denny-1's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This one for LOLA... I don't feel much like writing today... ...this one's for LOLA... Movie Details Bukowski: Born into This 'Bukowski' sheds light on poetic luminary By Ty Burr, Globe Staff Boston Globe Published: 05/28/2004 ADVERTISEMENT In "Bukowski: Born Into This," the late LA writer Charles Bukowski is seen reading from his poems and stories at staged events, and it's as though a Sterno bum has commandeered the podium. He clutches a bottle of beer and peers at the audience through narrowed, nervous eyes; the audience senses he's as much freak show as artist and goads him; he goads them right back, then picks up a piece of paper and reads something like this: "Beware/The average man/The average woman/Beware their love/Their love is average, seeks/Average/But there is genius in their hatred." On the occasion of another reading, Bukowski looks over the crowd and dryly comments, "You have my soul, I have your money." It's a trade he can live with. Directed by John Dullaghan, "Born Into This" wants to claim Bukowski (1920-1994) as a 20th-century West Coast Walt Whitman -- a people's poet of modern degradation. Through a selective presentation of his writing and a reverently crass treatment of his life, it makes a funny, often intensely moving case, and you're having such a good time that you're glad to let it. More to the point, you come out of the theater wanting to beeline to a bookstore, grab a copy of "Post Office" or "Love Is a Dog From Hell," and adjust your opinion as necessary. Bukowski's cult of personality -- he was famous both as a dirty old man of letters and a poet-prophet who saw life from the underside of a barstool -- served him well after fame came late in life with adoring readers and Hollywood adaptations like 1987's "Barfly." "Born Into This" captures the rancorous legend in old video interviews taped by director Taylor Hackford in the early '70s and foreign journalists in the 1980s. A few celebrity friends such as Sean Penn and Bono testify; Tom Waits correctly IDs the writer as a crucial influence. There are also interviews with those who loved him, published him, and/or put up with him: This is the kind of documentary in which the subject's widow can say "Oh, yeah, the time he pulled a blade on the maitre d' at the Polo Lounge. There was that" -- and say it with nostalgia. But it's Bukowski's voice that's clearest. It's a sidling, sneering instrument, cousin to William S. Burroughs's flat drawl, and the writer deploys it to great epigrammatic effect. "Love is the morning fog that burns away, quickly"; "Nobody ever realizes they're a writer, they only think they're a writer"; "If your parents like your work, you're doing something wrong" -- these are dark jewels of observation that the writer tosses off without strain in interviews. They're defense mechanisms, too, because Bukowski's real work -- the stories, novels, and poems he tapped out obsessively throughout his life -- are as emotionally tender as they are squalid. (At one point he reads a verse about copulation and bursts into surprised tears.) "Born Into This" traces the writer's LA upbringing at the hands of an absurdly punitive father. ("This was very good training for me," Bukowski said. "When you have the [expletive] kicked out of you long enough you say what you mean.") It delves into the scarred adolescence of which he wrote, "I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future." It covers the flophouse years, rejection slips, and decades working as a postman; drunken marriages, sozzled arguments, a remarkably sane daughter; the dalliances with Hollywood -- "Barfly" is mentioned but not several other Bukowski adaptations -- and the affairs with women. Dullaghan doesn't let the writer off the hook of his misogyny but neither does he plumb the fleshpot nihilism of his work for such magazines as "Hustler." ("I treat men worse," Bukowski said, and that was that.) In all, "Born Into This" is a rather more spiky "American Masters" installment about a man who, like the Beats with whom he uneasily coexisted, found solace in opening up the sluiceways and calling whatever poured onto paper art. (To write otherwise, he felt, was hypocrisy.) Dullaghan takes Bukowski's widow, Linda Lee, to visit his grave; on the headstone are the words "Don't Try" and the figure of a sparring man. His writing came from the unresolvable tension between the two. Movie Showtimes Movie Showtimes for Tuesday, June 1 Purchase Tickets from MovieTickets.com by clicking on a linked showtime. Kendall Square Cinema 1 Kendall Square Cambridge, MA 2:35 pm, 5:00 pm, 7:30 pm, 9:55 pm ...just in case...this comes from Boston.com... 5:12 p.m. - 2004-06-01 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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