Very well executed

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

In 1989 Jack Rebney made a series of videos promoting Winnebago products. The shoot was not a happy one, taking place in Iowa during midsummer, and Rebney became highly frustrated with his efforts. Unbeknownst to him the camera crew edited many of the outtakes together and released them on VHS; they showed Rebney cursing everything and everyone in the basest terms.Due in no small part to the ease of copying tapes, the video became something of a cult with Rebney cast as "The Angriest Man in the World." With the advent of the internet its popularity soared - so much so, in fact, that filmmaker Ben Steinbauer was persuaded to search for Rebney's whereabouts and find out what he had been doing since the videos were made.WINNEBAGO MAN follows a familiar thematic path with Steinbauer at first finding difficulties in his quest, then discovering Rebney; trying to establish a relationship with Rebney; and at the end persuading the reluctant ex-salesperson to appear at a fan convention in San Francisco dedicated to the original video. Steinbauer manufactures a happy ending in which the fans congratulate Rebney, and the old man returns home apparently touched by their affection for him.But that is not how the documentary pans out. Throughout the action there remains the distasteful suspicion that Rebney's sensibilities are being willfully exploited by the filmmaker. Now in his mid-seventies with a glaucoma rendering him almost blind, Rebney uses aggression to compensate for his shortcomings, and by doing so conforms precisely to that sobriquet that has stuck to him ever since 1989. At one point he tries to act calm, but eventually admits that this was nothing more than a form of pretense.In truth it's not Rebney who pretends, but Steinbauer himself. Saddled with the responsibility of making an "hilarious" film for the fans, he willfully allows Rebney to give vent to his anger. The fact that he is now a frail old person seems irrelevant. When the two of them end up in San Francisco, the sight is grotesque: I was reminded of the most notorious sequences in Tod Browning's FREAKS (1932) in which the disadvantaged were presented for our entertainment.The film reveals one of the seamier aspects of fan studies: whereas people of all classes, ages and ethnicities might be devoted to a particular text, their addiction can destroy as well as enhance. This is precisely what happens to Rebney. For all the director's attempts to manufacture a happy ending, the old man's melancholy expression (revealed in close-up at the end), denotes his true state of mind.

As viral videos go, The Winnebago Man is one of my very favorites (I know it's been a meme for ages, but just I came upon it recently). And to find out that someone actually made a documentary about Jack Rebney certainly piqued my curiosity. Sadly, it's not great.The movie's fantastic for the first 30 minutes or so. Its focus is on giving context (what the video is, how it came about, why we love it), and this is where it's really entertaining. Most of the good stuff is found in the interviews with the production crew, and this is where I laughed and enjoyed myself the most.But the director crafts a narrative out of tracking down the reclusive YouTube star and trying to bring him out of retirement for more Internet glory. This was my problem with the movie; it got away from what made that original video fun and tried to exploit the guy's unwanted celebrity for new fame. It gets uncomfortable, and I really wish the director would've kept himself out of the movie. It's very forced.There's a sizable part of me that regrets having seen this. As one of the interviewees in the movie said, to dig deeper into the legend is to ruin the fun of it. And in this case, I wholeheartedly agree. Rebney was far more entertaining when he was railing against flies and had trouble saying "accoutrements". I still very much love the ill-fated Winnebago sales video, but this movie I can do without.5/10

Jack Rebney is the most famous man you have never heard of - after cursing his way through a Winnebago sales video, Rebney's outrageously funny outtakes became an underground sensation and made him an internet superstar.I confess that I was not aware of Jack Rebney or the "Winnebago Man" clips from YouTube. Of all the memes out there, this one somehow escaped me. But that in no way lessened my enjoyment of this film, because it was only partially about Rebney and more about Internet infamy, and the lives of those who have been shamed on the Internet. (Though, luckily for Jack, he was more honored than shamed.) I would have liked to know more about "Star Wars Kid", but that could easily spin off to be its own documentary, and possibly a far more fascinating one.

Some people see documentaries as pointless and boring films that just collect information about a topic "no one cares about." Totally not the case, especially with Winnebago Man. It is easily one of most entertaining documentaries I've seen and probably focuses on one of the quirkiest topics a film in this genre has ever touched on.For those unfamiliar, "The Winnebgo Man" is a video from the late eighties that was passes around from VHS tape to VHS tape like a virus. The video consisted of a man, presumably in late forties or early fifties, named Jack Rebney swearing between cuts and takes off a commercial him and his crew were shooting over the course of two weeks. Normally, once a take is shot and something fails in the middle of the take, the camera immediately stops rolling. The crew decided they couldn't hit stop just when Jack Rebney messed up and decided to keep the camera rolling just a tad bit longer.The lines Rebney drops make me laugh just thinking about them. Quotes like "Will you do me a kindness?" "Don't slam the f**king door...no more!" "God, I can't f**king make my mind work!" and "The acutrama that you will need, ACUTRAMA? What is that s**t?" are all just little tastes of the rage Rebney delivers in the four and a half minute clip. In 2005, a video sharing site named "Youtube" opened and the video as uploaded to the site currently boasting over six million views.The real question was, what happened to Jack? Ben Steinbauer, the filmmaker responsible for this film, is hellbent on trying to answer that question. He calls in a private investigator to try and track down Rebney in hopes that he can answer one of his hundreds of questions. At first, it seems like a lost cause. He has no voting registration, no social networking accounts, and the Winnebago company stated after firing him for verbal abuse to employees they heard nothing from him and they didn't want too.Ben finally finds Jack on a remote mountain in Northern California living a secluded lifestyle and being "a hermit" as he refers to himself. He has a a dog, he is going blind, and has a George Carlin/everybody's crabby grandpa type attitude towards everything. He is now seventy-eight years old and has published a book called Jousting With the Myth.Ben is such a fan of "The Winnebago Man" clip that he shockingly did this out of the goodness of pure groupie curiosity. He is a likable guy and even goes into a detailed background about his obsession with the video saying how if he had a bad day at work he'd pop in the tape and also explain how he showed it to his grandmother and his dates.Winnebago Man was included in a ten pack of Dvds my uncle purchased from the Found Footage Festival, a festival that two average joes named Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher put together showing random clips from VHS tapes they got from garage sales, thrift stores, etc. At the end of the film, Ben convinces Jack to make an appearance at the festival because the two men think of Jack like a movie star.Being at the festival lands the brightest part of the film; Jack interacting with the fans he thought he never had. The boys ask him "What is an acutrama?" to spice things up. While the actual definition is an add on for something, Jack explains that he didn't know whether it was pronounced "acutrama" or "acutramaw." But he then goes onto say "When you're in Iowa, in a forrest, and it's 100 degrees it's f**king acutrama!" Starring: Ben Steinbauer and Jack Rebney. Directed by: Ben Steinbauer.