Popular reviews

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★½

  There’s a good reason why so much of Robert B. Weide and Don Argott’s intimately superficial “Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time” is spent explaining why and how the film came to be: This is a biographical documentary aimed at people who love Vonnegut’s books, but people who love Vonnegut’s books have already read about the key points of his biography. Not only do they bleed through the bindings of “Slaughterhouse-Five” as if his wounds were still fresh, they’re also smudged across the most dog-eared pages of novels like “Player Piano,” “Breakfast of Champions,” and “Timequake” (the last of which even interrogates his creative process in its own playful way).

  Vonnegut’s writing laughs at our place in the stars by seeing…

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★ 2

  Near the end of Robert Weide’s documentary on Kurt Vonnegut, we hear archival footage of the author explaining that people are terribly lonely because we’ve evolved to be social creatures with large extended families, networks of people we can interact with on a daily basis, but modern society has isolated us into ever smaller nuclear units. He exhorts his audience to create a larger network for themselves (they don’t even have to be good people, they just have to be there). I suppose that’s what’s so addictive about social media, it creates the illusion of interaction in the same way a narcotic can create the illusion of happiness. We read a book or watch a movie or hear a song…

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  Review by Matt Marotti ★★★ 2

  kinda wish Weide unstuck himself from the movie tbh

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  Review by pirateneckbeard ★★★ 2

  I really enjoyed reading Vonnegut when I was younger and really think he pushed boundaries of ideas of what novels could be so I was very curious to watch this. I do think it does a wonderful job of showcasing his childhood and his protracted rise to fame in the late 60's. I think my problem with this documentary was Robert B. Weide's melding of his own life into the construct and how long he took to make it do to his fame from other paying projects which I wouldn't have minded if the movie was called "Kurt and I: Our story that I finished". I have to say I think Weide really treats this material with sensitivity and compassion…

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  Review by Allison M. 🌱 ★★★★★ 7

  “The horse jumped over the fucking fence.”

  Co-director Robert B. Weide wrote Kurt Vonnegut a letter in 1982, expressing interest in making a documentary about his life. Weide and Vonnegut started a friendship that lasted 25 years. Weide interviewed Vonnegut innumerable times; eventually the amount of data, tapes, videos, and photos piled up until the right moment for the documentary to be released.

  It starts from Vonnegut’s childhood and continues until the end of his life. It explores his work: his first story sold to Collier’s and the twenty years of blood, sweat, and tears before his eventual success when money was “coming out of [his] ears”.

  Vonnegut was on another plane of existence, weaving in and out of time…

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  Review by Dave Taylor ★★★½

  If Director Robert B. Weide had been an unsuccessful hack, whose one attempt at film was portraying the life of American author Kurt Vonnegut, then his almost 40 year production schedule would have to be considered at least partially a failure. But Weide had a big part in the success of Curb Your Enthusiasm, so I’ll cut him some slack. Also, that extreme length of time and his ongoing relationship with Vonnegut has given us an unprecedented look at the author’s life and art that is so vast, it’s amazing that this doc isn’t three hours long. That being said, as a Vonnegut admirer but not obsessor, the two hour runtime did feel long to me. Still, I’m overjoyed that a monument to Vonnegut such as this exists.

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  Review by Channing Pomeroy ★★★★ 1

  Somewhere in the middle of this film we see an archival photo of the Cape Code home where Vonnegut raised his family. On the dining room wall is a mural of a tree and a line from William Blake painted boldly in Vonnegut’s distinctive script: “Go love without the help of anything on earth.” It moved me and wished I had painted that in our home when the kids were young. The difference between me and Vonnegut is that I would need these words each day to remind me, and that Vonnegut (or at least the one shown to us by is friend Robert Weide) doesn’t need to be reminded.

  I was lucky enough to meet him in college after a speaking engagement at a book signing. We chatted for a moment as he doodled on the title page of my book, and he was a charming as the figure in this love letter of a documentary.

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  Review by Tim Daugherty ★★★★ 15

  The only quote I’ve ever adopted - to the degree I’ve remembered and used it - was Kurt Vonneguts great moral warning preamble in Mother Night (Novel, 1962).

  “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”

  It’s probably the only piece of pop culture philosophy that has ever stuck with me over the years (ahem, decades...fuck...I'll soon be closer to 60 than 50!). I check myself with it on occasion. How many public figures, from Hollywood to Washington DC, are pretending to be something? How about friends, family and co-workers? Letterboxd members?Authenticity is fleeting and rare.

  It also spawned the only film adaption of KV’s that I have loved, so…

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  Review by kendra_am ★★★

  Now I want to befriend an artist so I can insert myself into the documentary I make about them

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  Review by Stephen Gillespie ★★★★ 3

  The Twin Geeks Review
  
  Kurt Vonnegut Jr., like his postmodern contemporaries, pushed the boundaries of what novels could be. He played with form in an anarchic manner, producing gleeful novels full of real import and meaning. His output is a long list of countercultural expressions that would end up defining popular culture; those who like Kurt Vonnegut love Kurt Vonnegut. He is the kind of author where you can’t just read one book. His unique style and unrivalled wit compels readers to consume everything they can find. And I would know: I adore Kurt Vonnegut; I’ve read all of his novels; I own a Kurt Vonnegut encyclopaedia, and I even have a Kurt Vonnegut plush-toy I once received as a…

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  Review by Jordan Beaumont Anderson ★★★

  We Americans require symbols which are richly colored and three-dimensional and juicy. Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning.

  - Breakfast of Champions, the finest American novel of the 1970s

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  The life of a man who was more instrumental in the creation of my personal morality than my parents.

  So believe me when I say this is simply okay.

  I refuse to be objective.

  I cried constantly.

  So it goes.

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  Review by Lizzy ★★ 4

  I grew up with BrainPOP and YouTube video essays being the extent of my knowledge on Kurt Vonnegut, so I am likely the farthest I could be from the crowd you would envision when you hear about his fanbase, but I have some bones to pick. Vonnegut’s worth as an artist is not measurable by how much he was acclaimed. It is measurable by the fact that nobody before or after his time ever encapsulated the altruism and egoism of people in the way that he did. Nobody can describe Vonnegut but Vonnegut. His children are not the authority on his visions, he is. His identity as a writer is not based on his celebrity status, it is based on his ability to write and write well. He was a wise voice from the farthest point of the star system, not a walking Hugo award and certainly not somebody whose life should be analyzed in the voices of others.