Words Dept.: entry

I went to Sheffield Doc/Fest last week. It’s a film festival especially for documentaries and I saw a number of rocking films. My special pick was Junior, which is about the most gripping character-based doc I’ve ever seen, thanks to the uniqueness of the central characters Eddie Belasco (75) and his “Ma” (98), who have this incredible relationship. Something quite odd about watching a film like this in a darkened cinema is when you get to see one of the “stars” at the end. In this case, Eddie appeared for a Q&A and, initially at least, it felt strange to think of him as a real person, rather than a character in a movie. Well I thought so, anyway. Perhaps it’s just me.

Anyway, by far the funniest film I saw was Winnebago Man, which charts the efforts of filmmaker Ben Steinbauer to track down Jack Rebney. This erstwhile star of bootleg VHS tapes and latterly YouTube achieved foul-mouthed infamy in the early 1990s and has been labelled the angriest man in the world. Initially he seems reluctant to accept his cult stardom and dismisses those who are interested in his life. But as the film unfolds he appears genuinely touched by the enthusiasm. One of the highlights of the festival was when Rebney took questions via Steinbauer’s mobile phone, which resulted in some predictably unpredictable responses.

If you’ve never seen the original YouTube video, have a look at this. It is very sweary but also contains a number of stone-cold classic catchphrases (“Accoutre-mah”, “Would you do me a kindness?”, “My mind is just a piece of shit this morning”) that I intend to use in my daily discourse henceforth.