Chop Suey

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11/07/2021 A frenetic, fractured and fantastically sexy documentary in Weber's stunning ephemeral style. Viewing it feels like having three conversations at once and this perfectly appeals to my ADD brain. It's a frenzied look at Weber's fascination with his corn-fed, All-American model whom he takes along with the audience on a trip down memory lane. Except Weber's memories are inhabited by obscure artists, bygone celebrities and notable characters who we are introduced to as he sifts through his collection of photographs and expounds on each image with rare clips and anecdotal narration. A beautiful, mesmerizing achievement in aesthetics. See more 01/10/2015 Interesting, sexy and eclectic. See more 07/17/2010 Bruce Weber's movies are the upscale gay man's version of those Starbucks jazz CD's. There's something authentic in there somewhere, but in the making it's been banalized out of existence Everything in Weber-World reeks of white terrycloth bathrobes, running with terriers on the beach, cheekbones, white teeth, gaily laughing women in pajamas, and all the other images that are permanently encoded in our brain as Polo-specific. Weber can be photographing a thalidomide wino or the desiccated face of a seventyish Robert Mitchum, and somehow it all comes out like the glossy welcome brochure at an A-list hotel. CHOP SUEY purports to spread wider and dig deeper as it is Weber's record of his obsession with Peter Johnson, a high-school athlete Weber commemorated in torrential, Dantean detail. But Weber continues to pretend that he's only interested in "beauty"--and that his interest in Johnson stems from the wrestler's being what Weber could never be (beautiful, I guess). There's no sex in Weber's voiceover explanation of his Aschenbach-like dwelling on this gorgeous nobody, and thus Weber is able not to be homosexual. Weber plunges into denial as passionately as he falls into reverie. He means for the movie to be a fantasist's autobiography, and also a highly self-conscious arrangement of Weber in the history of American photography (quotes from Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Larry Clark abound). But what comes across is a guy who is trapped in an upmarket carnival of surfaces. Weber is more interested in his Josh Hartnettesque models' torsos and legs than even in their faces; for Weber, pornography is not a projection of a psychological state but simply a record of physical perfection. He seems to throw uglinesses at us in this movie as a means, again, of denying his own predilections. He may enjoy presenting us with an old, ugly female cabaret singer, or the mummylike visage of Diana Vreeland, but he certainly has no interest in copulating with them. So why put up this front of "romanticism"? There's nothing romantic about the movie--maybe partly because, unlike masturbatory artists from Genet to Larry Clark, Weber doesn't investigate or push or worry his desires. He doesn't even take them at face value. He fanatically perfumes them. This makes everything feel hollow, personalityless, and fake--just like the stuff Weber makes at his day job See more 06/22/2010 Weber's talent as a photographer is undisputed, so "Chop Suey" is a bit of a disappointment. The film, which is positioned as an autobiography, tells us very little about Weber as a person and instead becomes more of a biography of Frances Faye, a popular pianist whose active career spanned the 1940s through the 1970s. The result: meh. Without context or a recognizable arc, "Chop Suey" plays like a video collage of Weber's inspirations without revealing much about the man behind the camera. See more 01/13/2009 A weird mish mash of Weber's career that shows how an artist expesses himself through photos and film. I don't know how to explain this doc, but it captures the concept of "art." See more 12/10/2008 This is something that i could well have found pretentious and completely self indulgent, but was won over by Bruce Weber's lyrical naration and true passion for the subjects on show. His photography and film footage, capturing so well a love and lust of the soul and the human body. See more Read all reviews

Chop Suey

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