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This is a very cool documentary tracing the life of an extremely lonely person as he finds fame, then religion and finally crime. The filmmakers have dug up an amazing amount of archive footage, and I like how they have kept it objective by not adding any commentary of their own, but simply presenting the events as they happened. I just wish they had allowed Stewart to talk a little more--most of his narration is just about his childhood, not about the climactic events the movie covers. The story is both hilarious and sad as we find out Stewart's early life was nothing but a series of traumatic events--his parents were alcoholics, his mother died in a fire, his sister was strangled, and his first wife left him. It is not hard to see how a person with such a background would try ANYTHING to find a little meaning in life, whether wearing a rainbow wig and dancing like a loon at sporting events or trying to warn people of the Apocalypse. For me the most poignant part comes at the end, where we find out he still believes the end of the world is coming any day now, even though 10 years have passed since his original prediction. It's a sad portrait of someone who is still clinging to his beliefs after everything else in his life went wrong. On a side note, the parts where Stewart explains his obsession with television reminded me very much of Jim Carrey's character in "The Cable Guy," and I have to wonder if that movie was partly inspired by this story.
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