Giuseppe Makes a Movie Review

There are so many reasons to make a movie, and so many reasons people do.  Artists sometimes feel the need to express their emotions, thoughts, and ideas into cinematic means.  Others want the fame and fortune that making a hit can bring.  Others do it simply because they can, whether they're born into the right family, with the right set of skills, in the right place at the right time.  But the best, above all these other reasons, make movies out of sheer love for the craft.

That's what drives Giuseppe Andrews, the charming subject of Adam Rifkin's Giuseppe Makes a Movie.  Like Andrews' movies, Rifkin's documentary is lovingly homemade, all rough edges and tender observation, a fitting stage to the big, strange ideas that Andrews brings to his movies.

Andrews' are movies that most people will never see, that most people wouldn't even want to see if they had the chance, that - honestly - I probably wouldn't want to see.  The plots are loose, the props cheap, the dialogue vulgar.  Some of the lines - spouted with unrehearsed gusto by a troupe of misfit actors, such as a Vietnam vet and an elderly woman battling cancer - would make Tarantino blush; there's language more colorful than you'll find anywhere else in film, including pornography.  There's no concern for clarity, continuity, or even coherence.  Even the most story-driven of Andrews' films are more trailer park tone poems than discrete narratives.  And that's what makes him the world's lowest-budget auteur.  No one else could make the movies he's making, because no one else would think to.

That Andrews is so utterly happy making his dinky films on less-than-shoestring budgets is all the more wonderful considering his career trajectory.  He found minor fame in a slew of studio movies like Independence Day and Never Been Kissed, but now he bemoans indie directors for making their movies with too much money at their disposal.  He's incredibly well-versed in film, admiring the work of great directors like Fassbinder and Fellini, and fancying himself akin to them in that he wears many hats.  He is writer, director, actor, editor, making films in a Wild West fashion, slinging lines and rolling with the punches that come when making a movie over the course of mere days.

These are real films, despite how weird, how minuscule, how unseen, how incoherent they might be.  There's never a question of how Andrews and his crew accomplished something; movie magic of that kind is nowhere to be found.  But one might be wondering why they accomplished something, what drives this ragtag group of "beautiful eccentrics" (to borrow Andrews' phrase) to make their unorthodox motion pictures.

While some of his movies end up playing minor film festivals, none are ever seen widely, and this documentary is unlikely to change that.  These people aren't making movies to have them seen; for them, it's about the creation process.  They celebrate achieving something together, they band together as a community, they form a family, and they find brief moments of meaning.  Shells of men who have been forgotten by society get to stand in the spotlight, briefly.  They depend on each other, bringing accountability to those who haven't been counted on for anything for years.  Andrews, long-haired and straightforward, dutiful and loving, is like a West Coast Christ with a gang of offbeat disciples, and his miracles consist of giving them reason to get up each day, providing something to do, and producing booze at craft services (courtesy of producing partner and former BeeGee guitarist Ed).

There's a lot of weird stuff to behold in Giuseppe Makes a Movie, even as we catch only brief glimpses of the eponymous cinematic outing - called Garbanzo Gas, about a cow who gets sent on a lavish vacation by the slaughterhouse.  But Rifkin's film is never making Andrews a punchline; he makes weird shit, but he's completely genuine in the production of said weird shit.  We're never asked to laugh at Andrews, but we're often asked to laugh with him at the wild joys that come when making a strange movie with stranger people.  They believe in what they're doing, even if they don't always understand why they're doing it, and that's more than can be said for most of the people operating within Hollywood.