Home Movie (DVD)
Directed by: Chris Smith

I love strange documentaries, more specifically, documentaries about the strange people and things around us that we don’t normally take the time to stop and admire. And in this age of quirky reality-dominated television programming, I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one who finds elements of truth more interesting than the characters and plots that are being dreamed up in movie studio boardrooms on a regular basis.

Director Chris Smith has been working in the realm of slighty off-kilter non-fiction for a few years now, most notably with a film called American Movie about a struggling Midwest filmmaker trying to make his first feature. While that movie explored the trials and tribulations needed to achieve ones dreams (under somewhat ridiculous circumstances), Home Movie looks at the relationship between the average person and that special place they call home. Okay, maybe the people featured in the film aren’t exactly “average”, but that’s what makes Home Movie such a fascinating journey. It is grounded in bizarre realities that most of us average people will never know.

Smith seems to have stumbled upon the subject rather inadvertently as he was hired to create a few commercials for Homestore.com (an online business that focuses on real estate and relocation). To do this, he edited together some short clips of interviews recorded with an assortment of people who live in some very eccentric homes. Apparently he enjoyed these people and their footage a great deal and he thought they deserved more airtime than a simple 30 second TV spot. So he gathered up all the film he had shot and amalgamated it into a full length movie.

There are a total of 5 different subjects in this documentary, each of which are given pretty much equal time on screen. There is “Wild” Bill Tregle, an alligator wrestler/breeder who lives on a houseboat in the bayou; photographers Bob Walker and Francis Mooney who live in a house overrun with cats; Linda Beech, a former star of a Japanese sitcom who now lives in a secluded tree house in Hawaii; Diana and Ed Peden, hippies who have taken up residence in an abandoned missile silo in Kansas; and zany inventor Ben Skora who has created a futuristic house full of remote control gadgets and gizmos. Who knows how Smith tracked these people down, especially since they are from all across different parts of the U.S., but you can imagine what kind of broad contrasts are showcased here. Each of them takes the viewer through a tour of their homes while telling anecdotes from their lives and explaining what makes their homes so special to them.

Although there is no underlying story or narrative driving the movie, it never gets boring or dull. If anything, the main problem with Home Movie is that it feels a little too short with a running time of just over an hour. As a result, the movie does not seem like it accomplished all that it wanted to. That is to say, the different threads did not come together to deliver an overall message or moral. This may have been because it was rushed, but at the same time not every documentary needs to be “educational”. Home Movie is just wacky and fun, and that’s good enough for me.

The extra material on the DVD most notably includes the actual Homestore.com commercials that Smith created, but not a heck of a lot else. There are a few additional tidbits included for each featured home owner such as a gallery of cat photos, Wild Bill’s gator commercial, and a history of Kansas missile bases. An audio commentary track would have been a nice addition here, especially considering the high price that the disc seems to be going for. Still, Home Movie is well worth the price in my opinion. It’s highly recommended viewing, especially for fans of American Movie and other light-hearted documentaries. It really is a mad world out there. — Sean