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      Chop Suey

      Released Oct 5, 2001 1h 38m Documentary List
      71% Tomatometer 34 Reviews 50% Audience Score 250+ Ratings Bruce Weber's discovery of a gorgeous young hunk named Peter Johnson was the beginning of a marvelous collaboration that continued over four years. Plucking the young man from over a thousand boys in training as wrestlers, Weber turned Johnson into a highly-paid photographic model for Ralph Lauren, Versace, and Karl Lagerfeld. "Chop Suey" uses still photographs and live action footage to chart Johnson's transformation from a pretty young boy into a homoerotic icon. Read More Read Less Watch on Fandango at Home Premiered Dec 03 Buy Now

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      Critics Consensus

      Freeform in structure, Chop Suey captures the range of Weber's eclectic interests.

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      Critics Reviews

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      Brandon Judell indieWire 'Chop Suey' strives to be avant-garde and trendy. For many, it will be. Jun 28, 2014 Full Review Empire Magazine Rated: 2/5 Dec 30, 2006 Full Review Jamie Russell BBC.com It's an eclectic film, held together only by Weber's ironic voice-over narration and the endless shots of the beautiful Johnson. Rated: 3/5 Jun 25, 2002 Full Review Jae-Ha Kim Jae-Ha Kim The camera's focused on a group of young men, each more handsome than the next. They have the kind of fit bodies you only find at the Olympics or on the cover of GQ. Filmmaker Bruce Weber wistfully says, "We sometimes photograph things we can never be." Rated: 3/4 Jul 27, 2023 Full Review Lonny Pugh Out Magazine The interconnected, easily flowing montages create a moving rumination on the profound, blurred relationship between artist and subject. May 25, 2022 Full Review Film Threat Rated: 3/5 Dec 6, 2005 Full Review Read all reviews

      Audience Reviews

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      Audience Member 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. Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/26/23 Full Review Audience Member Interesting, sexy and eclectic. Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/15/23 Full Review Audience Member 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 Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/16/23 Full Review Audience Member 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. Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/17/23 Full Review Audience Member 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." Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/26/23 Full Review Audience Member 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. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/23/23 Full Review Read all reviews Post a rating

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      Chop Suey

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      Movie Info

      Synopsis Bruce Weber's discovery of a gorgeous young hunk named Peter Johnson was the beginning of a marvelous collaboration that continued over four years. Plucking the young man from over a thousand boys in training as wrestlers, Weber turned Johnson into a highly-paid photographic model for Ralph Lauren, Versace, and Karl Lagerfeld. "Chop Suey" uses still photographs and live action footage to chart Johnson's transformation from a pretty young boy into a homoerotic icon.
      Director
      Bruce Weber
      Producer
      Nan Bush
      Distributor
      Zeitgeist Films
      Genre
      Documentary
      Original Language
      English
      Release Date (Theaters)
      Oct 5, 2001, Wide
      Release Date (Streaming)
      Dec 3, 2013
      Box Office (Gross USA)
      $179.9K
      Runtime
      1h 38m
      Sound Mix
      Dolby SR, Dolby Digital, Dolby A, Dolby Stereo
      Aspect Ratio
      Academy (1.33:1)
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