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A wank and a nod
A tone of anti-sexual moralism takes the life out of "Auto Focus," Paul Shrader's bio-pic of the tragicaly libidinous "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane.
By GRADY HENDRIX
Offoffoff.com
(Originally reviewed at the 2002 New York International Film Festival)
The most compelling scene in a movie this year is that
of Willem Dafoe and Greg Kinnear sitting on a sofa and
masturbating together in Paul Shrader's "Auto Focus."
Now, "The Two Towers" hasn't come out yet but I'd say
that barring some elf doing something unexpectedly
disgusting with Frodo Baggins, "Auto Focus" has a lock.
Unfortunately, to get this bong of a scene up to your
lips and actually inhale you've got to labor
through the rest of Shrader's tired, moralistic,
anti-sex sermon about The Darkness in Man's Soul
which comes fully larded with flabby Euro-art
conventions that passed their Sell By date two decades
ago. On the bright side, however, put up with the rest
of this movie and you'll also get a nearly-as-good
scene of Willem Dafoe and Greg Kinnear having a tiff
over Willem grabbing Greg's butt during an orgy ("But
it was a group grope, Bob!" Dafoe offers).
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It's too bad that this bio-pic will be most people's
introduction to Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear), the actor
who played Hogan on "Hogan's Heroes" and who was
addicted to photographing and filming his sexual
exploits with so many women that, if laid end to end,
they would build a human bridge to the moon and back.
Crane was a one-trick pony whose celebrity pretty much
started and ended with "Hogan's Heroes", but his "aw
shucks" demeanor stands in stark contrast to his
life-long obsession with not only having sex with
hundreds of women, but with becoming an early adaptor
of home video equipment so he could tape and edit his
couplings. To this end he befriended John Carpenter
(Willem Dafoe) a color blind video salesman who helped
Crane get swinging in the swinging 60's. It's an
inspirational testament to man's ability to turn every
technological advance into a pornography delivery
device, and Carpenter and Crane are eager
missionaries. Crane wound up in a New Mexico motel
room, beaten to death with one of his own tripods (oh!
the irony!), and the case was filed away as
"unsolved", although Shrader is convinced that
Carpenter did it, even though the poor guy was
acquitted.
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| This flick has all the
sincerity of a televangelist — luring you in with the
lurid promise of seeing Colonel Hogan having an orgy,
and then giving you a lecture on why that kind of
thing is bad, bad, bad. | |
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Now, without much cooperation from any surviving
Cranes, Shrader has turned a script by a food delivery
guy into a movie about American male sexual identity,
"two men .Ê.Ê. involved in a conflict probably neither of
them would have done alone", the corrosive effect of
celebrity, and the desensitizing effect of addiction.
Pardon me, I just fell asleep. This flick has all the
sincerity of a televangelist — luring you in with the
lurid promise of seeing Colonel Hogan having an orgy,
and then giving you a lecture on why that kind of
thing is bad, bad, bad. It's the same trick sideshow
operators run, a classic bait and switch: once you've
paid to see Shrader's show, he lectures you for
wanting to see it in the first place.
It must have
been fun to shoot a movie with so much sex in it,
especially when so many American movies only show sex
with violence, but whereas Bob Crane loved sex, his
filmic biographer seems ambivalent, at best, about it.
A far better chronicler of the priapic sitcom star
would be his son, Scotty Crane, who runs a
web site
devoted to selling Bob Crane porn tapes and photos.
Scotty defends his dad like a bull terrier, and
insists that he wasn't the dark figure that Shrader
says he was. A quick perusal of his site delivers more
passion and thrills than Shrader's multimillion-dollar movie.
If this were a Socialist Republic we'd
get to send Shrader to the countryside to be
re-educated.
Not only is "Auto Focus" boring and mean (mean because
it's not smart enough to show us Crane's life without
playing "blame the victim" over his death) but it
doesn't even look good. Shrader tries a trick where he
starts the movie with classic compositions and camera
movements, and then progressively degrades the film
stock and starts using handheld cameras to show the
degradation of Crane's soul. Or something. It's pulled
off so timidly and halfheartedly that it winds up
looking like they couldn't afford to have a properly
timed print developed. There's also a lead-footed
credit sequence that may be paying homage to Saul
Bass, but it may also be the producer's son's high
school animation project.
Later this year, Chuck Barris, the host of "The Gong
Show" will get the mondo-movie treatment in
"Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," written by "Being
John Malkovich's" Charlie Kaufman. Remember a few years ago
when all we had to put up with were lame remakes of
"The Flintstones" and "The Beverly Hillbillys"? Now, just
when we thought they were running out of television
shows to put onscreen, it looks like every single
cast member of those shows will be getting their very
own joyless little bio-pic.
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OCTOBER 26, 2002
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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