Review: The Hole Story

2005 must've been a great year for breaking the mold in the arthouse underground hipster vogue semi-circle that dominated coffee shop talk. Me? I wouldn't know. I was just starting to hate Scrubs at that point.

I came along "The Hole Story" on the strength of filmmaker Alex Karpovsky, whose performance in 'Tiny Furniture' I found nuanced and domineering. Or nuanced and domineering. Whichever sounds better coming first. So I scoped him out, and came across this mockumentary about a mysterious ice hole.

Well, the mock part of the mockumentary portion was sort of ruined by me knowing that this was all an act, but it did me allow to concentrate on the film making and plot of a pretty slow moving movie. Slow as in mumblecore.

Now I like mumblecore movies a lot, and 'The Hole Story' lies on the outer fringe of that genre, which I think even 5 years later (present day) that genre is still on the outer fringe of popular culture (at least we got Greta Gerwig in an Ivan Reitman film starring Ashton Kutcher!). So in 2005, this movie was pretty far ahead of the game.

I say this is a mumblecore movie, because the lead character (and really the only character we follow) in the film is a filmmaker, dry wit, going through relationship problems, but ultimately dealing with himself- all within the same tropes/style of mumblecore. I am tired of typing mumblecore. But the movie stands out in that we just concentrate on 1 character, and watch that character break down, build up, shake all around. Karpovsky's real performance against a drab, rednecky backdrop take this film to the heights of me wanting to review it 6 years after the filming.

Though I knew this was a mockumentary, I still found myself wandering about what was real. Did they convince a mental institution that Alex needed help? Does a town really have that small of a Paul Bunyan Statue? The scene where we see Karpovsky, shaggy haircut in full effect, talking to a local cable hunting/fishing show host and asking him about how the personal/professional relationship works with his wife (who gives recipes on her husband's show) and Karpovsky's wordless, motionless reaction show that the filmmaker knew exactly what he is doing.

This movie is on Netflix instant watch, as is 'Bass Ackwards' another movie he acts in, and 'Trust Us This is All Made Up' which follows TJ Jagodowski and David Pasquesi relationship in relation to their improv.