CINEMANIA (2003) **1/2

Reviewed 6/5/03

This doc focuses on Jack, Bill, Roberta, Harvey, and Eric, five of the most devoted film geeks on the planet who not coincidentally live in New York City.  They watch 2 to 5 movies a day.  Every day.  Jack purposefully endures a constipating diet (minimize vegetables and beans) to limit bathroom breaks. Bill, who apparently loves peanut butter, is a Francophile looking to move to Paris and marry a French woman.  Roberta keeps every ticket stub and film flyer she’s ever come across.  Harvey has an enormous collection of movie soundtrack albums with no turntable to play them on.  Eric apparently has no standards and watches everything except French intellectual fare (bye bye, Resnais).  How do they survive?  Three are on disability and one lives off of an inheritance.  So are they freaks or aren’t they?  Probably by most people’s standards, but the film shouldn’t have editorialized as much as it does on that question what with its close-ups that are a little too close, editing in a cat who runs away when Jack picks up his boxes of film books at a store, or showing one cinematic patron zipping up his fly after a movie.  Still, it could have been much worse, and being a cinephile myself, I can hardly be objective in my empathy for these eccentrics (many of whom I see regularly).  They can’t help but display their idiosyncrasies (naturally every one of their apartments is completely unkempt and their bodies tend to be rotund).  However fascinating these obsessives may be, the doc’s biggest flaw is that it is a rather shallow look at these folks with the sources of their cinephilia left as much in the dark as the movies they watch.