Bukowski: Born into This

Rank

Top 20% of all time (see others with this rank)

Festival Year

2003 (click here to see all competition films from this year)

Category

Documentary Competition

Non-Cast Credits

John Dullaghan, Diane Markow, John McCormick, Victor Livingston

Description

The name Bukowski is a synonymous with fighting and fucking as it is with poetry and prose. Charles Bukowski was one of those rare writers whose work succeeded in creating a mythos of epic proportions around its creator. He came to personify the downiest and dirtiest of human existence. In a direct, clean style, he wrote about unthinkable, but very real, degradation based on his own personal, hellacious experiences.

Best known for Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Love Is a Dog from Hell, and the autobiographical novels, Women, Hollywood, and Post Office, as well as the screenplay for Barfly, Bukowski is considered on of the most influential authors of his generation. His language is simple, powerful, and often graphic. With exceptional insight and skill, he tears away from the mask from conventional civilized life to reveal a raw, tragic, sometimes humorous, but often unsettling reality.

Bukowski: Born into This brilliantly managed to do this same thing to the man. Utilizing an amazing array of interviews to reveal Bukowski in his own words and as seen by the people who knew him best, the film peels off the hardened mask of the beast to reveal the insecure, loving, and extremely human man underneath.

Reviewer

Trevor Groth (see other films reviewed by the same reviewer)

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