The personal essay film is a tricky genre, because when you get right down to it, who cares? Sure, there is a brotherhood of man and all that, but is it such that we\u2019ll be interested enough in a brother\u2019s struggles that we\u2019re willing to sit with them for a while in a movie theater, not to mention shell out money for the experience?<\/p>\n
These questions represent perhaps crass generalizations that crowd out the potentially dire and potentially universal themes and narratives that a personal documentary can encompass, but you get the idea. And the idea applies with particular pertinence to this movie, \u201cFlipside,\u201d which winds up making us care about the existential crisis of a white, possibly upper-middle-class male with no health issues, an apparently lovely family, a high-end profession in a form of filmmaking, and a lot more to be happy about. <\/p>\n
The writer-director of \u201cFlipside,\u201d Chris Wilcha, pulls us in through indirection. He starts the movie with a portrait of Herman Leonard, a music photographer, who sits in a gallery surrounded by his portraits of the likes of Nat \u201cKing\u201d Cole and Chet Baker and muses that \u201cevery life is a trip\u201d and \u201cyou are the captain of your boat.\u201d These platitudes gain some real weight when Leonard tells us he\u2019s dying. Wilcha then informs us that the footage we\u2019re watching is from a documentary he started but never finished. Turns out he’s got a bunch of them. <\/p>\n
\u201cFlipside\u201d then depicts how this state of affairs came to be. Wilcha presents a brisk account of his early years, the no-sell-out grunge ethos he grew up with as a Gen Xer, and how, upon taking a corporate job at Columbia House, he interrogated a system he despised from the inside, actually finishing an eventually well-regarded 2000 documentary \u201cThe Target Shoots First.\u201d Predictions that he could be the Gen-X Michael Moore ran headlong into Wilcha\u2019s need to make a living, which led to ostensibly meaningful jobs like a gig at \u201cThis American Life.\u201d But largely, Wilcha made commercials. Becoming the thing he beheld and disdained. <\/p>\n
Seeking something like redemption or legitimacy or … well, meaning, Wilcha found his way back to a record store in Pompton Lakes called Flipside, where he had a job as a teenager. (A Jersey boy myself, I\u2019ve actually set foot in the joint at least once.) Its proprietor, referred to throughout only by his first name, Dan, is, like Wilcha, something of a hoarder. This gives the spot its distinct flavor but also makes it an awkward business in the digital age. Wilcha\u2019s initial resolve to make a film to help the business diffuses over time and becomes another unfinished project. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The personal essay film is a tricky genre, because when you get right down to it, who cares? Sure, there is a brotherhood of man and all that, but is it such that we\u2019ll be interested enough in a brother\u2019s struggles that we\u2019re willing to sit with them for a while in a movie theater, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[43],"class_list":["post-1199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-movies","tag-documentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}