1.22: Amazing America Auction by Lynn Rosen: Not enough going on

John Ellison Conlee

Lynn Rosen

Hal Hartley

The Amazing America Auction

This film in the My America series focuses on an auctioneer selling a parcel of land to the highest bidder from a room filled with what we presume are immigrants based on the auctioneers descriptions of their clothes or appearance (usually a mix of some ethnic clothing combined with an American sports cap). While the auctioneer encourages the others to buy the land, he also drops in some touches that suggest maybe this amazing dream is not all it is suggested to be. The film seems to be working with the idea that the American Dream of owning land that can be called one&apos;s own and making a good life from that, is perhaps not quite as is advertized, and even the enthusiastically positive auctioneer cannot totally sell it.

In doing this, it is an engaging and quite comical piece, but even for a 4 minute film it has the problem that it feels like there isn&apos;t enough going on. Watching it, I felt that the repetition of the bids, and the lines about ethnicity and item of clothing, seemed to happen too often, and that there was not enough new material in between them to stop these lines being the ones you remember. This did rather undercut the film because it felt like there was not enough going on and that too much was repeated and making the same point again for little additional benefit. The actor does a decent job with it, convincing in his actioneering and in his personal comments, but the material is not as helpful to him as I&apos;m sure he could have done with.

A nice piece, but it did feel like there wasn&apos;t enough going on within it.

This film in the My America series focuses on an auctioneer selling a parcel of land to the highest bidder from a room filled with what we presume are immigrants based on the auctioneers descriptions of their clothes or appearance (usually a mix of some ethnic clothing combined with an American sports cap). While the auctioneer encourages the others to buy the land, he also drops in some touches that suggest maybe this amazing dream is not all it is suggested to be. The film seems to be working with the idea that the American Dream of owning land that can be called one's own and making a good life from that, is perhaps not quite as is advertized, and even the enthusiastically positive auctioneer cannot totally sell it.

In doing this, it is an engaging and quite comical piece, but even for a 4 minute film it has the problem that it feels like there isn't enough going on. Watching it, I felt that the repetition of the bids, and the lines about ethnicity and item of clothing, seemed to happen too often, and that there was not enough new material in between them to stop these lines being the ones you remember. This did rather undercut the film because it felt like there was not enough going on and that too much was repeated and making the same point again for little additional benefit. The actor does a decent job with it, convincing in his actioneering and in his personal comments, but the material is not as helpful to him as I'm sure he could have done with.

A nice piece, but it did feel like there wasn't enough going on within it.

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The Amazing America Auction

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