Crazy Love.

"Crazy Love has a tabloid story to kill for, and a basic nonfiction form to snooze over," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Whereas a doc like last year's Cocaine Cowboys melded a flashy, gaudy aesthetic to its outrageous subject matter, Crazy Love dampens much of its bizarre particulars with blandly functional talking-head interviews and archival photos and newspaper front pages."

Updated through 6/7.

To back up, Rob Nelson in the Voice: "In the summer of '59, Bronx lawyer and jilted lover Burt Pugach paid thugs to throw a jarful of lye in the face of his ex-girlfriend Linda Riss, who was blinded and disfigured as a result. To make a very, very long story short, Riss ended up wedding Pugach six months after he was sprung from jail in 1974. Now, despite some cute-old-couple squabbles that surface whenever Mr and Mrs Pugach stop for a bite at their favorite diner in Queens, they're living happily ever after."

"Why the long-running fascination with this tale, a kind of seamy modern gothic?" asks Ruth La Ferla in the New York Times; she visits Burt and Linda Pugach and talks with director Dan Klores.

"Given Klores's sly deadpan and all these bewigged middle-class people who look and sound like your grandparents in Florida (Linda wears outlandish sunglasses), it takes some time to realize we're in a maelstrom - going down down down into a saga of obsession, sadism, masochism, and codependency that was and remains one of the great, sick tabloid stories of all time," writes David Edelstein in New York. "For those who've never heard of Burt and Linda, I'll let Klores spring his jack-in-the-boxes—and let your jaw drop as low as mine did."

"For director Dan Klores to not explicitly condemn Burt Pugach's pathological violence for what it is - misogyny at its most extreme and flagrantly despicable - makes Klores a misogynist himself," declares James Hudson in the New York Press.

"There's no justifying what happened or how it happened, and Klores doesn't try," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Even some of Linda's friends remain horrified, and if you want to see a parable of evil gender relations in this movie - the domineering, jealous guy of all time meets the ultimate perma-victim doormat - it's definitely available. But in depicting the social world out of which this insane marriage came, Klores accomplishes a kind of alchemy that's difficult to verbalize."

Matt Singer at IFC News: "They say it takes all kinds. Well, some of those kinds are severely deranged."

Earlier: "Sundance. Crazy Love."

Updates, 6/1: "What is odious about the notion of so-called crimes of passion is how the phrase necessarily implicates victims, because it is the very desirability of the victims, after all, that provokes their assailants to madness (passion)," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "All of which makes the image of Mrs Pugach standing by her man squirmingly uncomfortable." What's more, Crazy Love "raises more questions than it answers, including the moral responsibility a documentary filmmaker assumes when his subjects seem so eager to exploit themselves."

"Klore's documentary feels, strangely enough, like a celebration of Burt's revolting life," writes Marcy Dermansky.

Update, 6/2: "[D]espite guest talking heads like columnist Jimmy Breslin this is mostly a classic two-hander, and maybe the next Grey Gardens," suggests Robert Cashill. "The same controversy, over why this distasteful material was considered worth digging up on film, looms."

Updates, 6/3: "Sure, the film's pace clips along to make each strange step in Burt and Linda's journey as shocking as if it were a narrative psychodrama, but why not try to tackle the questions it raises about codependency, obsession, liberation, or media sensationalism?" asks Aaron Hillis for Premiere. "Especially that last one, as Crazy Love seems oblivious to the fact that it's essentially a gonzo human-interest news feature."

Robin Abcarian talks with Klores and the Pugachs for the Los Angeles Times.

Update, 6/7: Sam Adams talks with Klores for the Philadelphia City Paper.

Posted by dwhudson at May 31, 2007 4:55 AM