Tarnation - WORST. FILM. EVER.

Cameras are dangerous things. They can convince even the most talentless hack of a true calling. All you gotta do is press that little red button and before you know it the world starts appearing on the viewfinder - stored, waiting for later manipulation. In the simplest but most essential way, you're a filmmaker.

Tarnation is a bad film in spite of its material. The problem is with all that stuff stored on tape is that you eventually have to edit it, mould it, structure it - make it tell a good story.

There are ways around this irreducible fact. Music has its own narrative momentum - it keeps familiar time, hushed voice to strident chorus, acoustic intro to rock outro. And thus in Tarnation we see stunning and powerful material made to fit the MTV mind. Made by the MTV mind, it's important to add. Accompanying the endless barrage of cuts and cuts and cuts is the aural wallpaper of an impatient mind, terrified of his audience being for a second, a mere second, left with the haunting loneliness of an image considered in pictoral isolation.

One comes to the end of Tarnation suspecting that Caouette is less of a camerakind than he wants us to believe, that there isn't a Friedman-like stockpile of 16mm lying around in the attic to excavate. And, more than that, Caouette's lens seems to keep missing the best parts of the story. Why are we spending so much time under the single bulb in the bathroom when Renee's visiting or Rosemary's dying? Captions haven't had to do so much work since The Duelling Cavalier.

Plus the kid's a snot. Honestly, this boy has been through some genuinely traumatic stuff, but by film's end he has exhausted every ounce of audience sympathy with his narcissism. It's quite an achievement, to be unmoved by such material. But like talk show guests turning real pain into synthetic wares, the effect is that of a magical reversal of empathy - too demanding of our attention, like a straining witness playing up to a jury, the film never lets its tragedy speak unaccompanied. Oh look, there's Jonathan again. And again. The point where the audience enters into the story's innate pathos is cancelled out with melodrama. Just sit there and be moved dammit!

If this film was made by anyone other than Caouette, Caouette would not be on the movie posters, camera-gun pointed like a poser to his head. The only Russian roulette going on in this film, really, is with the life of his mother. Caouette knows it, and does everything he can to shift her left of centre. The scene where Renee sings and jigs her impromptu song about pumpkins seems to go on forever only, it seems, so we the audience can be wrung once and once more for an obvious point - this woman is at her end. And with no taste left in the tank, he just keeps the camera rolling - grotesquerie being the highest truth in this world. The "she's crazy" music used towards the end of scene doesn't help either. The way is paved for Caouette to take centre stage, and he happily, triumphantly does so - the pentient, understanding, loving son, at his mother's feet.

As so the film ends, in a final act of emotional fakery and helpless overstatement. Some things should remain home movies.
And how the hell does Gus Van Sant find the time to become attached to so many crappy films between his own recent monstrosities?