The Popkorn Junkie :: Autofocus

When you think about bizarre Hollywood deaths, celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Sharon Tate, and Haing S. Ngor come to mind. Most people don't think about Bob Crane, the star of the hit television show "Hogan's Heroes". The truth is--so little is known about Crane's life, that's why most people never gave his death the attention it deserved. Now, with "Auto Focus", Crane's life comes slamming into our collective faces, and some people will probably not want to see it. He was so beloved on "Hogan's Heroes" that most people from his generation have a hard time imagining him as the seedy sex-a-holic that he was. "Auto Focus" is a brilliant new film about that obsession, from master director Paul Schrader, whose film "Affliction" garnered James Coburn a much deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and was the most influential and controversial film on family of the last decade.

This film stays away from most of the good things in Crane's life, mostly because we already know about them. It shows his rise from a DJ to the "Hogan's Heroes" star, but focuses mainly on his failed dinner theatre attempts, his two failed marriages, and his decline into the seedy underworld of pornography and sexual escapades. This eventually leads to his death, Bob Crane having been found bludgeoned to death in 1978 in an Arizona motel room.

The film also focuses on Crane's relationship with amateur filmmaker John Carpenter (not the same man who directed "Halloween" and "The Thing", or the first winner on "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire"), who is suspected of being the man responsible for Crane's murder. Carpenter is the one who first exposes Crane to the world of sex by taking him to a strip club. The scenes between Greg Kinnear (Crane) and Willem Dafoe (Carpenter) are extraordinary and both men should be considered for Academy Awards, most notably Kinnear, who gives his best performance of his career and the best single performance of the year.

Here is a warning to those of you who will be seeing this film: though most of the women in this film are shot kind of out of focus, there are numerous shots of nudity in this film, which are not tackily done, but done just right to create the feelings of Crane and what he was going through at the time.

This film receives the highest recommendation I can give and it will surely be on my list of the year's best, having managed to prove more enjoyable than the fabulous "Moonlight Mile" and "Signs". Greg Kinnear might be one of my new favorite actors, and Willem Dafoe has held that distinction since "Platoon". You must see this movie and learn more about Bob Crane, a comedic genius who was caught up in a world that became to addictive to just leave. "Auto Focus" is phenomenal.

-- Billy Ray ( 4 out of 4 pops )

Talk about this film with other Popkorn Junkies

Other Junkie's opinions.....

Mike ( 3 1/2 out of 4 pops )

There have been many good films dealing with the consequences of either drug or alcohol addiction. But I don't recall ever seeing a serious film whose theme was centered on sexual addiction and how one's life can be ultimately destroyed by it. Auto Focus does this brilliantly thru the telling of the sad life of Bob Crane who was so likeable playing Hogan on the popular tv show. The film is so believable in documenting how a guy like Crane could live two separate lives and how he was so blind in seeing how his sexual flings and escapades were destroying his family and marriage. Greg Kinnear plays Crane so convincingly that I can't imagine any other actor playing this part. Kinnear should be seriously thought of at next year's Oscar nominations for best actor. And equally brilliant in this film (as he is in all his films) is Willem Defoe who plays the lowlife who leads Crane into the world of pornography and videotape. Some critics have said that this film is meaningless and pointless, but I think it is an absorbing true depiction of addiction and insight of how a person can lead such two opposite types of lives at the same time.

Pappy ( 1 1/2 out of 4 pops )

When I first heard about Auto-Focus, I thought it was going to be an episode of Biography on TV. It is a story about the slimy wasted life of minor TV celebrity Bob Crane. It is also a slimy waste of a movie. There is absolutely no redeeming value to be found in this film. The story is just about non-existent; the character development shallow; and the dialog forgettable. Crane went from being a squeaky clean religious family man to a strip joint dwelling sex addict. The film does not tells why this happens, how we can learn from Crane's life or why we should care. There is a lot of nudity in this film, but like every character in the film, it is all very unattractive, and uninteresting. To paraphrase the dimwitted Sergeant Schultz in Hogan's Heroes TV show, if you go to this film, you will "see nothing, hear nothing, and know nothing" more than you did before you entered the theater - so why bother going. Try to escape the experience.