Review by: Owen Gleiberman
At a film festival, everyone is a bit of a junkie. In the space of a week,
you see more movies, 15, 20, or 25–depending on your tolerance, than most
people do in a year. Hungry and glassy-eyed, you lurch from screening to
screening, in search of the next fix, the movie that will make you higher
than the last one. At first, the quest is exhilarating; after a while, it
can turn exhausting ˜ a more intense dosage may be required. Yet the hunger
never dies. Why should it? When the Sundance Film Festival is as fluky and
daring as it was this year, movie love becomes an addiction you scarcely
want to recover from.
It was hard to avoid thinking in feed-your-habit terms, since the most resonant films I saw at Sundance were all deep-dish tales of dependence, chemical and otherwise. Take TV Junkie, a mesmerizing documentary trip to hell. The filmmakers, Michael Cain and Matt Radecki, edited down more than 3,000 hours of home-video diaries shot by Rick Kirkham, who chronicled his '90s notoriety as a reporter for Inside Edition and also his addiction to crack, which he hid from his family, even as he recorded it all, in squirmy and bleary-eyed 3 a.m. confessional detail, on camcorder tapes he never once rewound or watched. Kirkham, who resembles a hopped-up, hollow-cheeked Peter Gallagher, has an appetite for destruction that he can't stop stoking, even as he attempts to cling to a normal existence. The fascination of TV Junkie is the way his drug life fuses with his need for the camera. Kirkham's video descent becomes a tawdry tabloid Grizzly Man, a look at the secret sick heart of fame as it falls apart in someone's hands.
Sundance: Grib grabs the remote and switches on TV Junkie! Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with Grib's take on a really interesting sounding documentary called TV Junkie. I'm hoping SXSW nabs this doc so I can take a look at it. Here's Grib with the details!
Hey, Harry, Grib here with a review from Sundance of the new documentary "TV Junkie," which is a one of a kind film that packs an emotional wallop. It is the story of former "Inside Edition" daredevil reporter Rick Kirkham, who collected over 3000 hours of video footage of his own life, starting at age 14. This obsession eventually led him to insist that he and his wife Tami tape all of their conversations with each other. During the long weeks he spent away from his family in LA and New York City working on "Inside Edition," Kirkham also taped himself snorting cocaine and crack; he went through rehab three times, eventually losing his job and several others thereafter. Co-directors Michael Cain and Matt Radecki (and a staff of editors) culled through every minute of Kirkham's footage and made an incredibly gripping, unflinching film that chronicles Kirkham's rise to the top of reality journalism and subsequent descent into the hell of addiction and paranoia that cost him everything. I will not give away the ending, as to do so would be to rob the film of some of its power. Aside from occasional onscreen titles, the film is told entirely through Kirkham's own footage.
In addition to its raw emotional power, this film is a marvel of editing. Kirkham's tapes were largely unlabeled and not chronological; the filmmakers never knew what they would see when they started watching a tape. Some of the most chilling footage comes when Kirkham addresses the camera alone, telling himself that he knows that crack is controlling him but knows he can't stop using it. In one scene, he leaves his son's first birthday party to go score some drugs; in another he admits to his wife that he is rolling loose change to pay off drug debts. One of the film's biggest surprises comes at the beginning, when the filmmakers tell us via onscreen titles that Kirkham never looked at a second of his own footage. When one tape was done, he just popped in a new one and plowed ahead. Watch for this one. It's quite an experience
Review by: Sally Foster
Rick Kirkham began shooting his own video diaries when he was only fourteen
years old. Over the next few decades, Rick recorded every event in his life,
accumulating over 3,000 hours of footage, most of which he never even
watched. By the time he was 33 years old, Rick had achieved everything he
had aspired to; a reporter for Inside Edition, he spent his weekdays in New
York performing outlandish stunts for a segment called "Inside Adventure"
and his weekends at home in Dallas with his wife Tami and their two
beautiful sons. Yet still, Rick felt that something was missing.
Filmmakers Michael Cain and Matt Radecki sifted through thousands of hours of footage to piece together the story of Rick Kirkham's life. Focusing on a period of about seven years, the film chronicles the tumultuous ups and downs of Rick's daily life, interwoven with the story of his intense struggle with substance abuse. The result is an unbelievably candid glimpse into the contradictions of cocaine addiction. An outwardly wholesome family, the Kirkhams suffer with Rick as he goes in and out of drug rehab programs, intermittently agonizing through periods of sobriety and spiraling back downward into addiction. The audience watches Rick's elation as Tami conceives and gives birth to both their sons, his disappointment at having to leave them for work, and the self-loathing he feels due to his inability to stay away from drugs for any lengthy period of time.
There are parts of this film that are extremely difficult to watch. As Rick plummets further and further into the depths of his addiction, he and Tami begin to fight, their arguments punctuated by two year-old Rick, Jr.'s screams as he stands in the corner of the room wailing. The camera stays on, recording Rick as he berates himself for his addiction and the way he is destroying his family, all the while folding a piece of aluminum foil into a makeshift pipe.
Rick's coherence through all of this is what really carries the film - despite the drugs, he is fully articulate and presents an authentic portrait of himself, making absolutely no excuses for his behavior. Most puzzling of all is Rick's insistence on recording every moment of his life, no matter how incriminating or unflattering. He even involves Tami in his bizarre obsession, asking her to record phone conversations between the two of them while he is away so that they have both sides of the dialogue on tape. Cain and Radecki worked with Kirkham to edit together crucial bits of his video diaries, reconstructing his life into a tale that vacillates between uplifting and painful, but through it all is undeniably real. "TV Junkie" is by no means easy to sit through, but will leave you with a whole new understanding of the complexities of addiction.
MOVIEFONESundance Review by: James Rocchi, Cinematical Sundance Festival Reports "Rick Kirkham recorded over 3,000 hours of video footage as
his personal diary. He never watched any of it."
Posted Jan 23rd 2006 11:58AM by James Rocchi Filed under: Documentary, Independent, Sundance, Festival Reports "Rick Kirkham recorded over 3,000 hours of video footage as his personal diary. He never watched any of it."
Playing in the Documentary section of Sundance, TV Junkie is a portrait of Rick Kirkham, whose chance teen placing as a dancer on American Bandstand and a 14th Birthday gift of a movie camera led to a lifelong interest in television and video. Kirkham wound up going from positions in smaller markets to a job as a crime beat TV reporter in Las Vegas to, eventually, an on-air position as a reporter - if, to be blunt, you can call it that - for TV's Inside Edition, engaging in wacky stunts like motorcycle jumps, Harley rides, being shot out of a cannon and race-car antics. Along the way, he was regularly setting up his camera to record a video diary. He was also smoking crack.
Co-directed by Michael Cain and Matt Radecki, TV Junkie is made solely from Kirkham's diary entries, self-recorded footage and TV broadcast footage, with a smattering of still photos along the way. And it might just be me - I do TV as part of my job, I've done TV as part of my job - but I found it fascinating. Not necessarily because of Kirkham - he seems like a joke of a 'journalist,' and the personal footage hardly presents him in the best possible light - but simply because of how it captures the poisonous neurotic narcissism of a man committing a man committing what he himself calls "slow-motion suicide." Kirkham and his girlfriend Tammy get pregnant, get married, have kids - and all the while he's falling on and off the wagon, hating himself and smoking crack and hating himself even more for doing so.
But there's something hypnotic about Kirkham's diaries and his story: Watching his diary entries throughout a 48-hour long crack binge is terrifying, as he goes from euphoria to despair and back to the kind of 'fun' that looks like no fun at all as he explains that now "I know how horrible drugs are." And Kirkham's a natural TV presence - all-American good looks, baritone voice, easy manner - but his video diaries have this creepy sort of disconnect to them, as if he weren't living the feelings he relates but instead just reading them off a teleprompter. His speaking is flawless, but the speaker is flawed, and that disconnect is part of why you can't stop looking at his toxic, self-loathing Memorex memoirs.
TV Junkie is a chronicle of a man who recorded everything for future posterity but seemed incapable of having those confessions change his present, who seemed unable to understand the difference between watching and seeing. The unexamined life is not worth living, but is the over-examined life truly lived? TV Junkie may not resonate with everyone - but if you've ever been out with friends and wondering how, exactly, you were going to re-translate the night for your next posting on Myspace.com, TV Junkie’s Kirkham might have something to say to you as he spills his soul onto the tape.
JoBlo.comIf I told you this movie was about a successful TV personality who, despite having a great job, a beautiful house, a lovely wife, and two adorable babies, fostered a life-withering crack addiction, your response might be something like "Gee, again?" But what makes TV Junkie so damn watchable is that the entire film is composed of homemade video footage. Rick Kirkham, you see, is also a "video journal" junkie. No matter how good or bad things get for the guy, Kirkham would always point his Handycam directly at his own face and confess the ugly truth for all to see...only I'm pretty sure he never intended this footage to be used for public consumption. With no narration and (thankfully) no editorializing, the film presents a character you'll like, and then pity, and then hate, and then root for ... even though you know it's probably pointless. I think the flick happens to run about ten minutes longer than it really needs to, but I found it pretty darn engrossing all the same.