Doc.

"As exhaustively, rather sycophantically chronicled at the outset of Doc, Harold 'Doc' Humes knew everyone (Baldwin, Duchamp, Dietrich, Ornette Coleman, Timothy Leary) and did everything," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice.

"Lovingly assembled by Mr Humes's daughter Immy Humes and jam-packed with interviews with notable 20th-century cultural figures (including George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, William Styron and Timothy Leary), Doc is one part cultural analysis, three parts home movie," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "Mr Humes, who was born in 1926 and died in 1992, came of age in Paris during the 1950s. He wrote the politically radical novels The Underground City and Men Die; helped create the New American Cinema Group with Jonas Mekas and others; founded the Paris Review with Mr Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen; advocated massage and marijuana; designed a fireproof, waterproof paper house; and gave lectures to anyone, anywhere, at the drop of a hat."

Updated.

"The stylistic success here is so great that it's easy to lose sight of the film's central figure, a brilliant and inventive (and perhaps slightly insane) figure with a mind as divergent and curious as the construction of the film itself," writes Rob Humanick in Slant.

"The renewed attention to Mr Humes is no doubt aided by the growing interest in American writing of the 1940s and 50s, and a better understanding of the mental instabilities that can stall a creative career," writes Celia McGee in the NYT. "But also intriguing to many is the documentary's revelation of a CIA connection to the history of the Paris Review. In the film, Mr Matthiessen, best known as a novelist, environmental activist and advocate of American Indian rights, admits publicly for the first time that he was a young CIA recruit at the time he helped start the magazine, and used it as his cover.... Some critics belonging to a younger generation have discerned in Mr Humes's behavior and beliefs the seeds of the 60s and 70s counterculture. One, Alan Cheuse, also finds in Mr Humes's writing early intimations of what he has called the 'paranoiac fiction' of Thomas Pynchon."

Updates: "While complaining about earnest but hopelessly underwhelming documentaries is as effectual as candlelight vigils for world peace, Immy Humes (Oscar-nominated for a 1991 documentary short) earns a few extra words of condemnation for not even bothering to get a tripod," writes the Reeler. In short, "Doc is a collection of reasonably amusing anecdotes in search of relevance."

"The destructive swath that Doc Humes's insanity and narcissism cut through his family, we learn, was in the end balanced by the piercing intelligence that he freely shared and doggedly worked to awaken in those brave enough to stick with him through the paranoia, chemical misadventures, scarring object lessons, and manipulative freeloading," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "The film's coda discovery about the veracity of Doc's later-life delusions is too deliciously ironic to describe in detail, other than to say that it gives sobering new weight to Woody Allen's old joke that 'paranoia is knowing all the facts.' It ends this fine film on an exuberant, exasperating, and crusading note that perfectly befits its subject."

Posted by dwhudson at January 23, 2008 12:55 AM