Average Rating: 7.7/10
Reviews Counted: 102
Fresh: 94 | 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: 34
Fresh: 33 | 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
User Ratings: 7,093
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
Oct 6, 2004 Wide
May 17, 2005
$0.4M
Wellspring
All Critics (109) | Top Critics (34) | Fresh (98) | Rotten (8) | DVD (10)
'Tarnation': A Filmic Diary of a Chaotic Life, Consisting of Mosaic-Like Bits and Pieces of Memorabilia
Nearly 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.
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.
A twisted pastiche of pain, suffering, and narcissistic indulgence.
A little too self-indulgent at times to be considered a "documentary", but all in all a very creative and moving look at life. 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
May 27, 2008Super Reviewer
"Tarnation" is a documenary made by and about Jonathan Caouette. Its starting point is his mother's lithium overdose in 2001 and then reviews the facts of his mother's life, followed by his own, mostly through photographs, 8mm film, and odd film clips(It took me ten minutes to get the "Rosemary's Baby" reference but
March 12, 2006Super Reviewer
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