Overall rating: 1/5
Directors: Doug Hawes-Davis and John Lilburn
Tagline: Heavy Metal Parking Lot meets the geriatric set, with boring results..
The Film: This Is Nowhere is a low-budget documentary with all of the sins that low-budget filmmaking generally offers. It’s shot on video. There are no fancy special effects. The picture quality isn’t always what it could be. These are all sins that can be forgiven, though. The film also happens to be terrifically boring.
Boring, I can’t forgive.
The premise of the movie is actually quite promising. The film purports to take a look at the unique sub-culture of nomadic recreational vehicle owners, or RVers, and especially their penchant for seeking out and living in Wal-Mart parking lots.
Made for Montana Public Television, the movie comes packaged either in a 87-minute full version or a 57-minute broadcast version. I didn’t catch the broadcast version, because they don’t pay me the kind of money necessary to make me watch this film twice. However, there is no doubt in my mind that you could easily find 30 minutes of unnecessary footage to cut.
Any cuts would probably make the film more watchable. The individual shots are generally overlong, with the camera often lingering for 20-30 seconds on, well, nothing. C’mon, it’s a friggin’ Wal-Mart parking lot. We got it. You’ve shown us this same shot 40 times already.
The filmmakers also chose to use stock footage in a manner so gratuitous, it would make Ed Wood blush. A guy says he plans on driving to South America? Quick cut to footage of a South American village. Another interviewee goes off on a tangent about how we’ve become a disposable society? Insert stock footage of a landfill here.
What makes the movie even more annoying are the brief glimpses of what it could have been. The filmmakers skim along the surface of an intriguing topic without ever plumbing its depths. The interviews are a good start, but there is no follow through. One woman comments that she and her husband plan to RV for the next five years “unless the Lord comes back before then.” Another RVer goes off on wild tangents about “Ay-rabs” and Mexicans. Obviously these people have some interesting ideas. We don’t hear any more of them, though.
There’s also the myriad contradictions inherent in the RVers lifestyle. They want to “see America,” yet they drive from strip-mall parking lot to strip-mall parking lot, clinging to the rigid familiarity of Wal-Mart. They love the natural beauty of the country, but they consistently are presented sitting on lawn chairs on top of hard asphalt.
There are many promising themes to be found in the movie, but they are never clearly presented to the audience, so the picture flounders.
Rating: 1/5
The DVD
Video:
The movie was shot on video for television, so it is presented in full frame with all of the harsh reality that video provides. Colors are generally good and saturated. But did manage to catch a glimpse of jaggies here and there. All and all, this is not the kind of disc you throw in to show off your new HDTV.
Sound:
The movie is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo. The dialogue is generally sharp and clear. The musical score is the best that Missoula, Montana, has to offer, I guess. But I found it somewhat distracting and often ill-suited to the material.
Extras: Rating: 1/5 Final Thoughts:
I wanted to like this movie. I really did. But the repetitiveness of shot selection, backdrop and content failed to impress me. It nearly failed to keep me awake for the full, dull 87 minutes. It ended up being one of those sad movies where the filmmakers vision was not met by their talent.
I’d have to give them a negative score on the extras. The movie gives you the original trailer–which frankly is much better than the actual movie–and not much else. There is a series of trailers for other documentaries, or “ads” as I like to call them. And that’s it. We’re done.
