don't turn yr back on me

Another day, another Errol Morris documentary. This is the one that made Herzog eat his shoe. He bet Morris, if you make a documentary about a pet cemetary, I will EAT MY SHOE. And so he did, and then he did. Gross, right?

What's nice about the late 70s is the clothes that people wear. We have some great patterns and strips to see in this documentary. Not to mention facial hair, awkward hair, smelly looking fabrics and cute cars. This is sort of a muted scene, but it's nice anyhow:


The deal is that this guy in North Dakota buries his faithful dog when he's a kid, near his family farm, and he lets other people who loved their faithful animals and don't want to send them to the rendering plant bury their animals there too. [The rendering plant and the guy who runs it are the foil to this guy and the pet cemetary. The rendering plant and the guy who runs it don't seem all that bad, but next to this hero, he looks like a major a*hole who's just trying to do his job. The zoo comes out shady, as well.] He does the same in California but as like a business. But then the lease is up on the land in California, and all the graves have to be moved. Then they move it, some people are miffed, some not as much, some lady wears a fur to the exhumation and that makes another lady mad, and then either another family takes it over or something or it's another pet cemetary (I fell asleep or daydreamed through some of it, the 70s are almost always out of focus to me and require special effort, for some reason this does not apply to The Godfathers. maybe cos they're so beyond great. anyway!), anyway, then it's a father and his two sons who run the pet cemetary and it's called Bubbling Well, which is a gruesome name for a cemetary, right? Yikes, yucks.

Then there's lots of interviews with pet owners and the father and the mother and their two sons. The father wants to retire soon. The mother connived to get both sons back in town. The older son burns out in the insurance business and brings his annoying motivational-speaker personality to the business. But he gets there after his broken-hearted younger brother, so the motivational speaker is the lowest man on the totem pole and he doesn't like that. The younger brother seems mellow. He lives near the pet cemetary, maybe they all do, but he lives alone and he has a nice speech about playing guitar. Then he does this and it is amazing:



How could you not rent this?