Home Movie
Home Movie
G | 25 January 2001 (USA)
Home Movie Trailers

Director Chris Smith (American Movie) continues his exploration of all things quirky by affectionately invading several unique homes. Linda Beech is a former Japanese sitcom star who resides in a tree house in Hawaii. Diana and Ed Peden are hippies who have converted an abandoned missile silo into an underground retreat. And Bob Walker and Francis Mooney have reconstructed their home to cater to their dozen cats.

Reviews
Scanialara You won't be disappointed!
Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.
Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.
Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.
bandw This could have been an excellent movie, but it lacks focus. It deals with some highly unusual people living in some highly unusual houses. After a quick round-robin visit to each house and occupants, that lasts about ten minutes, we know about as much about these people and their houses as we find out in the next hour. We are left with wanting to know more about how these people came to be in their current situations and about the history of their houses. For example, the alligator man says that everything in his house has a sentimental value - then show us some of those things and explain to us what they mean to him.I wanted to see more about the houses themselves - how they are laid out and how the people live in them. The people who live in the old missile silo give us a ten second tour of where the rooms are in their house *from above ground,* and that is it for the overview.These people are satisfying some deep emotions through their living environments and I wanted to know more. Think what Errol Morris would have done with this material.The film indeed has the look of a home movie, so the title is a clever pun.
timnil This documentary is by the same person who did "American Movie" which documented the attempted making of a low budget horror movie. It's a fascinating look at how people re-model their houses to match their personalities. I love quirky documentaries like this, so it was right up my alley. The houses included one that was made out of an abandon missile silo in Kansas - complete with an aging hippie homeowner playing a Native American flute to chase the evil spirits away. There's a retired actress that lives is a hydro-electric powered tree house in the jungles of Hawaii, an alligator wrestling good old boy that lives in a houseboat in the swamps of Louisiana and an uber-geek that has remade an electric house complete with robots. My favorite though, is the family that has completely remade their house in order to let their 11 cats run amok in it. This is a short fun film - if you want a break from heavy, serious stuff, give it a try.
thomdoyle To his credit he's built one 280-pound, 6'8" robot named Arok who can vacuum the carpet, mix drinks, dance, take Polaroid photos and talk, plus two smaller (5' tall) robots, one for the Orland Park Police Department another for the police department in Park Ridge. Before the Ferrari there were three other remote controlled automobiles. Skora says he invented a cordless telephone three years before AT&T came up with theirs. He's built a viewer/telephone that actually operates between his home and that of a friend in Mokena.Skora's home is an electronic fantasy with a 6'-diameter electronic iris door, remote control roll-down shower curtain and a 16'-diameter revolving living room. The house has kitchen cabinets with shelves that go up and down electronically, lights, music and waterfalls that turn on and off by remote control, a wet bar that glides out from a flat wall, electronically-controlled hands that appear out of nowhere to deliver hand soap or swizzle sticks for your drink, a transporter room, Hollywood smoke effects and an easy chair that can be driven --starting, stopping and turning on a dime-- by operating two toggles on the arm rests. And, as they say, that's not all. There are fascinating things too numerous to chronicle around every corner in Skora's house. Most can be operated by simply dialing numbers on a touch-tone phone. "I can operate everything here even if I'm in Tokyo," Skora boasts, making a sweeping motion with his arm to take in his entire residence. What's even more remarkable, from all accounts he's been able to perform that bit of electronic magic for close to thirty years.All of Skora's electronic bells and whistles, from the suit of armor that doesn't just talk to the full-sized female mannequin/floor lamp with a panties lampshade to the, well, bells and whistles, are created with one thing in mind - fun. Ben Skora is nothing if not an elfin prankster. Friends say that if Ben thinks about something he'll build it, but if it can get a laugh, he'll build it faster.
thomasdosborneii A big, burly guy who makes his living working with 'gators lives in a home-made houseboat in the Louisiana bayous and takes people on tours to see the water lilies blooming. An electronic genius in Illinois lives in an all-electric house that is his greatest toy, and when he says all-electric he doesn't just mean the cooktop--rooms change locations, living room chairs are as mobile as wheelchairs, soapdish hands pop out of the wall, and everything is controlled by pressing code numbers on the telephone. A new age family in Kansas lives in an abandoned Atlas missile silo that they converted into what they call their "twentieth century castle" and play Native American instruments in rooms where potential nuclear destruction was once housed. A childless couple living in California have turned their house completely over to their eleven or twelve cats who have hundreds of yards of overhead walkways, secret passages into hidden rooms, and every single thing that a cat could want, and the couple makes their living by photographing their cats for greeting cards, calendars, and cat-lover books. In Hawaii a pioneering elderly lady lives in a tree-house generating her own electricity in a remote jungle valley that is barely assessible via her SUV only when the level of a boundary river is low enough. Come meet these fascinating, unusual, genuine people who fashioned for themselves EXACTLY the kind of life that THEY want. We can too. What are we doing with our tract houses, our ticky-tacky apartments, our nine-to-five jobs, our outrageous mortgages, and we don't even have what we really want! These people broke free (if, indeed, they were ever trapped in the first place), because the only voices they listened to were their own, inner ones. Very inspiring for the rest of us. It's not too late to dig up that forgotten wishbook, roll up our sleeves, and start making our desires come true, too.