What Happened to Kerouac?
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Movie Reviews of What Happened to Kerouac?
Movie Review: WOW! Great snapshot of the Beat Generation
Summary: 5 Stars
Of course there was no generation just a handful of writers and poets who all knew each other. After reading all the books about Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady and reading all the books written by Jack, Jan Kerouac, Carolyn Cassady, and Ann Charters I finally discover this little gem of a documentry. It's the first time that I've ever seen Jan Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Carolyn Cassady or William Burroughs on film. What a treat. If you don't know these people you'll probably be bored to death. But if you're a beat generation nut like myself, this is a real gem. Don't miss it.Movie Review: the only true bio of jack
Summary: 5 Stars
Ignore all the other negative connotations regarding this dvd release and dig this.... this is the only release you need regarding Kerouac .. Corso is monumental.. Ginsberg waxing on ultimate reality alone is worth 3 times the price of this dvd. It has the Steve Allen footage in the best qualtiy available.. Snyder .. Creeley..etc.. if yr interested in Kerouac... this is the one to have...Movie Review: A glimpse into his life...
Summary: 5 Stars
This DVD had an impact on me that was similar to the first time I read "On the Road." The scene where he reads on the Steve Allen show made me cry... his beautiful sadness kept me enraptured.Movie Review: Kerouac the Enigma
Summary: 4 Stars
I got into Kerouac by way of my interest in Neal Cassady, whom I can't really remember how I discovered. (I have yet to read "On the Road" but am familiar with Jack's prose style through spoken word recordings.) Anyway, I came to this doc more from an interest in the person than his work, which I think is common to a lot of people who love the Beats. Their personas are as much a part of their legend as anything they wrote.
That said, Jack looks like a troubled boy even in his best clips here, which are undoubtedly the earlier ones on the Steve Allen Show--probably in part because he was in what he perceived to be a sympathetic environment and therefore felt at liberty to indulge his playful and vulnerable side. He is in fact most touching as he reads excerpts from "On the Road". He is also a ruggedly handsome and charismatic figure, although his tendency for brooding and blustering is apparent even here. Far less flattering is his appearance on a later talk show, aptly titled "Firing Line" in which ,visibly drunk, he (understandably) reacts defensively and plays the fool to host William Buckley's cross examiner. This was only a year and a half before Jack's premature death from alcoholism, and he seems too beleagured with complexes to get out anything coherent. He seems to be trapped in a subjective hell wherein he believes everything and everyone to be part of some "organized effort to ignore him".
As a younger man however, his appeal--both personal and literary-- is obvious. He got American literature out of its stodgy rut, writing in bold, Hemingway-like strokes, blending narrative fiction with poetry off the top of his head in what was to be called "spontaneous prose". As one of his contemporaries points out in the interviews, this was a wildly adventurous choice to make in the fifties/sixties, from a man who could "write any way you want" but chose the road less travelled because that's where his passion was.
Neal Cassady is seen briefly in a clip filmed at A Different Light Bookstore, San Francisco in 1965. He appears with Allen Ginsberg, who is clearly enamored of him. Neal, as everyone knows, was Jack's muse/alter ego, the inspiration for the character of Dean Moriarty in "On the Road", and--according to many of his contemporaries--a kind of genius in his own right. However, nothing he says in this clip made any sense to me at all--and even Ginsberg seems at a loss to communicate with him. He too seems lost in his own head, trapped in some internal dialogue with himself. Still, it's easy to see how he could draw people in and inspire them. He had that alpha energy that makes things go. Mix it with good looks and charisma and you've got a cult! The cult of Neal. I think in some ways Jack was brooding because he wasn't Neal. Neal was the doer, and Jack was the observer/commentator, and one can never be the other, although each usually longs to be.
Carolyn Cassady--Neal's wife of 20 years, is unexpectedly good-humored and funny to listen to. Poor Carolyn was the anchor that kept Neal from floating into the outer stratospheres. Compared to Jack and Neal, her solidity and insistence on at least an operating level of convention make her a heavy in most books about the Beats, but it's clear from this interview that she was simply SANE. Pretty even in old age, with unbelievably beautiful blue eyes that still twinkle when she reminisces on Neal and her affair with Kerouac, she proves herself humorous, resilient and every inch their intellectual equal. She must also have been remarkably patient to deal with these two exasperating egotists, not to mention sporadic sexual meddling with her husband by Ginsberg. Somebody give this lady a medal!
In the end, this is a good doc for anyone interested in its subjects--it's a little heavy with talking heads and light on vintage footage, but all in all compelling, illuminating and worthwhile.
Movie Review: What Not To Watch On A Late Night In Japan
Summary: 4 Stars
I slipped this 1986 production in my DVD player a couple of nights ago after the wife and kids had fallen asleep, and while the trains to and from Tokyo roared by a hop skip and a jump away, and things were high-rise and pretty much all about the future outside my midnight window, I took a trip back in time to c. 1959 America. The first major point I want to make about this DVD is that it contains a young, electrifyingly handsome Kerouac doing his famous reading from On the Road. If this DVD contained only that clip, it would be worth the price. In fact, as the show proceeded, I found myself wishing that this clip was the only thing on the DVD, with options on speeding it up, slowing it down, listening only to the audio, perhaps having it simultaneously translated into Japanese (for friends who might drop by), French, Italian, and--what the heck--Mandarin too. The rest of the DVD outside of cameo appearances by a well-embalmed Huncke, an articulate Ann Charters, a righteous Diane di Prima, a super sound-byte by Creeley, an impressive Carolyn Cassady, a spookily laconic Burroughs, and a prim discussion by Snyder, was rather depressing. We see Neal Cassady a tick after his prime saying little but saying it quickly, a post-stroke Allen Ginsberg getting sly revenge on Jack's mother, and the trickster antics of Gregory Corso, gumming his words like an old drunk in your home-town bar, holding forth like (see previous), urged on to greater mental triangulations by the off-screen producer, and finally making a weird kind of sense. Joyce Johnson reminisces about Jack on the eve of his On The Road fame. One of Jack's wives tells it like it was (she couldn't deal with dirty bathtubs, so she went home), and the secret star of the show--Jack's wonderfully charismatic daughter Jan--also a writer--and beautiful--but doomed to die young--tells about compairing hand sizes with her pixilated dad while he watched the Beverly Hillbillies on television. Which brings up the painful parts of the video--almost as painful to me as watching a drunk Bukowski trying to kick his girlfriend in another DVD I saw recently--Jack being stupid on the William F. Buckley show, and Buckley egging him on, complete with snaky asides while a young, earnest Ed Sanders sits like an angel two seats down and is never really allowed to say much of anything. Jack comes across as a bully reeking of sweat and urine, hopeless, a soon-to-die wreck of what he was in the other clip. Gregory Corso at last fills the screen like the Fool in King Lear, however--wiser than his masters and mistresses--to really spell it out: success got Kerouac. All those people who wanted to tear off a piece of him for a souvenir, or buy him a gun to shoot himself with so they could say they'd done the deed later in case the camera crews came around, or buy him a drink, which was essentially the same thing as a gun--to kill his already gone beauty even more than it had been done in by much hard-living, drugs and many toasts to the moon. Yes, I was mighty depressed approx. 90 minutes later when the credits started to roll and Thelonious Monk (who also died young) began to play. But this was Japan in the year 2007, and out the window the Future was winking red and yellow lights.