Going to the Store
2019 · 11m · USA
Directed by Andrew Lewis
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Two Midwesterners tour the gas stations, strip malls, and fast food restaurants of their lives in an experimental documentary that treats prepackaged American suburbia with such detachment it becomes wonder.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Two Midwesterners go to stores. That's it. The film approaches this with such forensic detachment that strip malls become alien artifacts. Nothing happens. That's everything.
An experimental documentary that turns Big Gulps and shotgunned beers into Stranger Than Paradise material — extreme wide-angle suburban detachment is a Jeanne Dielman gesture done cheaply, and Midwestern blankness is criminally underused in indie cinema.
Extreme wide-angle Midwestern suburbia made uncanny through alienated detachment — Big Gulps and shotgunning beers at the mall lot. When that detachment tips into wonder, it's a real trick.