Interview. Bent Hamer.

For a conversation with Bent Hamer about casting Matt Dillon as Henry Chinaski, alter-ego of Charles Bukowski, in his new film, Factotum, you want someone who hosts a radio show called Drinks with Tony. You want Tony DuShane.

Related: "Like the film itself, Mr Dillon's performance works through understatement," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Factotum is a film about the horrors and occasional comedy of work, as well as gutting through life on your own terms, which in Bukowski's case meant turning both that horror and that comedy into literature.... Subversive might not be the right word with which to characterize his commitment to his art, his muse, his hip flask and the Big No, as in no to the straight and narrow, no to the clean and tidy. But it does have a nice ring."

Updated through 8/24.

"The go-to point of comparison for Hamer's film is [Barbet] Schroeder's 1987 Barfly, from an original screenplay by Bukowski, which likewise attached a contemporary A-list name to the role of Henry Chinaski, alter-ego navigator of Buk's hiccupped autobiographical aggrandizements," writes Nick Pinkerton, opening Reverse Shot's round on the film at indieWIRE. The comparison, he argues, "only serves to remind us how the expectations of what independent film culture can accomplish have diminished through the last 20 years, and highlight the banal superfluity of Hamer's movie." Justin Stewart and Nicolas Rapold follow, and they're far more willing to cut the film some slack.

Melissa Levine in the Voice: "[N]one of it goes anywhere. It's just stylized alcoholism with a tired wink."

Back in June, when he caught it at the Seattle International Film Festival, Sean Axmaker wrote here, "Hamer's sensibility is distinctively not American, and maybe that's what makes this askew look at rumpled dignity in a most undignified existence come through with a subdued, modest grace."

Jennifer Merin also meets Hamer and chats him up for the New York Press.

Online listening tip. Amy Reiter talks with Matt Dillon for Salon.

Updates, 8/19: "Dillon, now 42, has grown up into one of the most resourceful character actors in American movies," writes AO Scott in the NYT.

The Los Angeles Times's Kenneth Turan finds Factotum "a surprisingly satisfying film, true to Bukowski and itself, a work that manages to make the man and his profane world more palatable without compromising on who he was and what he stood for."

Jürgen Fauth: "Factotum Jeremiah Kipp in Slant: "[U]nlike Bukowski's character, who always makes a big deal out of living life to the fullest no matter how much life kicks you in the teeth, the film never really goes for it."

Update, 8/24: Dennis Harvey presents "a rundown on the major features about or derived from Bukowski to date" at SF360.

Posted by dwhudson at August 18, 2006 3:26 AM