Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

If you're a Bukowski fan, you'll love this documentary about his life and works. Interviews with his friends, lovers, patrons and publishers make up a good part of the film, interspersed with footage of Bukowski being himself around the house and during poetry readings.The big mystery to me is how he attracted all those women; we're not talking skid-row winos here, Bukowski kept company with some good looking girls and seemed to take them for granted. What's up with that? He wasn't nice to them, didn't use them as muses, certainly didn't take them places or buy them things, and I doubt anyone would describe him as an Adonis. There must have been something...In any case, he appears on film here exactly as he came through in his written work, there are no disappointments. From watching him drive to the racetrack to arguing with his wife, this is essential stuff for Bukowski fans.

For those of us who haven't read any of his writing, Charles Bukowski, as seen in this informative, engaging new documentary by John Dullaghan, is a craggy deadbeat everyman, a working class L.A. writer with enough cult status to have some cool famous fan admirers. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Waits, Bono of U2, and Sean Penn are the main guys who read lines or speak in admiring and affectionate terms of Bukowski. He also had a string of women, some wives, the last one, Linda Lee, a beautiful, classy lady with a tough and tender edge worthy of Lauren Bacall. More important yet for his reputation perhaps, he had an editor and publisher who put him on a monthly salary and brought out a lot of his books, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, who saw Bukowski as an updated Whitman, a man of the people spewing wild poetry. Somebody else told me he was the kind of writer you like if you're young and wild and drink a lot, the kind of tortured outsider persona that appeals to a 22-year-old, but that you wouldn't go back to. If you used to hit the sauce and gave it up you may feel Bukowski's prose has lost its flavor, like a doper's stoned insights. There are those who consider the writer a case of arrested development. Be that as it may, all his life Bukowski never wanted to be anything but a writer and never stopped writing, poems, then stories, finally novels. Two of his books most often mentioned are Post Office and Ham on Rye. These may be young men's books with more rough flavor than depth of thought, but the fascination, for the young man, is with something solid: the hard nuggets of brutal boring existence, the courage of the deadbeat who's seen it all and bravely slogs on. First there's the six years, age six to twelve, of being beaten severely once a week with a razor strop by his ex-soldier father. An experience like that, Bukowski says, is good for a writer because it teaches you to tell the truth. Next he had ulcerative acne vulgaris as an adolescent and his face was covered with pullulating boils that left his face craggy and pitted for life -- though there are angles in some of the varied films from different decades that show him tanned and sunny, almost elegant-looking and possessed of an evident macho sexiness that explains in part the many women in his life. The other part is that he was a late bloomer as a ladies' man and took advantage of the fame of his later years to make up for lost time. After the beatings and the acne Bukowski started visiting Skid Row to prepare for his future life. As his second decade wore on he wandered round the country staying at flophouses, rooming houses and cheap hotels, drunk, obviously, most of the time, throughout the Forties, excused by a psychiatrist from wartime military service. In the Fifties he settled into a minimal working stiff existence: employee at the post office, delivering mail (`living hell'); later on sorting it all night (which was so monotonous he'd get so he couldn't lift his arm), and, because he couldn't sleep, spending the day drinking and writing. Then, when a new addiction to gambling kicked in, he'd be at the racetrack playing the horses and play barfly in the afternoons brawling and flirting. He trashes the Barbet Schroeder movie from his screenplay about that part of his life, says Mickey Rourke is too theatrical and flowery; and he wrote a book called Hollywood after the filmmaking experience to show the dream factory was even stupider and faker than he'd ever imagined. Eventually a regular column in an L.A. weekly got Bukowski noticed. Then John Martin stepped in with his financial and moral support and through the Seventies and Eighties the man's reputation and financial success grew to the point where he moved to a nice house in San Pedro with his lovely wife. He wasn't expected to live after developing severe bleeding ulcers in his thirties (1956) but he recovered and had a new burst of creativity. In his last few years he got tuberculosis, lost 60 pounds, and gave up heavy drinking. He died soon after being diagnosed with leukemia, at 73. Watching this documentary you feel good because of the man's clarity and humor. Simplistic his expression may be, but it has the brilliant directness of the practiced writer who wears no mask. But despite all the tastes of his writing he and his celebrity admirers provide, I still don't know if I'd want to read some of his prolific oeuvre, and the picture of a similar, but sober, figure named Harvey Pekar in American Splendor (Bukowski too was wildly re-imagined by R. Crumb) seems more complex and multilayered, while no less down to earth. It's no secret that Harry Dean, Bono, Sean, and Mr. Waits are enthusiastic boozers themselves, and that's one big reason why `Hank' Bukowski's their bard and patron saint. And if you compare Bukowski to another heavy user (but a more wildly adventurous one), William Burroughs, his mind and work don't seem as rich or as interesting as Burroughs', nor his life as intensely engaged with the issues of his times as the Beats'. Nevertheless, that's not to impugn the authenticity of his voice. There's nobody quite like Bukowski; hence, no doubt, his cult status, and the way people from other countries, places where the brawling and the articulate life are less often combined, find him so fascinating – and so accessible.

This was a special movie for me since Bukowski occupied a special place in my life and provided me with some basic notions about looking at the world during an early formative time in my life. The year was 1975, and I was 21.Now that I'm 50 and I've been "clean and sober" for over half my life, Bukowski has lost quite a bit of his charm. Watching him in this movie I couldn't help but realize what a total case of adolescent arrested development he was. And although I think he should practically be canonized as a saint for his refusal to knuckle under to the phony plastic American success machine, it's also apparent that most of what he had to say was only negative, it only went half way there, so to speak. In other words, he provided no positive suggestions. He just said: be yourself, be a slacker, follow your own obsessions. And this isn't enough as far as offering young people something good to believe in, something that will help them feel like they can belong to something worthwhile.And much of the negative imagery quoted in his poems in this movie (I was never a fan of his poetry, only his prose) is almost embarrassingly lurid and crude, only a small step up from, a slightly more polished version of, garden variety Heavy Metal rock 'n' roll doom and gloom song lyrics.One other impressionistic thing I wanted to note was just how much John Martin, the publisher of Black Sparrow books, reminded me of Leonard "Nipper" Read, the police officer that arrested and helped prosecute the infamous UK gangsters, the Kray twins. Just a fun fact, that's all.Another thing that struck me was Bukowski's attitude. I'd heard him speak before, on cassette tape and on an early video of a reading he did in Bellevue, Washington, and I knew he had this kind of snotty, purring way of talking, but it really came through here. He really didn't seem like a very nice person, not someone whose attitude I would put up with in real life for very long.But, all-in-all, this was a very well done documentary, very well paced and hardly ever got bogged down. And it was a real pleasure to get a well rounded picture of a personality I had always been very curious about. And it was also very good to get to see and know some of the other people in Bukowski's life. John Martin, for example, is a very interesting and engaging man in his own right.As a portrait of an interesting literary and cultural figure I would recommend this film highly to everyone. And I think most Bukowski fans will like it a lot, too.

Charles Bukowski is probably the greatest American poet, who, to this day, remains largely unrecognized by the literary establishment in the United States. His greatest recognition came in and still is in Europe. He's the poet that college professors love to dislike; because, many of them tried to do what Bukowski did and failed. Bukowski became a cult, literary underground figure in the late 50's, known only to the few thousand fellow small press readers and publishers of the time. He wrote of his experiences in flop houses, bars, and women in a very distinctive, one-of-a-kind, formless fashion. He worked for several years for the post office in two different stints in the 1950's and 1960's. Bukowski wrote on his own terms and never compromised, thanks to his $100 monthly "grant" from a man that would become his lifelong publisher, who started Black Sparrow Press. For the next 24 years from January of 1970 until his death on March 9, 1994, Bukowski wrote stories, poems, and novels, finding time in his later years to replace drinking with racetrack betting. This is an extraordinary documentary, capturing Bukowski in the 1970's and 1980's mostly, telling the story of his incredible life and alternatively capturing private moments that define him as well as defy his reputation. The film uses interviews of those that lived with him and knew him to portray a man that waded through an interpersonal sewer of a life, only to conquer the literary world on his own terms and make a decent living from it to boot. It's the story of a man, a writer, who just lived life as it presented itself to him. He had an unflinching ability to face the realities of his life with charm, wisdom, and a determination that even he would not be able to recognize. Whether he spoke of his upbringing, his drinking, his laziness, his unattractiveness, his women, and especially about love, death and sex, he remained steadfast in his cynicism laced with humor, much like the comic artist Robert Crumb. Most of the highlights in the film occur when Bukowski is either conversing or reading his own work. He reads his own work in a world weary tone of voice that possesses a cadence that seems to say he's tired of it all. Just then though, he hits us with another gem, another truth about ourselves and the world around us. See this at all costs. **** of 4 stars.