Review of Auto Focus (2002) by Gabriel K — 01 Jan 2013

I admire the character Bob Crane who is known for acting in the 1960's TV series "Hogan's Heroes" but there is a haunting personal side of Crane I didn't know and that was his passion (actually his obsession) with photography and video equipment while mixing it in with his sexual escapades with women. Filmmaker Paul Schrader knows these characters inside out from his Travis Bickle, to Wade Whithouse and even Mishima. It is Crane's personal dark obsession that I instantly noticed.

The first half is filled with Crane's happy life(Schrader and his crew uses bright colors to suggest the feeling) as the film reaches the early 1970's the colors start to drab a little and the camera movement becomes shaky because Crane's life at that time was getting WAY to shaky. Greg Kinnear was born to play the DJ/Actor sensation and Dafoe is creepy as John Carpenter.

Premise: Auto Focus is a cautionary tale of addiction. What kills Crane, it says, is a lethal combination of sex, video, and celebrity: Because of his fame he can go to bed with a different woman (or several) every night. And because the mid-'60s marks the birth of a new technology-home video-and he's pals with a celebrity hanger-on named John Carpenter (a prodigiously cretinous Willem Dafoe) who works at Sony, he can videotape his conquests and relive them whenever he wants to. Which is basically all the time.