Retrospective: Guns on the Clackamas (1995)

[Mark R. Leeper]

             GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS: A DOCUMENTARY (1995)
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: This is an over-the-top mock documentary.
     GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS: A DOCUMENTARY covers the
     making of an epic western film.  It is being made
     in spite of the bad luck of having several actors
     die before the film is complete while the director
     has to work around the problem.  Co-written and
     directed by animator Bill Plympton, this film is
     uneven both in its humor and in its appeal.
     Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10

Bill Plympton is in a class by himself with his imaginative,
anarchic animation.  He will show people going through
transformations that can best be described as "topological".
People's smiles will turn them inside out or a woman's breasts
will transform into hot-air balloons and carry her off into the
sky.  His films are visually creative and rarely have a lot of
story.  That makes it ironic that he would try his hand at a live-
action film that limits him mostly to verbal humor.  He did,
however, attempt crossing over in 1995 when he co-wrote and
directed his second live-action comedy.  To be more specific, GUNS
ON THE CLACKAMAS is a mockumentary following the problems
encountered in trying to make an epic western called GUNS ON THE
CLACKAMAS.  There have been some very good comedies about
Hollywood and film production.  Among them are DAY FOR NIGHT,
HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, and LIVING IN OBLIVION.  Plympton has a lot
of competition and does not really come off a winner.

In the film we follow an adoring British filmmaker following the
shooting of a new film by the "Producer/Genius" Holton P. Jeffers.
Of course, to the viewer Jeffers seems to be making every possible
mistake, including some mistakes nobody has ever made before.  The
production of the film is plagued with the sort of bizarre problem
that one rarely thinks about with filmmaking.  One actress talks
normally off-stage, but in front of the camera she is reduced to
severe stuttering.  Sadly, she is the girlfriend of the executive
producer and cannot be fired.  Another actor has breath bad enough
to fell the leading lady.  The film has a barrage of problems that
would intimidate a Terry Gilliam.

Plympton's style is to show some odd feature of the story and just
keep shaking it in the viewer's face in the hopes that if it was
funny at first it will remain so, and if it was not funny it will
eventually seem funny.  There are extended gags about an associate
producer who is in love with kitsch popular paintings of children
and animals with very large eyes.  We see much more than we need
to of this art and the gag seems borrowed from Arthur Hiller's THE
IN-LAWS.  We hear about the stuttering problem in clinical detail,
which does not make it any funnier.

The film is shot so it seems like a grainy, low-budget affair.
But what we are seeing is intended to be a cheap documentary with
a rather arrogant, pretentious narrator/host.  The film might work
better if this narrator at least showed some surprise at the
incompetence of what he is seeing.  But none of the characters in
the film are very believable and the film might have worked better
as a farce not quite so exaggerated.

Humor is, of course, very subjective.  Judging from other reviews
of this comedy, some critics found GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS hilarious
and some were on a completely different wavelength from the film.
I found some if the ideas amusing, though lacking in their
execution.  They might have been better illustrated with
Plympton's surreal cartoons than with the flat performances
Plympton gets in live action.  Particular fans of Plympton may
find the film more rewarding than the typical film fan.  I rate
GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS: A DOCUMENTARY a low +1 on the -4 to +4
scale or 5/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0113239>

What others are saying:
<http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0113239/externalreviews>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper