Tarnation (2003)
Average Rating: 7.7/10
Reviews Counted: 103
Fresh: 95 | Rotten: 8
Using music and home video footage to great effect, Jonathan Caouette has made a very personal and moving film.
Average Rating: 8.2/10
Critic Reviews: 36
Fresh: 35 | Rotten: 1
Using music and home video footage to great effect, Jonathan Caouette has made a very personal and moving film.
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Average Rating: 3.9/5
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Movie Info
In the making since the director was 11-years-old and completed on a reported budget of about 200 dollars, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation is an experimental and self-reflective mix of documentary and fiction. Bringing together a collection of home movies, family photos, answering machine messages, reenactments and Caouette's video diary, the film attempts to delve into the filmmaker's experiences growing up queer with a schizophrenic mother and dealing with her 2003 lithium overdose, which
Cast
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Renee LeBlanc
Renee -
Rosemary Davis
Rosemary -
Adolph Davis
Adolph -
David Sanin Paz
David
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Tarnation Trailer & Photos
All Critics (110) | Top Critics (37) | Fresh (99) | Rotten (8) | DVD (10)
'Tarnation': A Filmic Diary of a Chaotic Life, Consisting of Mosaic-Like Bits and Pieces of Memorabilia
Top CriticNearly impossible to watch, thoroughly unpleasant yet strangely arresting.
A soul-baring scrapbook of a film, its audacity surpassed only by its tragedy.
Although aggressively unconventional, it's never pretentious.
An astonishing multimedia diary ... all accompanied by a scrolled family history that is as harrowing to read as a ransom note.
The movie climbs inside your head and rattles your consciousness.
Witness his hilarious high school musical rendition of David Lynch's Blue Velvet: much like the documentary itself, it's a heartbreaking, beautiful monstrosity.
An original, personal, emotionally touching documentary, which represents a new type of indie, based on innovating filmmaking.
As performance art born of personal pain, "Tarnation" stares teary-eyed into how genetics, culture, environment and susceptibility conspire to trigger mental illness - a documentary more to be experienced than simply viewed.
Jonathan had plenty to be woeful about, but the movie is best when it slips quietly into the pockets between his family's dramatic episodes.
Como toda confesión, en la que alguien desnuda su intimidad sin pudor para quien quiera escuchar, Tarnation es capaz de generar desde la fascinación curiosa hasta la incomodidad y el rechazo.
Tarnation takes its place alongside other classic cinematic celebrations of mental restriction in juxtaposition to lofty life goals.
The film is in the May program of the Charlotte Film Society, and even the CFS has offered few pictures this compellingly strange.
Audience Reviews for Tarnation
Super Reviewer
[font=Century Gothic][/font]
[font=Century Gothic]"Tarnation" is an exercise in amateur narcissism that only serves to make the viewer uncomfortable in a shared voyeurism. The only sequences of merit are when he explores his mother's mental illness and what it is to care for a mentally ill person.(How Caouette made it out of such a situation as a stable adult is only partially explained by his moving from Houston to New York.) [/font]
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Once you let go and just go along for the ride...you are off on a journey into the psyche of a family in turmoil.
It's not always an enjoyable journey, but it is one in which (after being led through a gamut of emotions) you are ultimatley led back to the point of origin, which is love.
A great reminder of the fact that while we can not choose our families...we are (ultimatley) in control of just how much we allow them to adversely effect our lives as adults.
One of the tough questions that we all have to deal with at some point is: At what point do you let go of all of the negative family baggage (that we all carry to some extent) and decide to start living your own life and making decicions based on doing what is best (and most helathy) for you?
These are some of the hard choices in life and this film really makes you think about them.