Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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99 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
humanity of jack, July 13, 2000
Nothing happened to Jack Kerouac. He died like the rest of us eventually will. Jack Kerouac was a regular human being. Now you're problably saying "yea I already knew that, so what?". But what you problably didn't know is that Jack used literature to show how beautiful and ugly human beings can be. Kerouac was a man equally feminine as he was masculine (read Charter's biography about his relationships with Ginzy, N.C., as well as the women of his life.) All of this is touched on in the video documentary, which thrives off the somber emotion,and that sort of "grey sky comtemplation" of things, which seems to pervade all of Jack's work. The video moves through Jack's life in a fairly straightforward manner. We see him as a shy french speaking Mass. adolescent, a cleft chinned Columbia undergraduate, a rucksack wanderer,a chanting buddhist,an aloof catholic, who loved his mother and drank much too much Johnnie Walker. In "What happnened to Jack?" we see Jack as who he really was, a confused, tortured, disenfranchised,happy, unhappy writer who was very good at putting words together, which gave an honest glimpse of what was going on in his heart and his mind. There are many great moments in the video. Any beat "junkie" will love the footage of Jack and Allen coolin' it near Columbia, smoking cigarettes and shootin' pool. There's a clip of Bird and Diz blowing hot jazz, the beats in S.F. at the debut of Ginzy's "Howl", Mike McClure, Jack, Snyder and Ferlinghetti at Big Sur recitin' and writin' smooth synapses of the happenings there and around. There are countless anecdotes and picturs of all your "beat heroes", which portray them as strikingly regular and very un-heroic. The video as a complete work is very delicious, but the tastiest bits come when Jack reads "October in the Railroad Earth" to a montage of San Francisco images. When a debonair Jack reads "On the Road" to Steve Allen's bluesy piano in perfect phrasing and time. And last but not least there is the comical and strangely serious Greg Corso explaining genious, fame, and why he thinks the "Beat Generation" was a phenomenon. Kerouac would problably want you to see this video because it shows that he was not a fad, an icon, nor a saviour for a generation. He was simply a regular man trying to find answers to very un-regular questions and he used his writing talent to unravel those mysteries.
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59 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THIS IS THE ONE - BY FAR, THE BEST KEROUAC DOCUMENTARY, August 31, 2001
A near-perfect documentary on Kerouac, and the list of interviewees is...well, they are all here: Herbert Huncke,
William S Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1st wife Joyce Kerouac, daughter Jan Kerouac, Diane DiPalma, Carolyn Cassady, a short, but priceless b & w film clip of Neal Cassady at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in the 1960's, much of the William F Buckley interview with Jack from 1968, Kerouac reading from On the Road on the Steve Allen Show, many of Jack's tape-recorded poetry readings with appropriate vintage footage from San Francisco, Times Square NYC, Jack's hometown, Lowell,MA etc., and an insightful interview with Gregory Corso, who seemed to understand, and put into words better than anyone else, the essence of Kerouac.
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48 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
MacAdams kindles Beat flame, October 11, 1999
By A Customer
In a subject where "expert" commentary frequently brings to mind overused, deflated balloons or some flaccid, rubbery French pastry, this film is a nonpareil. Amazingly, MacAdams has drilled into a motherlode of material elsewhere untapped; sources include the fiercely protected estate of Kerouac (evident through a rare, outstanding recording of Kerouac reading parts of Dr. Sax high on tea; Tulane historian Douglas Brinkley is now sifting through all of it), Ken Kesey's Merry Prankster footage (live reels of Cassady!), Kerouac's later, soused appearance on Buckley's "Firing Line," and interviews with central figures in Kerouac's life and in the Beat movement: John Clellon Holmes, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Carolyn Cassady, Herbert Huncke, Joyce Johnson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and (best of all) Gregory Corso (watch for the explanation of "the classy spirit"). The film is simply produced but marvelously filmed, with picturesque footage of Lowell and video-style film of New York and San Francisco accompanying Kerouac recordings of "Lucien Midnight" and "October in the Railroad Earth." Ideas are developed shrewdly, craftfully with simple back-and-forths between different horse's mouths. There is no narrative voice-over or gaseous postulation. MacAdams achieves what any good documentary maker or journalist strives for: he turns on your radio, sets the dial to his station, then plainly broadcasts a seriously static-free, seriously hip FM song. Dig it.
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