Gary's Movie Reviews - Thumbs Up for the Surprising and Interesting Documentary "Craiglist Joe": Celebrating Differences

I've actually been watching quite a few movies lately, and will probably spend the next few weekends trying to catch up on some of my movie reviews from April alone.  This time:  It seems I had rather a lot to say about this documentary my brother and his wife shared with me from Netflix, a film about a guy who tries to go across country and back using only Craigslist:

Craigslist Joe (see the trailer linked here)

I’m not really into the beat poets, the literary arm of the hippie movement with the likes of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs.  As I understand it, Kerouac’s most famous novel, On the Road, is rather semi-autobiographical, telling the story of a group of friends traveling across country, embroiled in jazz, poetry, sex, and drugs, much as Kerouac himself was. Even though I’m still rather curious about some of this writing, I’ve never read the beat stuff.  I consider it to be out of my personal style, and if it’s anything at all like the stuff Hunter S. Thompson has been publishing, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, perhaps I shouldn’t.  They recently made a French-Belgian film of On the Road that I wasn’t all that interested in seeing.

     This film, I suspect, has those same sensibilities.  This is a documentary made by a guy named Joseph Garner, a young twenty something who thought it might be interesting to see if he could survive going across country and back again for 30 days without a credit card or cash, and only using Craigslist to procure shelter, food, money, travel, and occasionally companionship and entertainment.  (I later found out, while looking for pictures to include here, that he actually produced the Hangover movie series and the movie Due Date, among others.)  I will admit that it made for an interesting documentary since it seems Craigslist users, at least the ones dealing with Joe, don’t seem to come from the upper crust of society, but are mostly the poor, the downtrodden, the occasional compassionate person, or in some cases, the weird.  He made friends with a lot of people I would classify as modern day beat poet types, who have probably read and identify with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.  Others are even more offbeat, such as the woman who offers Joe a place to sleep, but first chants while he holds a couple of crystals, or the former actress Fran McGee who was most known for playing a hooker that propositions young Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2, and now lives in total obscurity in a tiny little apartment, suffering from obsessive-compulsive hoarding and sounding quite insane at times.  Joe doesn’t throw anything out, and organizes one little room enough so that the frazzled woman could finally sit down.

Another woman he stayed with seemed much more normal, until she revealed she made her money as a dominatrix, claiming she wasn’t really all that interested in it beyond the money, yet some of the video footage of her plying her trade on her customers was quite disturbing!
  He also stayed with a Muslim family, who talked about their persecution after 9/11, both here and back in the Middle East, and he made friends with some warm Jewish people and served food at a soup kitchen.  One night, he couldn’t procure lodging, and resigned himself to sleeping in a doorway when a young black woman felt sorry for him and offered him her floor.

In the end, Joe broke down crying for the experiences he had that will stay with him for the rest of his life, but I’d be willing to bet he doesn’t want to actually live like that for the rest of his life.  I’ll have to admit it was an interesting film to watch, and my brother and sister-in-law liked it well enough to watch it over again just so Mom and I could see it, and Mom thoroughly enjoyed it as well.  We talked about it a bit in the car on the way home, agreeing, for the most part, that this sort of endeavor could be very dangerous, overcome with how many friendly people there were to lend Joe a hand through Craigslist alone, and how one must still be extremely cautious.  

Perhaps there are more good people out there than bad, but all it takes is one, and I think Joe should consider himself lucky.  Maybe he didn’t run across too much crime simply by the fact that he was making a documentary with a cameraman along for the ride.  I have a feeling that if he continued this kind of existence, especially without a cameraman, that sooner or later, his head would wind up in someone’s refrigerator.  That’s rather gruesome of me to say, but one must be aware of such things and wise to the dangers of the world if one is to survive for very long amongst the human race, which does this sort of thing way too often.

     I may feel I am one step removed from these kinds of people, but in reality, I’m just one small step away.  Lose another job for long enough and I could wind up just like some of them!  Another thing I pointed out to Mom was that if Jesus came now instead of back in the days of the Gospels, that it would be these kinds of people he would be making friends with and teaching, and not my ilk.  His disciples would most likely be made up of the types of people Joe traveled with in this documentary, and that, as Mom said, is certainly food for thought!