VividSimon Simply Perfect

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

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

Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Prismark10 Gore Vidal was always good value for money. Writer, polemicist, raconteur, wit and intellectual.Vidal died in 2012, he lived to a good age and this film released a year later is a documentary of his personal and professional life with contributions from those who knew him.Gore was a patrician who came from a political family but had complex relationships with his parents. In a roundabout way he was related to the Kennedys through Jackie Onassis and experienced the Camelot years.Yet he was critical of both Democrats and Republicans as they served the same people, the moneyed and liked to paint himself as an outsider. For many years he lived in Italy.Gore could be charming and also abrasive and was willing to take on all comers. Gore engaged in debated with the right wing author William Buckley Jr, got in a scrape with Norman Mailer and even turned his back to former acolyte Christopher Hitchens when he got too close to the American right and for his support of the Iraq War.This was an enjoyable documentary, I always find it stimulating to listen to Vidal even if he might be exaggerating his stories or embellishing his own importance but I would had liked to see more focus on his writing as well.

jkbonner1 Vidal was born into privilege but this didn't stop him from having a disastrous relationship with his mother, Nina. He seemed to have a better one with his father but his parents divorced when he was young and his mother burned through several marriages. He attended a New England boys, Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire and had an affair with another boy, who died at Iwo Jima.Vidal in the movie commented on the futility of war and the horrible waste of lives it incurs. He served in the Navy in the Pacific Theater for several years and claimed he never heard one serviceman utter a patriotic comment. To Vidal patriotism was just a cover-up for justifying war.Even as a youth Vidal knew he wanted to write and after he graduated from Exeter he skipped college and set off on a writing career. His third book, The City and the Pillar, became very controversial because of its explicit use of homosexual situations. It is worthy to note that Vidal did not like the terms homosexual/heterosexual and claimed that a person being either one was likened to having blue eyes or brown. This is pretty much the medical position taken today.However, in the 1950s and 1960s (before the Cultural Revolution of the late '60s) writing openly about sex of any type was a taboo. Vidal found his works banned by the New York Times and he had to go to Hollywood to write screenplays to make money. He did quite well monetarily there and with the money he made bought a grand estate in New York. Nevertheless, his frank and overt language in The City and the Pillar caused many critics to smear his name for years.Vidal was a great writer and his historical novels were first-rate. I read both Julian and Lincoln, and both capture the era perfectly that Vidal is describing. The first the mid-4th century Roman Empire and the second when Abraham Lincoln takes the helm of guiding the Union to ultimate victory in the Civil War (1861-1865). He was also a great debater and the movie captured some of his infamous run-ins with that great bastion of American conservatism, William F. Buckley. The movie also took up the relationship between Vidal and Christopher Hitchens, who before the latter endorsed the Second Iraq War (2003-2011), appeared to be the anointed heir-apparent of Vidal's legacy. Regarding the Second Iraq War Vidal clearly called it right.The movie covers Vidal's life from 1925 to 2012. His prime time was the 1950s to the 1980s. It could have been more incisive of Vidal's life but still I had to marvel how prescient he was. He saw clearly the drift that overtook the United States in the second half of the 20th-century and the now current political impasse at which we have now arrived.8/10

soncoman I was introduced to Gore Vidal by my tenth grade high school history teacher. Mr. D'onofrio set aside one class period for his students to watch a one-hour interview he had taped from a late night TV interview. This was 1980, long before home video recording was the norm and you could still occasionally catch an author, historian, or philosopher on late night television. Most of my fellow classmates were bored stiff, but I was fascinated by the things Mr. Vidal was saying – things I hadn't heard anyone else say about the state of government and how things really worked in Washington.I searched for material on and by Mr. Vidal, which led me to his play/film The Best Man, which took a decidedly different look at a Presidential Nominating Convention than anything Walter Cronkite ever showed us, and Myra Breckinridge, the most notorious film of its time. (I was too young to see it, and Vidal disowned it anyway.) I sought him out on TV, where had had become somewhat ubiquitous, and always found his interviews thought provoking.Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, a new documentary by Nicholas Wrathall, was a trip down memory lane for me. A decidedly one-sided look at Vidal's life and influence, the film – via archival footage and interviews with Vidal shortly before his death in 2012 – gives a pretty complete picture of who he was, what he thought, and the battles he undertook almost to his last breath. A bastion of the liberal left, Vidal never towed the party line. As harsh a critic of Kennedy as he was of Nixon, Vidal saw the election of Barack Obama as the final indication that the Republican Party would soon go the way of the Whig Party. Would he were around today to see the resurgence of the Tea Party.Author, politician, atheist, playwright, political commentator, humanist, screenwriter, film actor – all roles with which Vidal undertook with gusto, verve, and the conviction of his ideas. The strengths of those convictions led to two notable feuds that are covered substantially in this film. Authors William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer both had memorable encounters with Vidal and thankfully both are preserved on videotape. Vidal's two runs for public office, once for a New York House seat, and once for the U.S. Senate versus Jerry Brown, gives us a glimpse at a man who was willing to put his money where his mouth was, even though he spent substantially less money than Brown did in the Senate race.The film also gives us a more substantial look at Vidal's private life, particularly in the long relationship he had with Howard Austen (a man he lived with for over 50 years with whom he claims he never had a sexual relationship) and with the friendships he had with the likes of Tennessee Williams, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman.More autobiography than biography, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia is 90 minutes of pure, unabashed Vidal, interspersed with some of his most caustic comments, ie "Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale." or "Envy is the central fact of American life." The film happily reminds us of a time when intellectuals could be entertaining and thought provoking, and unhappily of what passes for intellectual debate today.www.worstshowontheweb.com

steven-leibson I've not read Gore Vidal and have only seen two farcical movies based on his writing (Visit to a Small Planet and Myra Breckinridge) so I was not at all prepared for seeing an hour and a half of someone who is probably one of the most informed, most thoughtful political thinkers of our time. Prepare to get a fast education in the last 65 years of cold-war and post-cold-war politics. Every word rang true to me. Anyone who can trash William F. Buckley, Jr. live, on TV, on the fly and reduce him to a street fighter stance is AOK in my book.This documentary combines historical footage of Vidal appearing on television in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with new footage shot over the last ten years or so of Vidal's life. (He passed on in 2012.) All that's left now is for me to get his historical novels so I can see earlier American history through his eyes.Seen 8-18-13 at the San Jose Camera Cinema Club. The movie is currently making the rounds at international film festivals and there's a distribution deal in the making.