Flipside

I have to admit that I am guilty of being so attached to Wilcha's story ever since I saw his first documentary, "A Target Shoots First," in 1999 at the Viennale. For 25 years, I wondered where this guy-a promising documentary filmmaker-went. I stumbled upon his Instagram page a few years back, and I finally got to hear his moving story in full, and it was very well told!

This is a film about LIFE-so much about his story dealing with a midlife crisis and being brave in telling it in the first person. It is also about all the characters that were his friends, colleagues, collaborators, and even subjects of documentaries, making this story very relatable. There is always a sense of humor and wit amidst a philosophical subject, just like in his first one.

I don't know if I need to wait another 25 years until his next documentary (I hope not!). Just writing that last sentence feels like I may not have a full grasp of his message. However, I am uplifted today by this film-trying to let go of my old self at the right time and live life to the fullest.

As a filmmaker with many projects that I've had to put aside over the years so that I could attend to paying jobs, I can relate. But anyone who has tried to strike a balance between work that is fulfilling vs paying the bills can relate. The film weaves together seemingly disparate stories, from that of an ailing photographer to that of the Flipside record store and others, into a unified meditation on life, creativity and happiness (and regret).

Scenes with the filmmaker's parents are humorous as well, as he returns to his childhood home where he has stashed mementoes from the past 30 years ... finally cleaning out the old closets and letting things go.

Lured out to California from the East Coast by movie director Judd Apatow, documentary filmmaker and family man Chris Wilcha makes a bonus short film used for the DVD but soon finds follow-up work scarce. After "selling out" doing TV commercials, Wilcha returns to his first love, going back to the unfinished documentaries he once had a passion for, left by the wayside or abandoned by circumstance. One of his documentaries is about Flipside Records in New Jersey, a record shop packed with vinyl, where Wilcha worked years ago and today finds remarkably unchanged. This treatise on growing up and letting go of our youthful dreams and endeavors gets off to a rocky start (Wilcha begins with footage from a would-be documentary on jazz photographer Herman Leonard that doesn't help us get our bearings). However, what follows is quite poignant and beautiful, a paean to the past that may still have a future. We meet a lot of interesting people in the course of this little gem, including Wilcha's own father, an avid collector of hotel soaps and shampoos...but not a hoarder! Worth-finding. *** from ****

Alternative perspective (against the grain of automatically raving reviews by insiders): this self-indulgent diary, from a luxury commercial ad spot videographer who wants to be a filmmaker, is the very definition of privilege. Only the media establishment (and pertaining wannabes/barnacles) are themselves desperate enough to cheer him on; whereas normies in any general audience will spend the whole running time rolling their eyes at this rich family guy's suburban midlife crisis, grappling with his abandonment of inconsequential subjects. But hey, he's got friends in high places, if you want to know how this diary video got so much money and attention thrown at it...

This "documentary" should have been a 20 minute oral podcast. It's embedded in a too-frequent cliched narrative that presents a clean, safe, middle-of-the ground kind of predictable suburban documentary that makes an audience feel good due to trite resolutions. It appeals to digestible consumers and critics' familiar tastes while also name-dropping celebrities in the indie world to garner attention and interest from an audience while forcing their integration into a meaningless and pointless story that has nothing to do with those people.

The documentary has no momentum; it's absent of meandering surprises; it is vacuous; and it falls short of entering into daring journeys with unknown outcomes. The documentary feels like a desperate attempt to "say something" or "accomplish something" as a last breath to prove and validate one's significance. That's not such a bad thing, however the movie doesn't follow through in this direction which would have been a much more fascinating, brave and honest story.

The majority of this documentary is either talking or speaking with no action. It jumps from one character to the next without any connection whatsoever - other than hollow, sad, sentimental stories about finding oneself in a world that's out of sync with one's own personal desires and wanting to be "recognized" and "seen" in life (e.g., validated) before we all disappear. In this vein, the documentary verges on creating a visual self-help guide with an unconsciously motivated guru-therapist-director finding salvation and peace (for who? The audience? Himself?) by discovering "what's important" to him in life. In other words, the documentary is chockfull of rambling platitudes, psychological rationalizations, and inventive justifications to neutralize any sort of regret or guilt that might be lingering in the deep corners or minimal surfaces due to one's perceived decisions or social or cultural position in a partially fulfilled life.

A more interesting documentary would have been to explore all those shattered and broken pieces of reality as fragments of a greater artistic piece that the director is trying to assemble and make sense of as he reaches his so-called mid-life crises. In a way, he accomplishes this beautiful artistry ... but only in a few minutes towards the end as described below.

With these critiques in mind, I must admit the last twenty minutes (with the exception of the final ten minutes of the movie) are some of the best and most insightful conclusions and resolutions I've seen in documentaries over the last twenty years. However, the David Milch material is unnecessary and should not have been included at the end of the documentary as it contorts the narrative back to the self-help, garbling and trite gibberish that fills the majority of the movie (while also introducing another celebrity for the sake of the all-too-frequent celebrity docs that are suffocating contemporary documentary).

The final sentences of the movie pair well with the best twenty minutes towards the end. Overall, good effort but ultimately a failed attempt at meaningful coherence as not enough attention is given to the director's personal narrative over his life course. The movie misses the target.