User Reviews

It really is a bittersweet film; the individual stories are fascinating, and Jeffrey has such a vibrant personality. And he's never bitter, he doesn't take himself to seriously; there's no preaching, just recollections.

I stumbled across it late at night on the Sundance channel. My mother and I watched it together; she said it reminded her of the way her cousin talks of his past. It gives you an intimate feeling, like he's just sitting down with you and chatting, like you could share some of your own stories with him. There is nothing theatrical - it is at times grainy and/or over-contrasted. It's a camera, a friend asking questions, and a man answering them while he smokes endless cigarettes. And it works. To anyone who knows real life is far more interesting than fiction, this is one to see.

The autobiographical narrator is a sassy, emotionally wounded man who spends much of this movie in a nostalgic haze, recalling with incredibly acidic wit the wistful and sometimes revolting events of his too-short life. He died before the movie was released.

You'll never look at potato salad the same way again.

"I lived to hear the sound of her nails tapping on a polaroid." My friends and I love this movie. Strouth has single handedly doubled my sass vocabulary. I want to personally thank everyone who worked on it, Sundance for showing it and most of all Jefferey Strouth for sharing his life with the world.

In American Fabulous, filmmaker Reno Dakota has created a fascinating portrait of a unique life... his friend Jeffrey Strouth. Reno had the foresight to capture this amazing storyteller sitting in the back of his classic Cadillac... shot on Hi-8 video in the late 1980s, the film looks a bit grainy at times but it is perfectly apropos and only adds to the immediacy of this engrossing documentary. Strouth is so hilarious, so Queenie but so blunt and shocking as he tells the story of his life that the viewers of this film cannot help but be held in suspense wondering what he will say next! There is a story he tells (I will not give it away) that is so disgusting and so funny it had tears running down my face. When the film ends, and you realize Jeffrey is long gone - a victim of AIDS, all one can feel is gratitude that Reno Dakota captured and shared these gems with us!

Most of this film shows the late Jeffrey Strouth, in the back seat of a car, talking and talking and talking and talking about his many unusual experiences. Either he has a huge, exaggeration-inflated imagination, or, he's one of those folks who is extremely often effected by planned and co-incidental timing, resulting in his involvement in a plethora of rare occurrences. In any event, I don't dispute the interestingness of his tales. But I sure did get tired of his banter: a style which others have characterized as queenish and effeminate. Sorry if I'm dwelling too much on delivery and not enough on substance. I'm not bothered by fingernails screeching on a chalkboard; but Jeffrey's rambling really turned me off - to the extent that I was unable to fully concentrate on the dialogue. Therefore, it's MY expectation that, in this case, the book must certainly be better than the movie.

This movie is strictly a monologue told on the road by Jeffrey Strouth, mostly from the back seat of an old Cadillac. Who is Jeffrey Strouth, you ask? No one of consequence outside his large circle of friends and anyone who loves to listen to good dishing. I do love listening to good dishing, and I found many of Jeffrey's stories humorous and poignant. After a while I have to admit, the movie did run out of steam for me. Maybe I've just heard one too many stories of burned out people in the east village, I don't know. Still… I do recommend this because it IS an important installment of gay history, and because some self-loathing bigot here found Jeffrey's fey nature "disgusting" and felt that the movie should be burned (and he claims only to have seen two minutes of it!). Who knew the gay community had a faction of neo-Nazis? Go see this movie for Jeffrey, for all those who fought the good fight against AIDS (they didn't lose that fight, the world lost), and for a free and fabulously diverse America.

American Fabulous is, in every queer sense of the word, a fabulous movie. Yet, for all the wonderful story-telling and brilliant imagery, a sense of gloom pervades Jeffrey's oral history. In many respects, this movie hearkens back to the era of "classical" gay and lesbian history. Jeffrey's tales reminded me of "Stone Butch Blues," and the multitude of other books and stories about people who were ecstatic in their lives as a response to society's less than kind treatment of them. Violence rips through even the most hilarious tales, especially the one about his trip hitch-hiking across the country with a friend who was more high-strung and nelly than Jeffrey. This is not really a light romp, but it reflects a harsh reality that, thankfully, those of us who came out in the 90's have rarely had to face. If this were available on DVD, I would recommend that every GLBT center kept it on hand to help pass down the history of our people. Few documentaries have so well captured the sense of survival and happiness at any cost.

Now this is great movie making at its best. One of the better Documentrys that were and are made here in the central ohio area.

the only other one i can think of is "the cucumber incident" which oddly enough was made up in Deleware as well.

alot better then any work done by director Louis Wood, or the flat out dull work of Jack Bowman, both from Dayton.