>>PREVIEW
AIR GUITAR NATION
DIRECTED BY Alexandra Lipsitz
Opens Friday, April 27
Uptown Screen
Over the past few years, mainstream documentaries have been pinned down to a very specific style. Thanks to Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary was suddenly required to be about a deathly serious topic, designed to make you think critically about the state of the world long after the credits rolled.
Air Guitar Nation is here to blow this trend out of the water. Director Alexandra Lipsitz’s light-hearted doc focuses on the growing phenomenon of competitive air guitar – a subject that she believes needs no justification as the topic of a feature length film.
"Well, we managed to make sewing interesting on Project Runway," she says, referring to the TV show on which she has worked as both photographer and producer, "so air guitar’s not actually a big leap. You go into it thinking it’s this kind of ridiculous thing and you imagine dumb, drunk boys on the tailgate of their pickup truck aimlessly wasting hours of their lives. But what I found was these impassioned, smart creative people who were enjoying the ability to express themselves through rock ’n’ roll, through performance, through being a fan. Living the dream of being a rock god."
Alright, so maybe this is deathly serious.
Fortunately, Lipsitz doesn’t force the idea of air guitar as a life and death event down the audience’s throat. If nothing else, she proves her worth as a documentarian because you go into the movie wanting so badly to mock these people, but she won’t let you. Her undying belief in their sincerity bleeds through, and it’s infectious. "They want to be the best at something, and there’s something inherently serious about that," she says. "We’re competitive beings at times, and there’s something great about achieving and proving yourself."
What’s most endearing about the film and its cast of eccentric characters is that, despite everything else, they know they are playing air guitar, and they know that it’s a little bit ridiculous. It’s a logical piece of the film that is missing from most documentaries about niche cultures, and adds a human element that allows the audience to connect realistically with the characters.
Ironically, what seems like the biggest joke in the film is the least of laughing matters – that the message behind air guitar is world peace. Dan "Bjorn Turoque" Crane even performs with the slogan "Make Air, Not War" scrawled on his chest. Tied into this is the anti-Americanism that some of the U.S. competitors face when they arrive in Finland for the world air guitar championships.
To make matters worse, the competition featured in the film occurs almost simultaneously with the U.S.’s first bombing of Iraq in 2003.
"I think the guys felt it," Lipsitz says of Bjorn Turoque and David "C-Diddy" Jung, the first ever American participants in the world air guitar championships.
"It’s sort of depressing, that just because you come from a geographic region and there’s a corrupt politic unit representing you with a belief system that you don’t share, there’s a helplessness. So whether you’re a filmmaker or an air guitarist that represents that country, you want to be able to reach out and say ‘this isn’t what we’re about.’"
It’s amazing that such an innocently fun film provides so many worthwhile talking points. In that respect, it’s not unlike the rock ’n’ roll it openly apes – important without being self-important. |
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