Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Gordon-11 This documentary film tells the story of a man who owns a motel for peeping into the private activities of motel residents.The fact that someone put their perverted idea into action for a sustained period of time, then write about it and share with the world is quite beyond me. The documentary does do due diligence on whether the claims are true, and you will have to decide for yourselves whether the claims are true. My assessment of Foos is the same as the female journalist in the beginning. It is an interesting documentary.

EdD5 This is like a couple hacks watched The Thin Blue Line and then set out to recreate its weight and nuance but lacking both skill and a compelling subject. It tells the largely non-story of author Gay Talese's effort to immortalize a motel peeping tom. Talese's "insights" into his protagonist seem as manufactured and tenuous as the protagonist's credibility and the film indulges rather than subverts the two blustering egotists it presents. Talese lives in a home ornamented with pictures of himself, while his counterpart has a basement full of "treasures" he boasts are worth millions. Talese's books repeatedly and laughably litter the background of many shots, including one at the home of "the voyeur" where the author just happens to be sitting in an easy chair with an older volume framed nearly touching him. The revelation near the end of the subject's duplicity to the author involves something which any high school kid would have checked before writing a story for his school paper, but neither Talese nor his vaunted fact checkers seem to have bothered. The only real subject here is two old men struggling to burnish their lives with some added relevance as the sun sets. If that alone were worthy of a film, it would have taken a filmmaker with deeper skills and more original ideas.

bseaman-20248 I do not get all these reviews raving about the brilliance of this documentary. To steal a tag line from the 90s hit comedy Seinfeld, I think this documentary could be billed as " the documentary about nothing". Gay Talese, at 80-something, is obviously not prepared to go gently into that good night. However, in searching for ways to rage against the dying of the light, he has completely erred in judgment and instead decided to write a book (and agree to participate in a documentary) about this purported voyeur who secretly watched his motel guests over 20 years, or is it 30 years? Who knows? Because the subject, Gerald Foos, is completely unreliable as a source, erring on three major points: 1) when he bought the motel - there is a discrepancy of three years from when he says he bought the motel and when it was actually purchased; 2) he neglected to tell Talese that he'd sold the motel a few years after he bought it; and 3) his story about witnessing a woman being murdered was not founded in fact.That a journalist of Talese's stature and reputation would write a book based on only one source, a completely unreliable one at that, is bad enough. That a major publication like The New Yorker would publish an article about it and that Talese's publisher would promote this book speaks volumes, I think, about the ovine nature of people. Somebody is deemed to be a major talent, therefore we just have to let him/her write away or shoot the film and we never have to question his/her source.My doubt about the veracity of this story was aroused several minutes in, when Foos describes the catwalk he built that allowed him to spy on motel guests through grates in the rooms' ceilings without being detected. WTF. I thought? Did he build his catwalk in concrete to completely muffle the noise of his footsteps? Why didn't the dogs of motel guests bark at the sound and/or scent of a human above them?Mr. Talese, you really need to spend the last few days or months (if not years) of your life in quiet contemplation of a life lived. If you once were this famed journalist who spared no effort to get the story right, forget about it. Your glory days are long gone.

jonathan-harris17 A story about a man (Gerald Foos) and his apparently dead-inside wife letting in the world on his program of spying on motel guests.Such a claim in this day is hardly surprising, and so the content and character on display here merely comes off as slightly 'odd' but not especially insightful or fascinating for me.The main focus here is a man that is clearly a bit of braggart, a bit delusional and ridiculous, a bit cash-obsessed yet also enjoys a bit of voyeurism. He exclaims the values of souvenirs he's collected like it's impressive, yet is surprised his story is met by the media with a sense of wrong-doing.The journalist here makes some odd choices indeed, why only one source for a one-note story is a huge point -- although one he does mention at least, there just isn't enough here to claim anything of special interest.