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

The concept for this documentary was intriguing and filled with promise, and the piece of film that inspired it was not only very funny but mysteriously appealing beneath its surface. While we watch Jack Rebney the RV salesman, we simultaneously feel on the one hand that he sounds like a an angry, overbearing, foul-mouthed, pompous blowhard -- and on the other hand we feel for him being trapped in a horrible, humiliating situation, and appreciate him for colorfully expressing the mountainous frustration that we come to feel along with him. With this documentary, history repeats itself. Jack is placed in just as frustrating a situation, and is just as eloquently, extraordinarily, literately uncouth about it. And that makes it an entertaining film -- inadvertently. In the end, "Winnebago Man" is not a deliberate success, but it's ironically a mesmerizing vehicle for the strangely interesting man that Jack Rebney is in the same way as the corny Winnebago ad that inspired it. And you get the sense that Ben Steinbauer is rightly as irritating to Jack as Tony, the hundred-degree heat, and the flies were in 1989. Steinbauer wants to find the man in the video and make a film about him, but despite this he seems to make no effort to understand him. In fact, he almost seems determined not to understand him. Jack is a literate, opinionated man who wants to express his views about the world. Steinbauer says Jack sent him columns and the draft of a book, but doesn't say anything that even suggests he read them. He says he wants to understand Jack, but asks him quests he specifically doesn't want to answer, and ignored he organic attempts to talk. I can't help but think that more would have been achieved by letting the cameras roll as the subject was allowed to relax and speak his mind. Instead Steinbauer condescendingly tries to drive him to town so that he can buy a video camera (which, owning a computer, I expect he could have already acquired if he wanted it) to post on YouTube (a medium he hates). In the end, there are some moments that consist mostly of what Steinbauer has filmed occurring at a live stage event, and Rebney does get to speak his mind rather insightfully if briefly about the appeal of the video itself. Some points have to be awarded for this being an entertaining film -- but the only credit the filmmaker gets for that is for physically finding an entertaining subject and owning a video camera. His lack of curiosity about the man he finds seems to miss the entire point of this kind of film.

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.

Ben Steinbauer's documentary about Jack Rebney is an interesting and entertaining piece of filmmaking. I realize there is a huge sub-culture of "YouTube junkies" mind-boggling in diversity and size. Because I do not regularly peruse YouTube videos I was unaware of one of the most iconic characters ever to achieve a kind of mass popularity in cyberspace: "Jack Rebney, The Angriest Man In The World". It is definitely a cultural phenomenon whereby a man who would otherwise be as unknown as any other has become a world-wide star. His dialog, and I'm not just talking about his profanity, has transcended the internet ending up even in Hollywood movies. The industrial video he made for Winnebago probably helped shift some units by helping dealers sell their product...maybe not? But, the outtakes, which originally only went to a few executives at Winnebago and the crew, have transcended time place and product & will "live in infamy" on the internet and within pop-culture.How could one man's frustration shooting an "infomercial" come to this? Who is the man, the so-called "Angriest Man in The World"? What became of him after the video and, more saliently, is he still alive? These are some of the questions that Ben Steinbauer was interested in and he had to expend some effort, indeed, because Jack Rebney had long ago retreated and become a true hermit. Finally when Steinbauer found Jack, Jack was not often not honest, but still capable of great bursts of anger-many times still laced with language more suitable to jail and wartime. Jack is a juxtaposition who finds his notoriety irritating and intoxicating. He seems miffed that he is a kind of cultural icon due to the internet, more specifically due to film he thought shouldn't have ever existed in the first place. Perhaps in his seclusion he has found peace, but you get the feeling that under the surface he's mad as hell still with a lot of it centering around events culminating with the George W. Bush presidency. At one point I think Jack believes Ben's movie will to allow him to profess his manifesto regarding politics (and the general decline of the United States) which, it seems evident, is where Jack thinks his importance to his audience should lie. Ben tries to make it clear he seeking something more like how Jack got to the point he was as when he made the Winnebago video, that is what his fans are more interested in. This serves to irritate Jack and all grinds to a halt for quite some time. Ben does an end-around and finds a way to get back to Jack though and because of that we do end up getting this documentary. As mentioned earlier, the film Winnebago Man is entertaining. We get a slice of Jack Rebney, though not a whole picture of who this man really is. The holes are unavoidable as Jack Rebney has covered his tracks, purposely fell away from the day-to-day trappings of civilization. Who Jack is, perhaps, is truly only known to Jack himself and he is playing his cards close.In the end "Winnebago Man" fans are not terribly interested in Jack's life-story and/or his deeper views. The whole phenomenon rests on actually seeing a man voice "over-the-top" frustration so frequently and with, seemingly, bottomless profanity. Ben Steinbauer succeeds admirably by, first, finding the man behind the expletives who can still get just as frustrated and angry. This is what Jack's fans love him for...he's like us, but he has no need to fit in at all anymore. To coin Jack: "You believe any of that $#!+"?