Fourth viewing.
Rewatched after listening to Julie Salamon’s great Devil’s Candy podcast for TCM.
I’m well-aware of its problems, but I’m starting to feel more affection for this one. As a mega-fan of both De Palma and Hanks, I have always found it to be a glorious failure that is also fun to watch.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Wow, this was so great! Everything that I hoped it would discuss, it discussed at length.
I think that Reubens, while perhaps a difficult and troubled man, was a good man at heart who wasn’t always guilty of the wrongdoing that they said of him. (I am now convinced that he was railroaded by opportunists during the child porn scandal.)
This gets unexpectedly sad and then powerful at the end. I got a little teary-eyed.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P817PgBqfmg
For the first time ever in his career making movies, Hall Bartlett knew exactly what he was doing. He was adapting a best-selling novella by Richard Bach about a prophetic seagull, and he was going to turn it into a major motion picture. It was going to be an independently financed film with as little studio interference as possible. And by the end of the ten-month shooting schedule, Bartlett had mortgaged his home and invested his savings into the…
As one who practices Transcendental Meditation, I found this documentary both entertaining and disturbing. Personally, I enjoy practicing TM, but this documentary does confirm my suspicion that the big business surrounding it is dubious at best. Was Maharishi a disciple of Guru Dev, or merely his bookkeeper? And if so, what right did he have to capitalize on TM instead of sharing it with the rest of the world for free? And how can Maharishi's alleged dream of "World Peace" ever be accomplished when TM is so ridiculously expensive?
