Posted in: Movies | Tagged: Asylum Studios, entertainment, indie films, My Name Is Jonah

My Name Is Jonah Is Pure, Weird America

Published Mon, 16 Jun 2014 15:30:42 -0500

By Louis Falcetti

I don't like to know much, if anything about movies before I see them. It allows me to view them in kind of a vacuum. This was brought to my attention recently when I was ranting about how much I loved Winter Soldier, the fight in the elevator specifically when the rantee (the person I was ranting to? rantee/ranter?) said, "Yeah but that was all shown in the trailer." I walked into Black Swan thinking I was going to see a movie in the vein of that competitive ice skating movie from the 90s, The Cutting Edge (god bless the internet, all I had to google was "ice skating movie" and it was the first hit). So when I saw My Name Is Jonah this past March at the Boston Underground Film Festival I didn't know what to expect (which is also shameful since I had run into the filmmakers at numerous comic conventions where I happily took their Jonah promotional materials and obviously never read any of them).

The story of My Name Is Jonah is a story that is in danger of vanishing from the world, which is mad when you consider our culture's obsession with the strange, but Jonah's story is pure weird America. VHS footage and old, heavy smokers in motorcycle hats changing the subject from street gang rumbles so that lawyers don't have to get involved. It's a weird America story in all the best ways. It's like if Crumb and Anvil left their baby alone with American Movie for the weekend while they went down the shore, My Name Is Jonah is what their baby would be when they got back.

I left the show in Boston with the best kind of good movie buzz, when you leave a movie that you feel like you got and more than that, didn't insult you and did something different. It's the best kind of feeling. Seeing it at a festival definitely helped with the feeling of electricity running through the place, Jonah being there and then the film ending up winning the "Best New England Film" award, gave the entire film experience a heaving sense of fantastic energy.

(I'm graduating college in a few weeks and I learned in one of my classes that you're supposed to start reviews off right away with "the plot" and not meander on and on about yourself forever. Apparently, I didn't learn that.)

Jonah is difficult to talk about because MNiJ is really 3 movies in 1. It's the story of a strange guy who made wild, cosplay, heavy metal, Christmas cards, took Myspace by storm and became a mid-millennial minor cult figure. It's the story of how a kid from upstate new york escaped his reality into a reality he found more comforting, with all the highs and lows that accompany complete identity makeovers of the most DIY kind. And it's the story of a harmonica player with a broken heart (dog), lost stuff (wife) and an enormous bed (big).

Jonah's world is revealed with careful, even handed precision. What at first resembles a lovable, hometown character with a larger than life outlook, and a wild, checkered history slowly transforms into a portrait of a man who might be making up some of these legendary exploits while losing his family. That's certainly one way to look at it. Though the thing about great art is that it gives you many avenues for interpretation. MNiJ gives the audience enough varying views and enough unadulterated windows into Jonah's life to present this story to you, not trying to sell you it as a goof or a spectacle side show.

The first time I watched the film I was so taken in by the presentation that the story itself I found interesting, but only as a piece of this big puzzle that I was trying to take in all at once. This second time through I found myself trying to amateur shrink Jonah and his family from my futon, writing down things in my review notebook like "He gets it from his father! Of course!" or "What makes a person mentally ill? Who decides that? Who cares if they're happy?" I mention this only to show you how much I'm not going to do that in this review, though I really wanted to bang out a 3-5 pager about the story's major themes and discussing the pathology of Jonah, the religious beliefs of upstate New York, and Hawkwind.

It's strange, when I asked for a copy of the film for the purposes of review, the filmmakers were reticent for fear of me revealing plot points which is something you normally experience with twist-a-minute psychological thrillers or Quentin Tarantino scripts, not documentaries which are supposed to be pretty straightforward stories about something or someone. As I've wrote this review I've kept trying to think of ways to talk about Jonah's story but it doesn't really lend itself to a bite sized abstract, it's something that needs to be experienced.

MNiJ, without even intending to, ends up taking on the entire notion of "internet celebrity". It takes an internet celebrity footnote, something that someone may have sent you in 2006 with a message reading "Look at this crazy guy who uploaded all these crazy pictures of himself in crazy, heavy metal, fantasy poses on Christmas cards! Totally random!", it takes that idea, that everyday reality and dives into it, straight down the rabbit hole. It forces the audience to wrestle with the notion that maybe people are only jokes if they allow themselves to be jokes. Maybe there can be another realm of perception outside of a cold, dead reality that says "Stop daydreaming and grow up" and the other that says "You're weird and crazy and different, that's funny." There's another way of being that says "Go for it. Why not? Who are you hurting?" Some people waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on terrible, stupid children, what's the problem with a guy dedicating his life to following his crazy vision? Or think about it another way, if they made a movie about your life would anyone want to watch it?

The worst thing that a person can do with a first film is to throw a bunch of stupid, unnecessary effects in there for no reason other than they're trying really hard to show everyone how hard they're not really trying (as in the case of Garden State and also particularly handy when the story doesn't really stand up as well). What impresses me more than anything these days is when a film is just well made, when it doesn't try to be something other than what it is, when it's got good pacing, clean edits, great interviews, excellent footage and it all comes together in a less than two hour package. Those are the things you should be shooting for with your movie.

My Name Is Jonah is a weird America story in the most pure vein, it's not gaudy tasteless weird or demented nightmare weird, it's just American weird, where someone can try to pursue their dreams of being one of the superheroes that saved them from themselves and while that person could be lost or frightened, they can be whatever they want to be and live how they want. The film is all of that but at the same time will never lie to you or try to sell you a fake picture of how it could be or should be, they just show you how it is. It's a story that you haven't heard before and it's told with skill, humor, love and swords.

Check Out My Name Is Jonah at The Duke Mitchell Film Fest in London June 29-July 2

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