AUTO FOCUS review

AUTO FOCUS is absolutely, no two ways about it, brilliant. This is Paul Schrader’s best directed film yet – with the possible exception of AMERICAN GIGOLO, but I haven’t seen that in years.

Having said that, this is perhaps the most ICKY film ever made. The story of Bob Crane and the way Schrader brought it to screen happens to be one of the most frank and chilling portrayals of sexual addiction and self-delusion I’ve ever seen. For Bob Crane’s DONNA REED SHOW fans, this ain’t. For Bob’s HOGAN’S HEROES fans this ain’t. For those that want to feel safe and secure with their own sexual kinks, this ain’t.

This movie peels away Bob Crane, layer by layer. We start with his Radio show, his drums, his glib ‘announcer’ voice and wry wit stripping away Clayton Moore’s LONE RANGER on L.A. Radio, and we end… well, if you know Bob Crane’s story, you know where we end. On that journey, Schrader turns the audience into the voyeur, fascinating us with each new layer that he takes us through. From drum gigs at strip clubs to Minnesota Swinger sets. From Playboy Bunnies to middle aged obese housewives. From single partners, to double partners, to full blown hedonistic orgies, to hippie love-ins, to… well it is here and Bob Crane did it. And Schrader makes us watch. Kinnear makes us watch. In fact, you can’t take your eyes off screen.

You watch how he goes from that first plunge of infidelity with a brand new friend, with a cool new technological toy, into the fun and games of sexual filmmaking. Then as he’s conditioned to be used to the lifestyle, as his career flops… the women and games become more depraved, less glamorous and more… sad. Reducing him into a sad shadow of a previously merely shallow individual.

In addition to being Bob Crane’s story though, it is also the story of video captured sex, how it began, how it took off. We also see how Sex Addiction makes us feel when we watch it take a pair of men completely over. How their bizarre symbiotic love-hate sexual partnership warps and twists everything in their lives.

You know, I’ve seen LOST WEEKEND and LEAVING LAS VEGAS. I watched my mother decay into an alcoholic destructive dive that no pilot could pull out of. We’ve seen Drug Addiction films like TRAINSPOTTING, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, DRUGSTORE COWBOY and so on. The films themselves don’t have that icky bathtub film about them. That yellow toilet bowl urine ring ick is not present.

Greg Kinnear goes from being a charming likable affable chap… to someone so effortlessly slimy, disgusting, gross and repugnant, that the idea of his hand on your shoulder is akin to pulling a coughed out piece of bubblegum from a men’s urinal and chewing it… Blowing a bubble that you sneeze pop, only to chew the booger urine soaked gum all up again. I mean just spine shiveringly icky. Just ewwww, ya know? Ewwww.

Why is that?

What does Paul Schrader do that makes this film blackboard scrape the audience?

First off, we know this guy. We know Bob Crane. I’ve seen at least 80 HOGAN’S HEROES episodes, if I’ve seen one. He’s Hogan, he’s a likable sort of fella. He’s made me laugh for years. We know his eye rolls, his smirks, his quirks and his act. That’s the side we have been allowed to know. And we like him, the way we like folks like Tom Hanks and we just don’t want to think ill of anyone. This is someone we have hours of memories stored up about, and now we have all this… imagery.

It’s just sex, everyone loves sex? We all love to fuck, right? A good fuck is great, right? Nothing wrong with a bit of zug zug right?

Well, in American culture, we’re conditioned, and have from the beginning of it all seemingly, to not discuss what we do in the bedroom. Hell, it is fine to discuss the intricacies of body mutilation and serial killer specials on the T.V., but when we get to talking about the joys of two anally inserted fingers massaging the prostate gland… Well… it is time to tune out. That’s just not done. Casual masturbation is the domain of the early teenager, not a happily married man… oh and women never do that. They don’t fart or shit either.

These are facts. We know these things, because well… It is somewhere in the American Book of Conduct.

Only deviants frequent strip clubs, freaks buy vibrating gripping blow up alien love dolls, and the criminally insane and John Robie are the only ones to have seen a woman shit out a grape fruit repeatedly in MPG format and then emailed it to their friends and family with the subject line – NEW CGI YODA PIC!

When we sit in a movie theater, we don’t want to think about the concept that the person sitting behind you might have leaned forward, smelt your hair and then squeezed himself, all with out you knowing it.

As you sit at home and read this review, you don’t want to imagine me laying Marlene Dietrich style on my bed, typing this fully in the buff with a semi.

And you really don’t want to think of Bob Crane teaming up with Willem Dafoe to fuck anything and everything. We’ve seen the films that Dafoe has shot, Jesus, the man’s played a head-shrinked Jesus for Christ’s sake, and he’s going around asking women what time they think it is, and then informs them that it is… FUCK TIME. It is desperate, sad, pathetic and vital. Dafoe’s John Carpenter (not that one) is a great character, one of Dafoe’s best.

This is someone’s life. The film itself is not judgmental, but you find yourself in the position of judging this man’s life. We hear him say, “But I’m normal, I’m normal, there’s nothing wrong with it,” and you sit there watching how natural he is with his life choice. Who are we to condemn it? I watch movies all day and night. What a freak. Put me in a carnie and hand me a live chicken and call me geek, ya know? But that’s the public side of me. What if our lives were on that screen, would we be… ok with it? I mean, what would Bob Crane think of this film? What about his kids, his family, those women… all of those women, what do they think about finally understanding their place in the daisy chain life of Bob Crane?

The film feels like a violation, and we’re the ones committing it. As we see his success wane away, and we realize that all he has left are his fetishes, his kinks, his lusts and loves and passions, and we see the people in his world condemn, judge and loathe him for simply being who he is… Someone that loves to fuck. Who is honest about it. That loves to give pleasure, receive pleasure and then narcissistically re-experience that pleasure through the miracles of VTR (Video Tape Recording unit).

By the way, that’s one of the ultra-creepy levels right there… the fact this guy tapes everything, then masturbates to it, keeps records off all of his partners with a photo album with corresponding video tape numbers… Just Ewwww, ya know?

One’s enjoyment of this film will depend quite a bit on your threshold of personal hypocrisy. Can you deny another of their pursuit of happiness? I’m a pretty liberal thinking guy. I’ve been in some pretty odd situations in my life, but this Bob Crane – well, when you hear about Wilt Chamberlain and Gene Simmons’ alleged lifestyles, and you watch Bob Crane’s story unfold… That lifestyle seems filthy. But, they’re just fucking. But… I don’t know, there is just such a creep factor. Yet that is exactly how we’re supposed to feel.

I mean, as a hetero-male watching this film, I couldn’t help but notice that there is probably more women naked in this film and doing their thing, than in 3 months of VIVID VIDEO production. How many different sets of breasts do we see here? Tiny nipples, long nipples, fig tits, plum tits, orange tits, grapefruit tits, watermelon tits and so on. I mean, this is the entire gamut of female splendor on parade. And there is Greg Kinnear, smiling, laughing and just happy about the whole thing naked as a jay bird, usually with Willem somewhere naked near by.

We see how it affects those around him, and we just don’t care, he doesn’t care… looks like he’s having fun, ya know? Schrader could have played Willem Dafoe’s John Carpenter as a bad guy… someone to loathe, instead, while admittedly socially retarded, he does know a good thing when it happens to him. “A DAY WITHOUT SEX IS A DAY WASTED” they say. Dafoe’s Carpenter is Crane’s partner in life. They talk, laugh, masturbate, videotape and fuck women together. It is their lifestyle, it isn’t a loving lifestyle, it is a lifestyle about themselves and only themselves.

It is a relationship about getting what you need, not about helping or giving to the other. That’s a major key to sexual problems is projecting your thoughts of another’s pleasure as being about them, when you do it. It is in fact more about you than most can imagine. Here you see that pursued to the umpteenth degree. Here you see a man that has the pick up line down to perfection. He knows how to play his celebrity for all that it is worth. He goes to different cities and has different women in those locations. He likes to think that it is his business, but he shows the photos to others, thereby turning it into their business, their world. Crossing his own alleged lines and boundaries, till he no longer can make the distinction between public and private life. His addiction to video, makes him feel he can edit the bad parts of his life out, that we all can, that all can be forgiven and forgotten. He forgets that the scars one leaves on hearts and minds are not easily, if ever, edited for broadcast.

The performances from Kinnear and Dafoe are both tremendous. Watching Rita Wilson in this, I just couldn’t help but think the thought afterwards that… What if this was what Tom Hanks’ life was like? I then did the icky dance in the parking lot and wanted to Q-Tip my brain.

In a way, this has that same energy and love that ED WOOD had, but instead of leaving Ed as this quirky freak that loved making movies… it was as if you followed him through his life of soft-core porn and smut and his eventual penniless death. Burton wasn’t interested in showing the rapid decay of those with eccentricities. He was making a hopeful film about the strange and unusual. A beautiful fable of odd love.

There is no love at the end of the day for Bob Crane. He’s simply a man that gave it all up for fucking. His wife and kids… Ehhh, who cares. Schrader stares his story right in the eye and doesn’t blink. He shows it for what it is, an easy life to fall for.

As the film ended and the 7 or 8 people that I had at the screening stood up to leave, we all agreed that we liked the film, but everyone was doing that… I feel dirty dance… That, I have chicken grease on me wipe sensation. You have that feeling, and you don’t feel happy. It doesn’t feel happy or good or pleasant. It doesn’t make you want to rush home to jack off or take in a strip club. It makes you want to take an alcohol bath, to get that special scrub pad that takes two layers of epidermis away.

The film makes you squirm at the end. Makes you feel bad for Crane, makes you feel bad for having watched his life fall apart. For laughing at his situations and jokes. This is the story of a man’s life and how it fell apart.

Once about seven years ago, my father and I were out hitting garage sales in far South Austin. We pull up to this one house and it is the mutherlode. I mean, they had it all! Vintage collectibles from the thirties, original edition Burroughs novels, the stuff you never see at garage sales. As the owners came out of the house, Dad and I instantly recognized them. They were a pair of customers that had been buying from us since I was about 3 years old. As I was poking around their garage, I saw this box, and the first magazine on the pile was an old Famous Monster of Filmland. One that I didn’t have, I say to Dad, “Psst… come here” He got excited, we knelt down to go through the box… and discovered hundreds of Swinger Magazines. Dad and I looked at one another, did the icky ewww thing, bought our collectibles and got out of there… Ever since then, we’ve never been able to discuss those collectors without doing the icky ewww thing.

There’s something about sexual activity that craves in U.S. society to be quiet. This movie is not a quiet discussion. It isn’t a polite film, a romantic film, an erotic film… instead what we have is a total experience, the full Bob Crane ride with all the bumps, thrills, jeers and pitfalls. This is a movie in the disturbing tradition of HARDCORE and ROLLING THUNDER. And when the violence comes, all you can think is… damn.

There is one major complaint about the film. In the first scene where Bob Crane has discovered that he was caught on video by his friend being given a blowjob by a PussyCat stripper, when they cut to the screen, they have computerized blocks blurring the 'action'. Now obviously, for an R-rated film they can't show a girl blowing Kinnear. However, the computerized blocks takes us right out of the period and the time. It is something modern and not of the period. It screamed censorship - which it is - but it also is a big 'period-breaker'. It takes you out of the scene. Perhaps for the unrated DVD you show the footage, but here... you just stay on their faces mesmerized by the action they are witnessing. I don't know, but computer blocks are wrong for an otherwise wonderfully realized period marvel.

If you want to have a very frank conversation about sexual kinks and perverted desires… see this movie. If you want to fondly remember Bob Crane – avoid at all costs. I’ll never watch HOGAN’S HEROES the same way again.