| |||||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
Special Features
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
If you can manage to suffer through an excruciating series of painful tales of eye trauma, then you might find yourself caught up and swept away in Spalding Gray's filmed monologue Gray's Anatomy. This amusing and capricious film is a bit different from his previous Swimming to Cambodia, which focused on his role in the film The Killing Fields. This time, Gray finds himself experiencing "disturbances" in his left eye, and after he is diagnosed by ophthalmologists as having a "macular pucker," he sets out to find a cure without having to set foot in a New York hospital. Raised as a Christian Scientist and fearing the loss of his eyesight, Gray dramatizes his journey in search of alternative treatments. Along the way, he calls the Christian Scientists' hot line, visits so-called Native American shamans, eye nutritionists, and Filipino psychic surgeons, all in the name of relief. Directed by Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies and Videotape), the one-man show is injected with movement by his inventive use of sets, lighting, and creative camera angles. The pacing can sometimes be frantic due to Gray's excited dialogue and self-examination, but as a result, it succeeds in holding you until the mirthful end. --Michele Goodson
Product Description
One of the great raconteurs of stage and screen, Spalding Gray (Swimming to Cambodia), came together with one of cinema’s boldest image-makers, Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), for Gray's Anatomy, a spellbinding adaptation of Gray’s 1993 monologue of the same name (cowritten with Renée Shafransky). In it, Gray, with typical sardonic relish, chronicles his arduous journey through the diagnosis and treatment of a rare and alarming ocular condition. For the monologist, this experience occasioned a meditation on illness and mortality, medicine and metaphysics; for the filmmaker, it was a chance to experiment with ways of bringing his subject’s words to brilliant, eye-opening life.
Customer Reviews
“ Though based on his his attempts to avoid dangerous eye surgery, the story is really about meeting fascinating characters and Gray's own fascinating neuroses. ”
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:VHS Tape
As good as or better than "Swimming to Cambodia" and "Monster in a Box", except this time there is more. Surreal sceneries and sounds are added for effect, as well as short testimonials by "people on the street" describing their own unusual eye ailments. Gray always fascinated me...his unique perspective on life and the way he deals with it. I would also recommend reading "Impossible Vacation" (the subject of "Monster in a Box"). Very few books can affect me like that did.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:VHS Tape
Incredible writer and monologuist Spalding Gray takes us on an incredible journey, around the world and through his soul. Though based on his his attempts to avoid dangerous eye surgery, the story is really about meeting fascinating characters and Gray's own fascinating neuroses. If the idea of a monologue sounds boring to you -- basically Gray sitting and telling you a story -- I especially challenge you to try this out.
While dry, Gray's humor keeps you laughing out loud. You'll find it mesmerizing, and at the end of your own journey through the film, changed for the better. Highly recommended.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
By Birdman
Format:DVD
Spalding Gray's death has left us poorer than when we started. How evident this is after viewing this edgy, moving, often riotous monologue directed by Stephen Soderbergh.
A macular "pucker" leaves Gray virtually blind in one eye. Born into Christian Science, Gray leaves the church when his CS practitioner demands he renounce allopathic medicine to receive help. Gray's breathless journeys through alternative healing remind us that we all face mortality at any cost, and that no religious or philosopical system will spare us the inevitability of suffering or dying.
What I loved most about this film were Gray's frequent outbursts of humor -- framed in frustration, delivered in sentences which resonate like poetry in the mind, this guy rages -- quite literally -- against the dying of the light. And I would add that this is a film best viewed late at night.
While Soderbergh's direction is occasionally heavy-handed and self- conscious, it is still creative and ambitious and will never disqualify this film from classic status.
The movie doesn't benefit from the opening montage of "eye horror stories" delivered by subjects who almost lost their sight, and who occasionally make an unwelcome visit into Gray's monologue. Happily, Gray gets 'round them.
The man had a brilliant, brilliant mind and a great heart. Watch this, and the only thing you risk is awareness of his absence, and it is a sad feeling.
I just loved this movie, or should I say: I loved this mirror.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
This is a wonderful example of the 'gift of gab' - that is, the art of telling a story. Spalding Gray has a story to tell - mind you, the plot is not nearly as interesting as, say, a Jedi Knight fighting a battle in a galaxy far, far away. It is not so much what he has to say, but how he says it. If one of your favorite childhood memories includes sitting around a campfire listening to someone spinning a yarn about a headless ghost, then you might enjoy this more adult version of a scary story. Substitute the encounter with a headless horseman with an even more frightening trip to see a doctor to diagnose an incurable medical condition and you may start to understand this movie. It was fascinating listening to his tangential logic, flashbacks, and digressions of a gifted story teller. It is also somewhat of an insight into the mind Spalding Gray, whose favorite story was the life experience he gained by walking around Washington Square Park several times, breathing in all of life's drama.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
If you enjoyed "Swimming to Cambodia", then you will enjoy this film also. If you haven't scene "Swimming to Cambodia" buy this but watch "Swimming to Cambodia" first.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is the story of a very neurotic man who can't cope with having something wrong with his eye. I loved this movie. Spalding Gray is funny, smart, insightful, and full of angst. He manages to make his anxieties hillarious. I loved the way this movie was edited. I loved the intercut anecdotes of strange things that have happened to people's eyes, the commentary on the movie, and the visual representations of Spalding's journey to ever more bizarre alternative healers. I have seen the movie four times, and it just keeps on getting better.
Format:DVD
once you get it, you will never forget it: to wit, how unique and singular it is to be a great storyteller. we discover this by the way this show opens. a slew of people from everyday life tell their stories of how an eye condition altered their lives. i found myself nodding off as i sat through this, admiring the infrared film but finding the rest of it yawn inducing. then i was electrified by spalding gray's coming onscreen. by solely using his monolog skills, he holds me spellbound while he relates his eye injury story. it is a story i will never forget because its telling sears it into my memory.
it was sad to realize anew what a huge talent we lost with his suicide in 2004. ironically, with life later imitating art, spalding gray was in a serious car collision after he filmed this. he could not handle the pain, the constant physical therapy, the constant use of crutchess, etc., this in part led to his suicide. in this film we watch his hysteria over the prospect of a low risk eye surgery for the not painful condition of macular puckering in the eye. he was a complete mess over this eye problem alone but in a very woody allen like neurotic way.
it was sad to realize anew what a huge talent we lost with his suicide in 2004. ironically, with life later imitating art, spalding gray was in a serious car collision after he filmed this. he could not handle the pain, the constant physical therapy, the constant use of crutchess, etc., this in part led to his suicide. in this film we watch his hysteria over the prospect of a low risk eye surgery for the not painful condition of macular puckering in the eye. he was a complete mess over this eye problem alone but in a very woody allen like neurotic way.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Gray's Anatomy" is an enjoyable and delightful story by Spalding Gray...
Monologue, a word that is defined as a soliloquy; a dramatic sketch performed by one actor; the routine of a stand-up comic.
The late Spalding Gray. Read more
The late Spalding Gray. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Dennis A. Amith (kndy)
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gray's Anatomy
Though not as on target as his earlier films "Swimming to Cambodia" and "Monster in a Box," this tale of Spalding's "macular pucker" and the many odd and outrageous ways he sought... Read more
Published on June 3, 2011 by Jay Jones
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rediscovered for the First Time
I had seen a brief bit of this when I was younger and always wondered what movie that was where a guy just sits there talking to a camera. Read more
Published on December 2, 2003 by Michael Kaiser
5.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful
entertaining, well fleshed out with the stories of other patients - Spalding Gray at his best.
Published on September 11, 2003 by Linda R. Petrilli
4.0 out of 5 stars
Appealing with a touch of scraping
Unlike Demme's approach with Swimming to Cambodia, which, like Stop Making Sense, tried to capture the essence of a live performance, Soderberg tries to get inside Gray's head,... Read more
Published on May 11, 2002 by Mr. T. Matthews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Typical Gray Matter
Another triumph for Spalding Gray. I love a good storyteller, and Gray is in typical form here, frantically explaining (occasionally in a little too much detail) his journey... Read more
Published on December 30, 2001
1.0 out of 5 stars
Soderbergh destroys Gray
Steven Soderbergh apparently had no faith in Gray's storytelling skills, so you get 30 minutes of Gray, and 30 minutes of videotape of some people commenting on him. Read more
Published on August 2, 2000 by Jonah Falcon
