Tarnation
Sundance
10 tonight
This no-budget documentary—okay, it must have cost something for the miles of videotape. And editing bay rentals had to have mounted up to get all that raw (emphasis on RAW) material down to a palatable 88 minutes—has been much hyped about since it first hit the gay- and then indie- and then mainstream-festival circuits in 2003. It's gone on to become a benchmark; I can't count how many reviews of other films I've read that include a reference to Tarnation. And yet, I've never read anything that's done this film justice, because I've never before (or since) seen anything like it. You think you had a crappy childhood? Meet New York actor Jonathan Caouette, who for 19 years beginning at age 8 kept a video diary of one funny and tragic and harrowing life. How harrowing? Well, let's begin with what sparked this unique project: witnessing his mentally impaired, beauty-queen mother raped by a stranger. The lonely and damaged Texan points his camera at other members of his dysfunctional family, his schoolyard friends and, later in life, his same-sex lovers. But the most gripping moments come when Caouette is all alone—particularly the dramatic monologue he gives as a sweating, nervous, battered wife. He was all of 11 at the time.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.