmaker Ben Steinbauer (no relation) came across the Winnebago Man VHS tapes in the 90's, and like countless others was for some reason mesmerized by it.  Once it went viral on the Web he began to wonder who this angry fellow was.  Did he know he had become an Internet sensation?  What did he think about being famous--or infamous?  Was he always this angry?

Steinbauer set out on a quest to find the Winnebago Man.  It proved more difficult than he thought.  Even after he was able to discover his given name, Jack Rebney.  Rebney appeared to have vanished from the face of the earth and Steinbauer finally resorted to hiring a private investigator.  Steinbauer finally tracked Rebney down to a tiny cabin in the mountains of Northern California and met the Winnebago Man face to face.

What he got was nothing like the YouTube sensation.  Here was an old man, living a life of peace in the mountains.  Polite, patient, even demur.  He said he had heard about how his bad day had turned into a sensation, but claimed never to have seen it.  But something seemed a little off.  Both to me, the viewer, and the filmmaker.  It seemed like an act.

It was.

A few weeks after that first meeting, Steinbauer received a call from Rebney and discovered the man from the video was not so different from the man he was now speaking to.  It turns out Rebney is a man with a lot on his mind and he wants to share it.

The rest of the film is the pretty fascinating interaction between Steinbauer and Rebney, as Steinbauer tries and tries to get an idea of who this Winnebago Man is.  All Rebney wants to do is pontificate about his views of the world and his disdain for pretty much everyone in it.  He never says as much, but he has been wounded by his fame; he feels laughed at, not with.

Steinbauer attempts to convince Rebney to appear at the Found Footage Festival in San Francisco.  Rebney, unsurprisingly, stonewalls.  He has nothing in common with those people.  Why would they want to see him?  Steinbauer persists, and finally Rebney agrees.

Its at the festival where we meet our hipster friend from the opening quote.  Waiting in line to see the "three headed boy" he has no idea what a surprise he is in for.  What happens at Rebney's appearance is pretty remarkable and had to be a surprise to everyone involved, perhaps most of all Rebney.  It's a surprisingly poignant moment.

Cinco Banres, co-host of The Show With No-Name--a TV show in the pre-YouTube era that featured videos like these--puts oddball video voyeurism in succinct if not eloquent terms, "This is something to be watched, a cage, something on the other side.  I don't want the reality of it, I want the buffoon..."

Steinbauer wanted to know the reality of it and what he found probably surprised him and I know it surprised the Winnebago Man.  Sometimes they are laughing with you.

Here's the trailer (which is edited, for what that's worth).

The Adventures of Tin Tin, In 102 Words Exactly

Steven Spielberg plus Peter Jackson plus a decades old Belgian comic book character equals a pretty good recipe for high adventure.  Tin Tin has a very Indiana Jones vibe about it, unsurprisingly, and pretty much everything you'd want in an adventure story: secret maps, sea captains, sheiks, camels, shootouts, intrigue, narrow European streets, a sword fight with giant cranes.......everything.  Andy Serkis (LoTR's Gollum and King Kong) proves once again why he is the worlds greatest digital actor, as the pickled Captain Haddock.  The McGuffin turns out to be disappointingly predictable and the ending was a tad anti-climatic, but mostly a fun ride.

Rango

Imagine for a minute that the Coen Brothers joined forces with Sergio Leone to create an animated version of Chinatown in a western motif with a lizard as the protagonist.  It's a western!  It's noir!  It's a cartoon!  It's Rango!

Rango tells the tale of a domesticated chameleon that has no doubt been living the life of easy luxury in his aloha shirt and spacious terrarium.  But through circumstances beyond a lizards control Rango finds himself stranded in the dry Mojave desert and stumbles upon the dusty hamlet of Dirt.  Dirt is inhabited by an array of crusty, hardscrabble desert varmints, most resembling characters straight out of Hollywood Western central casting.  Some may see them as cliches', I prefer to see them as homages.  Due to the previously mentioned uncontrollable circumstances that led him to Dirt, Rango finds himself hailed as a hero by the townsfolk and is made the Sheriff of the town by the mayor, an ancient tortoise who wears a white cowboy hat and vest and rides in a motorized wheel chair.

Despite being way out of his element--and not brave or heroic by nature--Rango takes to his new role and struts around town, not exactly discouraging the rumors of his supposed exploits.  And perhaps blinded by their need for something positive to cling to, the denizens of Dirt look to Rango as their savior.  See, things have been tough in Dirt lately.  Water is scarce.  The water used to flow every Wednesday and the Dirtians would gather their buckets, jars, and pales to gather what they could.  But now the water has dried up and no one seems to know why.

Rango meets a young female lizard or gecko or something that owns a ranch near Dirt and thinks something nefarious is afoot and that the mayor is behind it.  Rango thinks she may be on to something and wrangles up a posse--which includes a one eared rabbit doctor, a chicken with conjunctivitis, and a Native American crow, among other things--to track down the cause of Dirt's mysterious drought.  All the while, the adventure is accompanied by a Mariachi band of small owls in sombreros.

If this all sounds like some one's acid trip, well, I wouldn't be surprised.  But I liked it!  The above described story is really just window dressing for a pretty straight forward unsuspecting hero narrative.  Will Rango fulfill his destiny as the hero, or will his seemingly natural instincts cause him to let the townsfolk down?  We already know the answer of course.

The movie is actually a lot of fun and looks incredible.  They used motion capture for most of the animation (using the motions of live actors captured and gussied up by computers) and the characters move fluidly and look natural, not like early motion capture attempts like Polar Express.  The cinematography is terrific, and I wasn't surprised to see Roger Deakins name in the credits as a consultant.  Deakins has been the director of photography for most of the recent amazing looking westerns like True Grit, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and 3:10 to Yuma.  The soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and Los Lobos is great as well, sort of a hybrid of Morricone and Dick Dale.

Besides Johnny Depp as the voice of Rango, the voice talents of Bill Nighy, Alfred Molina, Stephen Root, Harry Dean Stanton, Ned Beatty, and Abigail Breslin are also featured.  Timothy Olyphant also delivers a spot on riff as The Spirit of the West, which bears a striking resemblance to Cli...oh, I don't want to give it away.  Let's just say as a character prominently featured in many a Leone spaghetti western.

All told, I really enjoyed Rango and all it's weirdness.  Director Gore Verbinski (who directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies) has made a witty, quirky gem that has some great action sequences.  Be warned, however, despite being animated and distributed by Nickelodeon, this isn't exactly a movie for kids.  At least not small ones.  Most of the jokes would be lost on them, and it is considerably darker than your standard kid fare.

Here's a trailer:

Buck, In 102 Words Exactly

Blogger Note:  New feature!  In 102 Words Exactly is a feature I'll be running--my guess is pretty frequently since its only 102 words--when I watch/read/eat/use something that is worth mentioning but don't feel like spending a lot of time on.  Not that those are lesser movies/books/foods/gizmos, I just happen to be feeling lazy that day.  Why 102 words?  Why not?  Enjoy the first after the jump.