You’ve seen them. Lurking in your Facebook feed, ready to provide you with inspiration and a glimpse into the life of someone else, perhaps someone who lives in Portland and makes artisanal soaps, or perhaps someone who lives in San Francisco and grows a beard competitively, or perhaps someone who lives in Brooklyn and loves run-on sentences spliced together by commas. They are the subjects of profile documentaries — a short doc style that has become so prevalent online that Jim Archer has made a beautiful parody version.
Phil: A Tribute to a Man hits all the correct wrong notes: airy interview presented without context, long meaningful looks into nowhere in particular, and an everyday dude trying to appear far more profound than he really is. It’s also shot and cut together for maximum importance…regardless of whether there’s any of it to be found in what Phil (Joseph Morpugo) is saying.
It’s half Mastercard ad, half viral video, and fully made with appreciation for videos that utilize this style while genuinely exploring something worth exploring (as well as the legacy of movies like Spinal Tap, even though this reigns in the silliness instead of pushing it to eleven).
In a brief interview with No Film School, Archer said:
I wanted to parody these types of films not because I particularly dislike them — a lot of them have great stories to tell — but so many of them seem to follow this same formula. It usually centers around one interview which will be 95-100% voiceover, an atmospheric and emotive soundtrack, slow motion shots of literally anything, and at least one shot of the subject looking one way then immediately looking the other — that’s non negotiable. I feel that so many of the stories of these documentaries aren’t actually that interesting. It’s the just the production values that are, so I thought it would be funny to make one about a guy that REALLY didn’t deserve to have a film made about him.
Bravo.
But can you tell us more about Phil? He seems fascinating.
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