This was a special movie for me since Bukowski occupied a special place in my life and provided me with some basic notions about looking at the world during an early formative time in my life. The year was 1975, and I was 21.
Now that I'm 50 and I've been "clean and sober" for over half my life, Bukowski has lost quite a bit of his charm. Watching him in this movie I couldn't help but realize what a total case of adolescent arrested development he was. And although I think he should practically be canonized as a saint for his refusal to knuckle under to the phony plastic American success machine, it's also apparent that most of what he had to say was only negative, it only went half way there, so to speak. In other words, he provided no positive suggestions. He just said: be yourself, be a slacker, follow your own obsessions. And this isn't enough as far as offering young people something good to believe in, something that will help them feel like they can belong to something worthwhile.
And much of the negative imagery quoted in his poems in this movie (I was never a fan of his poetry, only his prose) is almost embarrassingly lurid and crude, only a small step up from, a slightly more polished version of, garden variety Heavy Metal rock 'n' roll doom and gloom song lyrics.
One other impressionistic thing I wanted to note was just how much John Martin, the publisher of Black Sparrow books, reminded me of Leonard "Nipper" Read, the police officer that arrested and helped prosecute the infamous UK gangsters, the Kray twins. Just a fun fact, that's all.
Another thing that struck me was Bukowski's attitude. I'd heard him speak before, on cassette tape and on an early video of a reading he did in Bellevue, Washington, and I knew he had this kind of snotty, purring way of talking, but it really came through here. He really didn't seem like a very nice person, not someone whose attitude I would put up with in real life for very long.
But, all-in-all, this was a very well done documentary, very well paced and hardly ever got bogged down. And it was a real pleasure to get a well rounded picture of a personality I had always been very curious about. And it was also very good to get to see and know some of the other people in Bukowski's life. John Martin, for example, is a very interesting and engaging man in his own right.
As a portrait of an interesting literary and cultural figure I would recommend this film highly to everyone. And I think most Bukowski fans will like it a lot, too.
Now that I'm 50 and I've been "clean and sober" for over half my life, Bukowski has lost quite a bit of his charm. Watching him in this movie I couldn't help but realize what a total case of adolescent arrested development he was. And although I think he should practically be canonized as a saint for his refusal to knuckle under to the phony plastic American success machine, it's also apparent that most of what he had to say was only negative, it only went half way there, so to speak. In other words, he provided no positive suggestions. He just said: be yourself, be a slacker, follow your own obsessions. And this isn't enough as far as offering young people something good to believe in, something that will help them feel like they can belong to something worthwhile.
And much of the negative imagery quoted in his poems in this movie (I was never a fan of his poetry, only his prose) is almost embarrassingly lurid and crude, only a small step up from, a slightly more polished version of, garden variety Heavy Metal rock 'n' roll doom and gloom song lyrics.
One other impressionistic thing I wanted to note was just how much John Martin, the publisher of Black Sparrow books, reminded me of Leonard "Nipper" Read, the police officer that arrested and helped prosecute the infamous UK gangsters, the Kray twins. Just a fun fact, that's all.
Another thing that struck me was Bukowski's attitude. I'd heard him speak before, on cassette tape and on an early video of a reading he did in Bellevue, Washington, and I knew he had this kind of snotty, purring way of talking, but it really came through here. He really didn't seem like a very nice person, not someone whose attitude I would put up with in real life for very long.
But, all-in-all, this was a very well done documentary, very well paced and hardly ever got bogged down. And it was a real pleasure to get a well rounded picture of a personality I had always been very curious about. And it was also very good to get to see and know some of the other people in Bukowski's life. John Martin, for example, is a very interesting and engaging man in his own right.
As a portrait of an interesting literary and cultural figure I would recommend this film highly to everyone. And I think most Bukowski fans will like it a lot, too.