Oscar winner Leon Gast (WHEN WE WERE KINGS) returns with SMASH HIS CAMERA, one of two (count 'em) documentaries about paparazzo playing at this year's Sundance Film Festival. But while actor/director Adrian Grenier's TEENAGE PAPARAZZO is playing in the Spotlight section, Gast's film - about groundbreaking septuagenarian Ron Galella - is playing in the documentary competition.
Karina Longworth of the LA Weekly draws the connections between the two films:
"The gap in quality and seriousness between the two films is not as vast as you might imagine. Both use the same exact footage from LA DOLCE VITA to explain to origin of the profession, both include montages of talking heads discussing the significance of the fact that the word paparazzo is Italian for mosquito. Both blame the death of the Hollywood star system for destroying the old, comparatively orderly celebrity publicity machine, and bringing on, to quote Liz Smith in camera, "whatever we have now." Both films are flawed, a bit too in love with their subjects, intermittently insightful, consistently entertaining. Neither fully accomplishes it alone, but together the two films document the changing face of celebrity, an evolution in what the public wants from their stars, and why...
CAMERA tells the story of Ron Galella, the first notorious American paparazzo, who had his teeth knocked out by Marlon Brando, and was famously sued by Jackie Onassis. As Gast's intimate, story-filled portrait proves, yesterday's pap targets were objects of curiosity, people who were trying to do a job and live a life away from the camera. Today's targets understand that submitting to the gossip industry's ambush, even courting it, is, as Jenkins tells Grenier, "one of your jobs as a celebrity." Galella started sneaking into venues and events because as a freelancer, he couldn't get on the list; he started poking holes in Katherine Hepburn's hedges because he couldn't get a shot of her at all otherwise. In Grenier's film, Paris Hilton readily admits that she needs the attention to make her living as much as the photographers need her neediness in order to make theirs."
Says Bilge Ebiri, writing at the IFC's Independent Eye:
"For all its fascination with glamour and the larger-than-life persona of Galella, Gast's jaunty, charming documentary is deceptively complex, tackling big issues with effortless clarity. The subject is certainly fun to watch, but to what extent is what he does an invasion of privacy - and what does that word even mean? (Constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams points out that there is no general right to privacy in American law.) In watching the photographer do his thing, and in letting him regale us with his tales of run-ins with celebs, Gast makes it clear that Galella was an integral part of a celebrity feedback loop that made the rich and famous even more famous and probably richer, too."
Entertainment Weekly's Owen Glieberman calls the film "dishy and elegant":
"Gallella, who began to stalk celebrities half a century ago and is still at it in his late 70s, describes how he stares through the lens of the camera — or, more to the point, how he doesn’t bother to. He’d rather look directly into the eyes of the star he’s ambushing; the shot, he says, is really about their relationship...
SHASH HIS CAMERA makes you see why Ron Galella was Andy Warhol’s favorite photographer. Galella’s photographs — millions of them, all archived, many now showcased in museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art — are raw, beautiful, shocking, tender, fascinating, and real. They’re proof that starting in the late 20th century, art and voyeurism could no longer be separated."
Alan Bacchus at Daily Film Dose gives the film 3 1/2 stars:
"It's too bad we don’t get reactions from Jackie O herself or the celebrities he harassed all these years. Though perhaps its for the best, for that would be a different documentary, and arguably a lesser one. CAMERA works so well because due to Galella‘s affable sense of humour and quirky obsessions Gast manages to get us to love this man who has caused such frustration and nuisance to the people he encounters on a daily basis."
As does SLC Trib cricket Sean P. Means:
"As he did in his Oscar-winning documentary "When We Were Kings," director Leon Gast both profiles an American original and laments a long-gone era."
Finally, Roger Ebert tweets a sneak preview of a review still to come:
"Just saw SMASH HIS CAMERA, about famous paparazzo Ron Galella. A vermin, parasite, stalker -- and a national treasure."
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