MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

SnoopyStyle Daniel Johnston is a singer, songwriter and artist from Austin, Texas. He is brought up in a religious family. He starts getting notice. When MTV comes to town, he barges his way onto the scene. He becomes a known underground artist and then discovered to be manic depressive as his disturbing behavior gets more noticeable.This documentary uses a lot of home videos and personal testimony from Johnston. It gives a slice of a mad mind. It's a little sad no matter how one feels about Johnston's work. It's too straight forward structurally. In the beginning, it's his childhood but the movie doesn't explain who he is. There is no real drama here. He's a disturbed man with loving parents, fans and some talent.

etidunseen2 Folktales are comprised of legends and are seldom rooted in truth. Often, they deify men and make overcoming the impossible seem plausible. Daniel Johnston's life has been riddled with such extreme triumph and tribulations that most would relegate his story to myth, had his journey not been so well documented. It also makes the intrinsic value of his folk music and art that much more valuable. It's easy to write his extensive catalog off as simple work from a simple mind, but after watching the well-orchestrated documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005) its evident that Johnstons brilliance is co-morbid with his disabilities. The rudimentary form his craft takes ties into his perceived understanding of the world and leaves his fans bewildered at the profoundness of his genius; especially because all other arenas of his life are plagued by his struggle with manic-depressive behavior and delusions of grandeur. The film, directed by Jeff Feuerzeig, serves as an instrument in helping audiences attain a better understanding of Daniel's disposition by utilizing post-production techniques to imbue the audience with same sense of mania that Johnston lives with from day to day. His disorder bore a neurosis that left behind an abundance of archival ephemera. The authenticity of his a visceral and auditory journaling, though music and other musings, create a first-person perspective through Johnston's eyes, which helps motivate the story when seamlessly woven into the narrative. It helps the audience understand the fantasticness of his irrationality by making them live through these severe circumstances. Presentation of the memorabilia through editing and Feuerzeig's direction also helms psychosis, as the each segment is ripe with strife to the point of cerebral saturation. However, the intensity of the segments are juxtaposed with stagnate close- ups of a tape recorder, where we just hear Daniels unnerving voice talking about the events as he experiences them. The paradox in pace creates the elusive mental-states of eccentricity and depravity in the audience. It's sort of like trying to describe to someone what it feels like to ride a roller-coaster; it's a lot easier just to let them ride themselves. Feuerzeig artfully captures Daniels essence as an unpredictable and mentally unstable individual, yet manages to garner adoration for the protagonist by surmising that Daniel is not the sum of his disorder. This film could have spun in any number of directions, exploiting the travesty's that ensued with Johnston's inherent proclivity toward the eccentric, but the director maintains tact and decency that gave the film a level of material that couldn't be created by any sort of misdirection. As style usually prevails over substance, The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005) lags in neither; it's an articulate film about an unarticulable condition.

tomgillespie2002 The struggle of an artist battling against his own demons has long been played out in both the movies and reality. Musicians such as Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and Jim Morrison fought against drug and alcohol addiction and led to their lives being played out on screen. They suffered for choices they made. Daniel Johnston, a cult figure and genius songwriter, battled with mental illness for most of his life. His art both benefited and suffered for his affliction. But Johnston was helpless of his fate. His mental instability deepened as his fame grew, and it's all captured in detail in this wonderful documentary.Daniel Johnston was always a strange child, growing up with a seemingly obsessive compulsion for art, and later to music. He was vastly creative, inspired and individual in his output. When he decided that he wanted to be a musician and be famous, his produced an album on tape, and advertised his work to producers and writers, and blew everyone away. Always influenced by his muse - a girl he fell in love with at college and never saw again - his songs were tortured and heart- rendering, yet joyous and upbeat. But his increasingly unstable mental state put his career on hold. After indulging in marijuana and LSD, he was submitted to a mental hospital after attacking his friend with a lead pipe. And so began Daniel Johnston's tragic public decline, as he alienated himself from his family and friends, and intensified his obsession with God, and ultimately, the Devil.I had never heard of Daniel Johnston's music before this film. His music is not for everyone's taste - his voice is high-pitched and unbalanced, and his techniques non-conformal and almost old-school - but no-one could deny the tortured genius behind it. Seeing him go on stage for the first time, all skinny and uncomfortable, glancing nervously at the camera every now and then, there was something awe-inspiring about him. It makes it all the heart-breaking to see him now, bloated and old, physically damaged by his mental illness. And yet his thirst for art remains.There are plenty of bio-documentaries and music documentaries out there that are capable of blowing you away (Gimme Shelter and The Last Waltz come immediately to mind), but although this is a great music documentary, it just as brilliant as a serious portrayal of the devastating effects of mental illness. As Johnston had the nack of recording practically everything he did on tape, we get to witness almost first hand his life and breakdown. There are early tapes of him arguing with his mother, and phone calls asking him to wash the graffiti he did on the Statue of Liberty. We also hear troubled calls from his loved ones and friends, and hear the effect it was having on them. One friend states that the troubled genius's of the past, like Van Gogh, are fascinating to read about and amplifies their God-like status. But no- one living has ever had to live with them, and witness it unfold before their eyes.An excellent documentary that really gets to the heart of it's subject. And I'll definitely be hunting down Daniel Johnston's work.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Brandt Sponseller Anyone who reads me regularly will probably know that I prefer watching films without knowing anything about them beforehand. Ideally, I don't want to have even the slightest idea about the plot or subject, the cast, or even who the director was. Of course, that's sometimes difficult to do, but as much as possible, I avoid reading or seeing anything about a film before I watch. I want to be a blank slate at the start of a film, without preconceptions.I had never heard of Daniel Johnston before. So I watched this film for an hour before I finally realized, to my shock, that it's not some kind of Spinal Tap-like joke, which it seemed to be. When I thought it was a joke, I was enjoying it quite a bit. It appeared to be a mockumentary about a fat, dumpy, mentally ill guy whom people were calling a musical genius--"the best singer-songwriter of his generation", even though as we see in some concert footage, he can't really sing, play an instrument or write songs very well. At all.In further explication of his "genius", we learn that he also did visual art--which were more or less the standard drawings of a kid obsessed with comic books and possessing some natural talent that could be developed. And we learn that he was an aspiring filmmaker. We see the standard young film fanatic kinda home movies--the kid could hold a camera steady and very rudimentarily frame a shot and do some editing. Nothing extraordinary, but again, maybe some talent there that could be developed. But the film kept focusing on his music, which the main character was maybe the most obsessed with, but for which he had absolutely no natural talent. Seemed funny to me, although maybe a bit too subtly executed to be as hilarious as Spinal Tap.As it went on, however, it seemed to be less funny, and there were an increasing number of scenes that would have cost a fortune to fake. There were people I knew showing up in the film in historical shots, with Daniel inserted in what I thought was a Forrest Gump way. This was happening more and more, so finally, at the hour mark, I had to run to the computer and check the "All Music Guide" to see if maybe there really was a Daniel Johnston, and this wasn't a joke.What had been mildly amusing and very quirky suddenly became perplexing. It's hard to believe that I'm not being put on. Now, I'm no objectivist on aesthetic value, but it's very difficult--and pretty frustrating--to see what anyone would find attractive about Daniel's music. He seems to only know a couple chords and very stereotypical chord progressions on both piano and guitar, and he can barely change from one chord to the next. His melodies are arbitrary--they're just whatever pitches happen to squeak out of his mouth as he recites his banal lyrics, which utilize "spoon-moon-June"-styled rhyme schemes. He barely understands rhythm. Yes, he's passionate about what he's doing, but so are the vast majority of people who can actually play an instrument, sing and write interesting songs. Johnston is no Syd Barrett. I'm a musician, too, and I could very literally teach anyone, and I mean anyone--learning disabilities and mental disorders or not--who has never touched a musical instrument before to do something comparable to what Daniel does within a week to a month. Why wouldn't they be considered geniuses? Why wouldn't they be well known, be offered record contracts, etc.? For that matter, why am I not considered a genius? When it comes to Daniel's mental illness (or illnesses, maybe), the film is much more interesting to me, although I haven't known many people with a serious mental illness, so probably there's not that much very unusual about Daniel on that end, either. I did get to know Jaco Pastorius towards the end of his life, and there were some similar problems there behavior-wise (as well as similar problems for the people around him, including trying to have him institutionalized against his will). However, Jaco actually was a musical genius.On technical terms, The Devil and Daniel Johnston isn't exactly a bad film. Director Jeff Feuerzeig probably didn't have an easy time of it, because he had to piece together a history of Daniel primarily by relying on home movies of poor quality. There are too many shots of cassette tapes and empty locations, but the film is pieced together competently and tells its story well enough. If you're at all a fan of Johnston, you should like The Devil and Daniel Johnston quite a bit.But this is not the film that I want to see. The film that I want to see is one that explores the psychological and cultural phenomena of how someone like Johnston can come to be considered a genius, how he can come to work with so many artists who truly are gifted, especially when he continually does things to sabotage himself, and especially when not only do many other gifted artists not ever get a break, but any arbitrary person could do what Johnston does. I doubt I'll ever be able to quite figure it out.(Edit:) Out of curiosity, I later listened to a few tracks from Daniel Johnston's albums--a couple from the early homemade tapes, and a couple from the later more heavily produced stuff. Oddly, the songs I heard, while not great in my view, showed at least some skill musically and vocally. That makes me wonder why Feuerzeig chose the songs that he did for the film, as they show Johnston as completely incompetent musically.