Surprisingly incoherent and boring

hyped garbage

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The first must-see film of the year.

I grew up in the Ozarks, a member of a hillbilly clan buried deep in the hills, and this movie met me homesick. It's a wonderful portrayal of Cracker culture--the pain, the joys, the violence, the lyricism, the misery, the beauty of poor white Southern life. It's a way of life that is largely unknown except through gross caricature. This stunning documentary manages to catch a glimpse at it largely without condemnation, pity, or derision. I must admit, however, it does throw in a hefty dash of Southern Gothic.As several commenters have pointed out, this is not a complete view of Southern culture, but merely one sliver. I'm not sure that the movie would make that entirely clear to outsiders. Of course the small town (white Pentecostal) South is not "the South." Nevertheless, it is a strand of Southern culture that deserves artistic scrutiny. This documentary is an excellent effort in that direction.

I am a huge fan of Jim White the musician, and I didn't make it through more than 23 minutes of this film. Now maybe things changed later; I'll grant that. Right at the beginning of the film, White procures a concrete statue of Jesus. He and some others remove it from where it lies in state along the entire length of the inside of a car trunk. But when it goes into the trunk of his seemingly equally large car, it protrudes beyond the back of the car, as if it doesn't fit--so we can see White's burden. It seems a telling incident: the heavy-handed symbolism and artsy contrivance stick out from White's cinematic vehicle like...well, You Know Who.By the time I stopped, nearly all of the people I'd seen talking were No Depression- magazine-darling musicians and other people who might have used the film toward an MFA. Not that there's anything wrong with the highly qualified and sometimes actually Southern talent here. (I especially enjoyed Harry Crews' storytelling.) But the film purports to be a sort of documentary road trip, exploring Southern spiritual culture, and instead was on its way to becoming--I repeat, I quit a third of the way in--a sometimes evocatively pretty, sometimes maddeningly awkward music video.Why drive around the Louisiana bayous if the people you "find" playing banjos and singing spirituals are, like you, likely to have tour schedules on MySpace?I emphasize: Jim White is a musical genius, and this film should not dissuade anyone from checking out his work or that of artists like Crews, the Handsome Family, etc. It's just an unfortunate misstep as a movie.

As a 'stranger' to the American culture, I was really impressed by this docu-movie. It gives me a look in the American South. Of course one can not give a complete portrait of something. There always a need for some subjectivity. I understand there a million other sides of the American South. For example, if you make a movie about Holland, surely you'll see mills and klompen. This is not representative for modern-day Holland, but it's a part of our culture, our history. I think the same applies to this movie. Apart from this, the movie is intertwining music, art and storytelling. This is fantastic!

Though I have ventured through the American South on a few occasions, it has always remained to me a deeply mysterious place. This superbly photographed documentary shed some light and dispelled some long-standing myths for me.For example, I had formerly believed that the South was a land still deeply divided along colour lines. I see now that that's impossible -- there are no black people in the South! So how could racism possibly rear it's ugly head? It can't! Yes, friends, the truth about the South is that it is a land full to bursting of friendly but misunderstood white folks, who may not have much formal education, but are endless fonts of homespun wisdom, tattoo their bodies with all their regrets and can even quote Goethe.I highly recommend this film. If Diane Arbus had decided to use her talent for bad rather than good and then went out to make a film, then Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is exactly the film she would have made!