erinfinnegan

I am so glad that I am not the only person in the world who has given so much thought to my own name. Alan Berliner proves to be even more obsessive than I am. After a number of "Egosurfs," (which is the word given to the act of looking up your own name on the internet,) Alan Berliner found twelve other owners of his name and flew them out to New York for dinner.

Imagine having a party with a dozen of your namesakes! Introductions are easy, and you never forget anyone's name. However, it can make you really start to question your identity. In a room full of people named Alan Berliner, who's who? All of them turn out to be white, middle-class, and middle-aged men.

The bulk of the film is put together with stock footage, man-on-the-street interviews (What does the name Alan bring to mind? One woman's response: Fat!) and old home movies. At the end of the film, Mr. Berliner encourages the viewers to write to him and tell them if they've recognized any of the faces in the stock footage as their own relatives.

This is a pleasant and fun documentary that really makes you think. It is never boring for a minute, and is just as delightful as Sherman's March.

In this movie, a disillusioned young man of "Generation X" decides his life of unemployment is starting to get boring, so he decides to move to South America. More accurately, (if I remember correctly), he decides to walk to South America from his home somewhere in the U.S., and from his research in the local library, he picks his final destination to be "The Darien Gap."

The only thing preventing his journey is the fact that he's just met a girl. She's a model, with a really funny hat, and they like each other a lot, and naturally, she doesn't want him to leave, as her modeling career has just begun to take off.

I saw this movie on the Sundance Channel several years ago, so I assume it was in the Sundance Film Festival. It has the look and feel of the usual independent films from the mid-1990's, with it's less-than-stellar cinematography and actors you've never heard of playing quirky characters. It even fits in with one of my favorite obscure genres, that is to say, Generation X disillusionment films made by disillusioned Gen Xers. However, "The Darien Gap" falls flat. If you want to see a funnier, quirkier mid-nineties disillusionment film, I recommend "The Four Corners of Nowhere," which makes up in laughs what it loses in cheesiness.