Cheap The Source (DVD) (Johnny Depp, Dennis Hopper) (Chuck Workman) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Source

A little disappointing but still worth seeing
The DVD is interesting, but there is too much of the same old commentary that has been circulating in beat documentaries for years. Many of the folks interviewed weren't all that significant to the movement. However, the Burroughs footage alone is worth the effort - but not nearly enough Jack Kerouac footage - there should have been much more of Jack and much less modern critique by folks who just weren't there. I would have liked to have seen more of Gregory Corso as well, but he has some priceless moments in the film! The Neil Cassady footage is also very good. Ginsberg is Ginsberg. I didn't get the point of the Johnny Depp/Dennis Hopper/John Turturro bits. Although Turturro's performance is by far the best! Overall, it's a nice documentary but not as ground breaking as was hyped.

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'Source' of Inspiration
"The Source," director Chuck Workman's documentary about the Beat Generation, is as close to communing with a bygone generation as possible. In this examination of the lives of modern American literature's unholy Trinity -- Allen Ginsberg ("HOWL"), Jack Kerouac ("On the Road") and William S. Burroughs ("Naked Lunch") -- and how they unwittingly made thoughts pulse to their own strange beat, Workman's film releases the essence of these legends by casting a spell of media voodoo. Ironically, this same method of divination is responsible for bringing bits of these great personalities into the minds of today's commercially fed youth -- remember the infamous Burroughs Nike ad and the use of Kerouac's image to sell blue jeans?

This look back at the fathers of the Beat Generation was filmed before Ginsberg was silenced by cancer in the spring of 1997, yet the poet functions as a spirit-guide not unlike Virgil in Dante's "Inferno." He gently takes us from the initial meeting of the three writers in 1944 at Columbia University to their inspiration by Neal Cassady through the '50s, the Jazz Age and into the '60s with the youthful interpretation of what they started and how it fomented a revolution.

Like Dante, we are left on our own for much of the documentary to sort through the barrage of incredible footage, interviews and huge cast of players, which Workman must have sold nearly a pound of his own soul to procure. The surreal nature of Burroughs loading his gun or watching Neal Cassady do a jig by a Volkswagen bus, plunges the audience even deeper into the past by humanizing men whose mythic importance is on the same level as JFK or James Dean.

It is these scenes that make "The Source" such a fine record of a lost age. Workman's labor of love is crafted like the best college history courses. We hear exactly what altered the state of the spoken and written word, and the writers' astonishment that they were being emulated and taken so seriously. Burroughs' contempt, Kerouac's confusion and Ginsberg's quiet acceptance of their fame are illuminating to those of us who weren't there or didn't pay close enough attention to the centers of culture.

Workman goes a bit astray with his use of reenactments, a decidedly MTV convention that, for the most part, serve only as a minor distraction. It's easy to buy Johnny Depp reciting bits and pieces of Jack Kerouac's works in what looks like a roadside bar, but Dennis Hopper's attempts at sections of Burroughs' "Junky," "Interzone" and "Queer" are terrible. It might be because Hopper is, in fact, a legend unto himself, and it's difficult to see him as another from the same period. (An excellent Burroughs can be seen in David Cronenberg's "Naked Lunch" starring Peter Weller as an amalgamated William S.). All is forgiven, though, because the fresh memory of John Turturro's visceral rendition of Ginsberg's "HOWL" outside the Rockland State Hospital in New York City is unforgettable and truly inspired.

However, much of the footage is painful, and Workman is determined to present this mythological period by picking at the scabs of time and the recent commercial deification of these people. Scenes of an angry and pickled Kerouac trying to discuss the essence of writing with talk show host Steve Allen -- and then if you can believe it, William F. Buckley -- are quite sobering and make it clear that theirs' was more of a struggle than a party.

Then there are the shots of Burroughs that are about as comforting as the cold sweat that lets the addict know he hasn't killed himself. He's young and dangerous, wielding a knife in one scene and a syringe in the next. And although there is a perverse thrill watching the world-famous junky shoot up for the camera, we also get to see the needles in his eyes filled with scorn for anyone unlucky enough to be on the other side of that camera. One can almost feel him looking through the movie screen, searching for the kind of people who will eventually frequent "art houses" to watch films about things that should be read in books.

Just when it appears that everything is getting too weird, Ginsberg returns. Wrapped in a blanket and looking so much like his Dantaen counterpart, he glides through the early morning light of New York -- with lines of his poetry materializing on a nearby movie marquee.

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The reality of the beat generation brought up to date
Released in 1999 to coincide with the publication of "The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats", this Chuck Workman documentary is a kaleidoscope of film clips, photos and interviews with a particular focus on Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. I looked forward to seeing this video in anticipation of learning something. After all, these writers influenced the era in which I was growing up and opened unique and dramatic new ways of viewing the world. Tracing the early beginnings in the 1940s and bringing the movement right up to the present, it showed the changes in these young men (and they were ALL men) through the years.

With the exception of Allen Ginsberg, they look like they all turned...out of touch with reality and locked into a way of thinking whose off-kilter attitude which was once hip, turned into an off-kilter attitude which never grew out of the fifties and seems "mental" today. Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti look like bad smelling derelicts. On a talk show in later years Kerouac, with slurred speech insists that the Vietnam war was a plot of the Vietnamese to get American jeeps and, in a later interview with William F. Buckley Jr., his eyes are red-rimmed and droopy and his words seem like babble as he is demolished by the precise cutting words of his host. The film moves fast and the clips come one after another. Often, the cast of characters are not identified and it was hard for me to follow just who was who. There's Ken Kesey. And Neal Cassady. And short film clips from 50s TV shows from Father Knows Best and Alfred Hitchcock poking fun at the Beatniks. It was hard to follow any individual story line and I found myself getting bored.

Several well known actors were hired to read some of the writing itself. Johnny Depp did a good job of reading Kerouac and Dennis Hopper read from Burroughs. John Turturro, was emotional in his reading of insberg's "Howl" but he never rose above the material. I wish this film was better. I would really like to know more about the beats. For years I've carried around the idea that some day I'd pick up acopy of "On the Road" or "Naked Lunch" in a secondhand book store and explore these writers for myself. But frankly, after hearing bits andpieces of them in this film, I've lost most of my interest. These ravings from angry young men intent on ripping preconceived culture apart certainly did influence our world. I say "hooray" for the effort. I'm personally glad that they opened the way to the future. But, after seeing this film, I'm not sure I want to enter their world through their words.