Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Edition - Part 4

Blogger's Note:  Check out part 1, 2, and 3 if you missed them.  You won't be disappointed.  Well, you could be I guess.  But it's worth the risk.

As always, these are in no particular order.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012 - Wes Anderson) - If you've ever seen a Wes Anderson movie, you know you can spot a Wes Anderson movie a mile away.  He was in the hipster vanguard, dating back to 1998's Rushmore, which I love, and possibly to 1996's Bottle Rocket, which I've never seen love.  Every aesthetic aspect of Anderson's movies smacks of the Ironic 60's; from the mod costumes, to the British Invasion soundtracks, part homage and part parody. His movies are weird and whimsical, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.  Moonrise Kingdom definitely works.  It's a story of young, forbidden love, 12 year old Khaki Scout Sam Shakusky falling in love with the slightly older Suzy Bishop.  The two run off together to the chagrin of Sam's foster parents, Suzy's attorney parents (played by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), the Khaki Scout Master (played by Edward Norton), the local cop (played by Bruce Willis), and basically everyone else who inhabits the beautiful New England island of New Penzance.

The grown up cast also features Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, and Jason Schwarztman.  All are great, as one would expect, but the kids are really what make the movie.  Jared Gillman as Sam and Kara Hayward as Suzy are the perfect pair to capture the innocence of a young and earnest love that doesn't really know any better.  More than any other of Anderson's movie, this one shows actual heart, rather than an ironic twist on what true sentiment might actually look like.  Not to say Moonrise is sentimental, because it's not, but it's Anderson's most honest movie yet and highly enjoyable.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962 - David Lean) - For my full take on 5 Things That Make Lawrence of Arabia the Consummate Epic click here.  I guarantee it's the only take on David Lean's classic that drops a quote from The Wire.

Fargo (1996 - Joel Coen) - I am a huge fan of the Coen brothers, and their classic crime story is without a doubt their masterpiece.  Not necessarily my favorite, but it's pretty great.  William H. Macy is a portrait of frustrated ineptitude as Jerry Lundegaard, a hapless car salesman who plots his wife's kidnap and ransom to extort money, and respect, from his wealthy father-in-law.  Unfortunately for Jerry, the criminal "professionals" he hires are only slightly less inept than he is and things go south in a hurry.  Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare are the mismatched kidnapper duo; one neurotic and one a sociopath.  Frances McDormand is terrific as Marge Gunderson, the unassuming, sharp, and very pregnant, small town cop who is investigating the case.  Dark, funny, and full of awesome Midwest accents and cadence, it also sets the pace in movie uses for wood chippers.

The Cooler (2003 - Wayne Kramer) - Another great performance from William H. Macy, this time as Bernie Lootz, a hard luck gambler employed by one of the last old school, pre-corporate casinos in Las Vegas as a cooler.  When a player gets hot at the black jack table or roulette wheel, they send in Bernie, a walking whatever-the-opposite-of-a-rabbits-foot-is and suddenly lady luck waves bye bye.  But when Bernie falls for waitress Natalie, played by Maria Bello, his luck, begins to change.  And that's bad for business.  Alec Baldwin stars as Shelly Kaplow, the hard core casino boss trying to hold on to the joint before the corporations take him over too.  He is none too pleased with Bernie's sudden stroke of good fortune.  He's old Vegas to the core, preferring to solve his problems with a ballpean hammer when possible.  A pretty good show about luck, destiny, and choices.  However, I saw Macy's butt on multiple occasions so that may have soured it for me a little.

Winnebago Man (2009 - Ben Steinbauer) - I wrote a full blown review of Winnebago Man a while back.  It's one of the most entertaining and thoughtful documentaries I've seen in a while.  Predictably funny, surprisingly poignant, and full of swearing.

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).