American Carny: True Tales From the Circus Sideshow

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Audience Member I'd forgotten that I'd seen this a few years ago until the final 20 minutes or so as it all came back to me. It's seriously low-fi, but still enjoyable as a primer for modern sideshow culture. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/09/23 Full Review Audience Member This was a hard one for me. The most interesting thing about it was watching the freaks try to convince themselves (I mean, the audience...Whoops!) that performing in sideshows is meaningful and somehow progressive--promoting gender and social ambiguity--rather than exploiting the culturally marginal to turn a dwindling profit from the normative order. Maybe there is no "good" reason to be fascinated by freaks and deformity. But I am. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/14/23 Full Review Audience Member How does one make a boring movie about the circus sideshow and its "freaks"? Well, Nick Basile did it. This doc tries to cover way too much ground in covering not only the rich history of the sideshow but in focusing on too many subjects. As a result, we get a movie filled with "talking heads" rather than a slice-of-life, which would have been far more interesting. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/18/23 Full Review Audience Member Not a history, but a story that chronicles what kind of personalities and people inhabit the Circus Sideshows. It nicely outlines the actual lives behind it, even if it skimps on actual day-to-day details. It reads like a biography, not necessarily a documentary. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/09/23 Full Review Read all reviews

American Carny: True Tales From the Circus Sideshow

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