Home Movie

Documentarian Chris Smith, who made driven, poverty row Milwaukee film buff Mark Borchardt an underground star with American Movie in 1999, turns his attention to people with unusual dwellings in this amusing, unpretentious follow-up. Home Movie introduces us to five individuals/couples with distinctive houses--a woman with an elaborate tree house in remotest Hawaii, a crocodile wrangler who lives on a Louisiana houseboat, a New Age couple who've remodeled a deserted Kansas missile silo center into an underground domicile, an Illinois inventor who's filled his place with outrageous mechanical gadgets, and a California couple who have reconfigured the interior of their home to provide walkways and cubicles for their beloved cats. Smith interviews all of the homeowners, along with friends and relatives, arranging the results into a reasonably smooth whole that gives each of his subjects equal coverage. The picture is a pleasant ramble through the sort of idiosyncratic terrain that Errol Morris has often traversed, but Smith's approach is far less mannered. He treats his subjects affectionately, without condescension, and while they may occasionally come off as a trifle odd, they're also never made to look ridiculous. One winds up liking them all, and the movie as well, which--at little more than an hour--doesn't overstay its welcome. Recommended. [Note: DVD extras include a 12-minute vintage promo for “Monsanto's House of the Future” (praising the then newfangled material: plastic!), an eight-minute featurette on the history of “Kansas Missile Bases,” a brief “Alligator Commercial Clip” for Louisiana's office of tourism, a stills “Cat Gallery” by Bob Walker and Frances Mooney, publicity stills of Linda Beech from 1958's Tokyo Broadcasting System series “Aoi Me No Tokyo Nikki,” and the five Homestore.com commercial spots that were the foundation for Home Movie. Bottom line: a nice little extras package for a nice little documentary.] (F. Swietek)