1995 mockumentary
Rating: 8/20
Plot: This details the troubled shoot of a Western.
My enjoyment of his animated work varies wildly, but as a fan of mockumentaries and movies about movies, I thought I'd give this non-animated Plympton work a spin. Maybe I was hoping for a hidden gem, like The Making Of. . .And God Spoke. Unfortunately, this is a clumsy and largely unfunny mockumentary, the kind of thing I think I could have made with a thousand bucks and a group of friends if I had either a thousand bucks or friends.
No-budget films can be embraced if the ideas are good enough, but this movie is short on ideas and dollars. Juvenile cheap attacks on political correctness and and religion and the avant-garde are fish-in-the-barrel shots. And while there are ideas that might have been fleshed out into something semi-humorous--yodeling, for example, is always funny--most of the humor in this is too obvious and/or half formed. Obvious musical cues; references to alien abduction, psychics, and bestiality; film snob criticism; soiled underpants; and a plot point involving bad breath are the worst offenders. Some the budget shortcuts (the day/night scene almost got me), backward noodle eating, all the fun ways to continue filming with dead actors, and even the stuttering are things that might have worked in better hands, but Bill Plympton's hands were not those hands.
One character talks about the "spiritual stench" of the movie being made. I wouldn't go as far to say this movie has a "spiritual stench," but I would probably rather watch 80 minutes of the film-within-a-film called "Frog Cowboys" before watching this again.
Gus Van Sant makes an awkward cameo in this for some reason.
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