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Review by davidehrlich Liked

Ren Faire is so good it made me want to log a television show like a god damn FREAK, and i will never forgive it for that. feels poised to become one of the key texts for understanding the next 5-10 years of american life.

Review by Karsten ★★★★½ Liked

so easy for a filmmaker with a fresh and distinct perspective to spin their wheels in that style when they realize it works, but each lance film seems to get more ridiculous than the last. wow!

5

A bizarre slice of docufiction experimentation as Shakespearean tragedy (“who wouldn’t want to play King Lear?”) that closely follows a Succession-style power struggle between various vendors, actors, and managers of the real-life Texas Renaissance Festival—a massive multi-million-dollar medieval fantasyland dress-up empire overseen by its lonely and aging owner "King George" Coulam who is hoping to retire, name an official heir, and move on to a life of gardening, creating art, eating at Olive Garden and being screwed to death by a natural-breasted woman he finds on sugar-daddy.com… As far as documentary subjects go, George is one of the most striking and eccentric finds I’ve seen in some time. A very petty and cruel power-drunk man whose mannerisms and speaking voice…

Review by Will Sloan Liked

A petty tyrant dangles his tacky, meagre empire before three desperate souls — a pathetically loyal sycophant, a SuccessWin gargoyle, and a soulless careerist — who are all sad and incompetent in their own distinct ways. The old man deserves credit for figuring out how to channel all of his saddest, most freakish, and most evil traits (fanatical reactionary and libertarian politics; gaping, unfillable void where his heart should be; desire to cruelly dominate other people; unbelievably awful taste in art and design) into a best-case-scenario career, and the only difference between him and Walt Disney (who he namechecks as an inspiration) and Elon Musk is that his fiefdom is very small.

2

Bro has one eye on the festival and the other on his sugar babies

1

gotta be like top 10 most dislikable old people

Review by em ★★★★

will the capitalist red bull guzzling lord of corn or the sad-sack shrek nerd who compares everything to willy wonka oust the decrepit perverted skeleton with anger issues to take control of a giant rennaissance theme park in the middle of nowhere texas. if only all shows had this exact plot

edit: i saw a preview of this at sxsw with jeff baldwin in attendance can you imagine how it felt to watch him watch it for the first time

Review by Matt Singer ★★★★ Liked

The first thing that leaps out at you when HBO’s Ren Faire begins is the way it looks. Every month, streaming services are flooded with new documentary series, most haphazardly constructed from talking head interviews and archival footage. If I have to watch one more doc that begins with the interview subjects arriving in their seat, adjusting their clothes and their microphones, and then saying something like “I’m ready, let’s do this,” I’m going to lose it.

Ren Faire is something else entirely. The three-part series, directed by Lance Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven), has cinematic visuals complete with extreme close-ups, a roving camera, and multiple angles on dialogue scenes. That is a smart choice. The obvious approach to the…

Review by rigatonibaby ★★★★½

rip logan roy you would’ve loved george coulam

Review by Megan (stoobs) Cruz ★★★★ Liked

This is simultaneously one of the most creatively distinct & conceptually insane pieces of documentary filmmaking I’ve ever seen. So much so that while watching I sometimes forgot that this wasn’t fiction. The central figure, 86 year old George Coulam is exactly the kind of man you would imagine spending his life cosplaying as a king (derogatory). He’s searching for both the perfect successor & the perfect sugar baby - natural breasts are a requirement. There’re two guys who are competing to take over. One is a Middle Aged theater kid who loves his wife but grovels for approval & one is a trust fund baby who dresses like a pirate & talks like a finance bro, trying to convince his dad to fund…

Review by austin ★★★★

george took me to olive garden and made fun of my fake boobs

Review by michaelmohan ★★★★★ Liked

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.