Video Store Rental Reviews #5: Carpet Cowboys (2023), Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), Tape (2001)
DVD reviews in the year 2024.
Netflix holds roughly 6,500 titles.
Max and Peacock are about the same.
Hulu has a bit more, at just over 7,000.
My local video store has over 31,000 distinct titles that don’t disappear at the end of every month.
Here are reviews for three of them:
Carpet Cowboys (2023)
The unsung creators behind the psychedelic carpets lining casinos, offices, and hotel hallways. Chief among these textile honchos is Roderick James, a Scottish expat with a self-styled outlaw-country manner—and countless schemes to grab himself a larger share of the American dream.
section: new releases
The most popular and beloved documentaries of recent years have explored the crevices of our country with the untold stories of people you've never heard of, from roadside zoos to closing-down bars. Carpet Cowboys is one such documentary, biographing the inhabitants of Dalton, Georgia, the “Carpet Capital of the World,” the small town where 85-90% of the country's carpets come from.
Very quickly, however, we learn that this doc ain't big enough for all of 'em and one cowboy stands above the rest: Roderick James, a Scottish textile designer, fashion enthusiast, Shark Tank product jingle songwriter, and aspiring proprietor of a Hard Rock Cafe-type establishment in the Philippines.
While the documentary promises tales of testing carpet's durability (each one needs 20,000 steps tramped over it) or its cleanability (complete with fake poo and vomit), co-directors Emily MacKenzie and Noah Collier shift most of the film's runtime to Roderick's misadventures, from his business ventures to his romantic exploits to the ever-changing status of his facial hair. Roderick is no Exotic, but he is mighty interesting. And using his story as an American Dream cautionary tale is strong thematically, but the peripheral characters of Dalton and the documentary are arguably just as interesting.
If these documentaries are your thing, you should definitely check out Carpet Cowboys - you should just know what it is first. It's much more Carpet Cowboy than Carpet Cowboys.
We missed the world premiere screening at New/Next Fest, so I'm very happy that our video store got an early copy of the Blu-ray, now available for pre-order from Memory, a partner label of Vinegar Syndrome.
Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
In a small Minnesota town, the annual beauty pageant is being covered by a TV crew. Former winner Gladys Leeman wants to make sure her daughter follows in her footsteps; explosions, falling lights, and trailer fires prove that. As the Leemans are the richest family in town, the police are pretty relaxed about it all. Despite everything, main rival (but sweet) Amber Atkins won’t give up without a fight.
section: comedy
Interviewed in 2009 for New York Magazine, comedy writer Michael Schur (Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place) was asked by Will Leitch, "Why mockumentary?"
“It’s just familiar and banal enough that you can play with it however you want it and it will always snap back into place,” he replied. “The audience will go anywhere with you because you’re talking directly to them. I think it’s the best way to tell a story on television.”
Before the mockumentary-on-tv boom that Schur helped launch, movies like This Is Spinal Tap, Borat, and Drop Dead Gorgeous showed that it's a great way to tell a story on film as well.
Drop Dead Gorgeous is one of those movies that you can't believe how funny it is. Kirsten Dunst (what a 1999 she had!), Denise Richards (who realized she was this funny?), Kirstie Alley (she should've made more movies!), Allison Janney (she's unstoppable!), and Brittany Murphy (gone too soon!) are all pitch-perfect - and that pitch is dark. I mean, Dunst tap-dances in a morgue, there are recurring jokes about eating disorders and burn victims, and you cheer when a certain character gets blown up.
It's a tightrope act. Yes, sometimes they slip a little (1999 words don't work the same as 2024 words), but it's still very impressive.
Oh, and it features great appearances from Amy Adams and Adam West, or, as I like to call them, Adams West.
Tape (2001)
Three old high school friends meet in a Michigan motel room to dissect painful memories from their past.
section: Richard Linklater
It's fitting that Tape is based on a play of the same name because the whole thing screams Acting 1 class. It's the kind of material a young acting student dreams of, the kind of thing that now haunts my nightmares. Three characters, one (hotel) room, controversial subject matter, everyone's hiding something, everyone wants something different, reminiscing on high school: the "this play would work for our final scene study project" list of criteria is long.
As a result, Linklater just...lets it be a stage play. He puts Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, and Uma Thurman in a room and seemingly stays out of the way. Performances are full of choices, Hawke among them the most exploratory, and could be copied-and-pasted into a Chicago storefront theatre in the '90s, much less an acting lab on a college campus today. Linklater's camera is unobtrusive, almost feeling voyeuristic or like surveillance footage (if only because the camcorder quality feels skeevy now.) After all, live plays don't have cameras getting in their way.
Credit: Each plot synopsis from Letterboxd via TMDb.