Tarnation

Jonathan Caouette has had a bizarre life. Luckily, he filmed it, and then got a copy of iFilm and made a movie out of it. There are some gorgeous collage segments in this strange tale of a homosexual boy growing up in a broken family, but there’s also a lot of filler. It’s intermittently amazing, horrifying, shocking, touching and then excruciating. Caoutte’s strange tale centers around his mother, a fashion model who was given hundreds of electro-shock treatments in spite of having no underlying mental illness. While mom’s brain was being reformatted, young Jonathan was sent to abusive foster homes and then to live with his grandparents, who may or may not have molested his mother when she was young. Then he got a video camera, and then he made Tarnation. It’s 45 minutes of great filmmaking, squeezed into a 90-minute movie!