Mule Skinner Blues

Film Reviews | Regular Feature The "World's Strangest Couple,"—a two-foot, six-inch tall woman and an eight-foot man, who were married in Ripley, New York—become the average family next door when seen through the eyes of the now-widowed wife. We view Jeanie Tomainie's marriage not from the outside in, but from the inside out. Though her world held very little difference from many other Southern rural neighborhoods ofthe 1930s, or perhaps because it held so little difference, it raises important questions about how a family becomes deemed a "believe it or not" family. In tone and visual style, Gibtown invokes Errol Morris's Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997). It might have pushed its own line ofinquiry further—to ponder more fully how a culture defines the "normal" and how a subculture writes a history of transgression—in order to achieve the same level of depth and coherence as Morris's documentary. Where his work asks larger questions around mortality, humanity, the past, and the future, this film buries its rhetorical framework underneath a string of remembrances and generalized philosophies. With so many of its interviews focused on the loss of loved ones and with its theme of lost history, Shachat might have made stronger connections between its myriad forms of grieving, a move that would make it historiographie instead of merely historical. As an encapsulation of a particular place at a specific moment in time, however, Gibtown is valuable. "Carnival people are the only people who paint dreams on plywood," carnival artist Johnny Meah remarks. This film pays homage to both the plywood and the dreams. Christina Lane University of Miami clane@miami.edu Mule Skinner Blues Mule SkinnerBlues (2000), directed by Stephen Earnhart, is a documentary about the inhabitants ofBuccaneer trailer park in May Port Village, in Jacksonville, Florida. The film is a concoction ofvarious sub-plots revolving around a dreaming, dancing , alcoholic, pontificating Beanie Andrew, his friends, and their opportunity to make a short horror film. The background to the film's production, according to Earnhart in a Times-Union newspaper interview, began in May of 1997, when a New York film crew traveled to Jacksonville , Florida to shoot a music video entitled, "Book of Angels " by singer Jim White. Mr. Andrew was cast as an extra in the music video because of his blue classic Coronet automobile . Many of Mr. Andrew's friends were cast as extras as well. While in Jacksonville, the video producers where discussing their ideas for a possible horror film production. Mr. Andrew kept suggesting that they shoot the film in Jacksonville . After the video crew went back to New York City, Mr. Andrew began sending location footage to the producers, as well as videotapes of his various talented friends. Some of this footage is in the documentary. In fact, Mule SkinnerBlues is a somewhat disjointed hodgepodge of various story lines and genre styles. The opening inter -titles and music set-up a The Last Broadcast (Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler, 1998) and The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) type atmosphere concerned with Beanie Andrew's vision of a swamp ape creature. However, the next strain in the film follows Beanie and his friends as they each discuss their aspirations and current station in life (the ethnography aspects). Beanie, who wants to prove that there is quality entertainment right there in the trailer park, begins videotaping (along with the filmmakers) the inhabitants of Beanie's world which include: the down, but never out - folk/blues/rock guitarists Ricki Licks and Steve Walker, Annabelle Lee Usher whose dead dog, Bandit, is frozen and sits in a freezer outside a mobile trailer home awaiting a fitting burial, Miss Jeannie Holliman, a singer whose voice gets better with Schnapps and sings the famous folk song from which the film is entitled, and Larry Parrot, a husband to a "mail-order bride," horror film memorabilia collector and screenplay writer. It is with the introduction of Mr. Parrot that the documentary changes directions again. The film's focus turns to Mr. Andrew's and Parrot's efforts at trying to produce a 15-minute horror movie about Beanie...