Steineded How sad is this?

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

ShelbyDThomas First off, let me tell you...this movie is funny. It is a dark comedy, so the humor was expected to be witty, and it delivered. Matt Dillon plays this role superbly - with some great one liners I might add. I was never a fan of his until this movie. The role is perfect for him.Had never heard of Bent Hamer until this movie, but I like his style of directing and he is very good at timing.Character development was OK, however I would have liked to have seen a bit more plot. That area made this film a tad forgettable.I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone who has a dry, witty sense of humor, it made me laugh out loud a few times, which I rarely do by myself at home. :)

rightwingisevil this is a pathetic movie with bore-u-to-death storyline. wasting the whole length of the playing time to portray a writer-wannabe self-righteous bum and loser. one of the worst movies ever made into production. there's absolutely nothing in it except self-indulgent binge drinking, sex, horse-race gambling and wandering around in bars, beds and temporary jobs in factories. most of the characters showed in this film was just like the main character, without any energy and interest in life, absolutely aimless like lost souls or walking dead. a guy who periodically holding a pen in his hand, chain-smoking and drinking would finally got his muse in writing? this is one of the worst movies, cuz it ain't worth making into a film, completely wasting time and money to tell a good-for-nothing guy's soul-less daily passage. one of the screenplay writers was the original writer who wrote this totally pointless nothing-in-it story, then some brainless guys in the movie industries picked up the garbage and made it into a movie with nothing in it. it's not Albert Camus' existentialism nor the nihilism but a shallow low-life do-nothing pinhead writing a void diary of his crappy miserable and tried so hard to look like James Joyce's 'The Dubliner'. there's no philosophy or life reckoning thoughts in it. a so-called short novel/movie with no oxygen and nutrition. don't try to fool me with high scored reviews to pretend that you could see something out of nothing. this is the exact sample of 'the new dress of the emperor', cuz it's naked nothingness.

grondag I have waited a long time to see this movie. IFC finally ran it one night. I thought it would be something like "Barfly" from Barbet Schroeder. Wrong. This film doesn't recreate that underworld of chintzy, dirty, smoke filled, character filled bars you associate with his stories. It also fails to capture that Bukowski attitude that Mickey Rourke did so well in the above mentioned film. That natural smart-ass attitude. Fans of Charles Bukowski will enjoy seeing scenes from his books on screen but those unfamiliar with his books could get the wrong impression about his works. This film looks like just another 'Movie Of The Week" about a drunk and his relationships. If you want to get a better idea about Charles Bukowski's world watch "Barfly".

mtelford Clearly this film was made for a newer generation that may or may not have had an inkling of Charles Bukowski's work. The autobiographical Henry Chinaski character in Bukowski's stories was brilliantly portrayed to perfection by Mickey Rourke in 1987's 'Barfly', also starring Faye Dunaway. Anyone who has seen 'Factotum' should certainly see 'Barfly' to get a better look at how Bukowski wrote his character. 'Factotum' lacks the greasy seediness of Bukowski's screenplay and the fearless hopelessness of his loner hero. The inadvertent humor that bubbles through in the dark desperation of Chinaski's misadventures doesn't work for Dillon as it did so admirably for the overweight filthy blood-soaked Rourke. Rourke's character makes the pain and pleasure of the previous night's misbehavior a place-setting for yet another grueling ugly day in the life of a drunken misanthropic unknown writer. Dillon's character misses these marks in favor of a strutting, handsome, relatively clean-looking wanna-be writer that scarcely passes for any moment in that of Chinaski's story. Dunaway's sleazy heroine Wanda is the perfect complement to the ne'er-do-well Henry. The women in 'Factotum' can't hold a candle to Dunaway's 'distressed goddess' and the use of more profane sexual subject matter in 'Factotum' proves to be more of a crude distraction than a tip of the hat to Bukowski's raw and unapologetic portrayals of dysfunctional relationships. I was stunned at how many of the exact same scenes were used in 'Factotum' (Marisa Tomei buying all the stuff and charging it to the old man is an exact rip-off from 'Barfly').If you want to see the best Bukowski stories on film, see 'Barfly' and 'Love is a Dog From Hell' (which also goes by the title 'Crazy Love').