User Reviews

After a while, I really did get more of what director Paul Schrader was aiming for with Auto Focus, the tale of males caught in some sort of odd damnation of both free will and morality. It's more like a drug movie, only here the drug being the opposite sex, and almost a singularly male ego-trip, instead of common narcotics. But it's also a very fine character study where the idea of character is taken into consideration, of how much one can seem a certain way, but then be stuck in with flaws and insecurities and, ultimately, temptation. The last of which is what Schrader puts into focus early on, but then after a while when temptation is gone, the film becomes a direct plunge into complete debauchery. And appropriately, like with all addicts, for a while nothing seems wrong at all about all of this.

Greg Kinnear is definitely in one of his best parts here, as he plays someone who is an actor who keeps his actor-like charms off the set as well. In Hollywood, away from the confines of Connecticut, his Bob Crane lands the lead on Hogan's heroes, but can't resist the first temptations of the night-life. This comes, in an introductory way and then throughout as a tag-along/counterpart, with John Carpenter (not the director, played with the best match by Willem Dafoe of being a creep and alluring at times), who shows him the ropes and hooks him up with video equipment. But as Crane goes deeper into his sexual drives, divorces, marries again and divorces again, his acting career and his livelihood seem to slip away. The themes of being perversely the 'All-American Male' are accentuated by Kinnear's Crane in voice-over as he talks about the unbridled joys of sex, and in an interview with a Christian publication he says 'I don't...make waves'. By the last third of his story, however, into the rot of the 70s, he's lost touch with the reality of his pleasures- or rather necessities.

Auto Focus isn't at times an easy movie to sit through; it's even cringe-worthy in a couple of scenes (notably for me was when he guest stars on a celebrity cooking show, only to keep on his sexually-driven side with audience members). Then there are other scenes (i.e. 'you have fingers up you-know-where', and the genital enhancement) where male masculinity is questioned, and in very peculiar ways between Crane and Carpenter; Crane is homophobic, but then what exactly is Carpenter's function? More than anything, less than being a friend, he becomes a kind of unintentional pusher, where the draw of going out on the town becomes a crux for both of the men. What's just as fascinating then is how Schrader aligns this with his style- the first half is mostly very slick and professional-looking, almost like an HBO bio-pic or something. But then as the characters lose a grip on everything except themselves, there's a hand-held, distorted view to everything. There's lots of nudity and on-screen sex (some blurred out, likely by MPAA request), yet Schrader gets something more shocking, in the mind at least, as Carpenter almost becomes the antagonist in a way as the story winds down (the last phone call marks this most).

Auto Focus has the ideal of the usual biographical drama of a somebody in Hollywood who soon loses himself to becoming a nobody, but there's plenty under the surface that makes it more intriguing. Crane's two sides to his persona- the celebrity one, and the personal 'lifestyle' one- become one and the same after a while, Kinnear being able to make such a near-irredeemable person somewhat sympathetic (or at the least very watchable). And Carpenter's more truthful, emotional, and scary turn is made palatable by Dafoe's equally nuanced performance. It's not great, but it's a near-classic of the tale-of-such-and-such-star when so many don't take in what's deeper into account. A-

Not having had a chance to see the movie first-run, I bought the DVD and was impressed with it. The movie itself was, to borrow a phrase from another review on this site "brilliantly disturbing." Those of us who remember when Bob Crane was murdered at an apartment in Scottsdale, AZ while doing dinner theater gig; that was weird in of itself. After all who would want to kill good old Colonel Hogan? I remember watching Crane on the show, and also on talk or game shows. He seemed so together, self-assured and quick-witted. So it was even more of a shock to find out about his double-life, which this movie covers so well although it is perhaps a bit misleading in spots.

Greg Kinnear does very good as Crane, especially in the latter scenes of the film. I think the part of Bob Crane would be somewhat difficult to play. Crane's legendary status is caught up not in his career itself, but his life other "on camera" life. A life that ended with his bludgeoning death (by blows from a camera tripod.) in June, 1978, just two weeks before what would have been his 50th birthday. Wilhem Dafoe is even better as the creepy John "Carpie" Carpenter, a video salesman who Crane meets on the set of Hogan's Heroes. Virtually all the supporting cast is also quite good. Particularly good are Kurt Fuller as Werner Klemperer/Col. Klink and Rob Leibman, who plays Crane's agent who watches helplessly as Crane's career and personal life veer out of control and plummet.

Carpenter, an electronics expert, at the time worked for Sony, selling the new and expensive technology of videotape players to mostly celebrities or others wealthy enough to afford them. The movie takes the viewer through the mid-late 1960's as Crane and Carpenter, both sex addicts, videotape their seemingly every night exploits with women they pick up from night clubs. This is no problem for Crane who was handsome and famous. Carpenter was portrayed as a hanger-on, along for the ride, and taking Crane's "seconds." Crane, married with children is at first able to hide his double-life from his family, although his wife is suspicious of his roving eye.. As a sidebar, there are some interesting tidbits in the movie about the development of videotape in the 60's into the 70's. After the cancellation of Hogan's Heroes in 1971 and his expensive divorce (his wife found photographic evidence of his escapades), Crane's sex addition seemingly worsens. He remarries, this time to an actress who played Col Klink's secretary in the Hogan's Heroes who tells him his dalliances are okay with her. They have a son soon after they are married and even she grows weary of his being away so much with Carpenter.

The mood of the film is in the beginning almost light-hearted, almost campy at times. . As the film continues and as Crane's personal life steadily implodes, professional life goes on the decline, a sense of darkness and desperation engulf the film. This is reinforced superbly by the hues on screen and the background music. The symbiotic relationship between Crane and Carpenter are portrayed so convincingly. Crane needed Carpenter for his video expertise and Carpenter needed Crane for the access to women. It is stunning how cavalier Crane was about picking up women and taping his sex acts, with or without their consent.

Crane is portrayed as a nearly broke totally washed-up B or C grade celebrity at the time of his murder. This was not necessarily the case. Crane in fact had made a lot of guest appearances on television series and game shows in the early and mid-70's. He had been signed to star in an ABC Movie of the Week shortly before his murder. Crane also owned a portion of Hogan's Heroes, and had received a royalty check in 1977 of over $95,000. Doing dinner theater was more a choice he had made, and he was making amounts off dinner theater that rivaled his royalty checks. Not a fortune, but a very decent living, especially for that time. To be sure he was strained by having to support one but two families, plus his addiction. He was not the big star he was, but not in oblivion, either. Only so much can be covered in the film's 90 or so minute running time, but the notion that his professional life was in smithereens was a bit misleading. Yet, many in Hollywood knew about his exploits and it no doubt cost him in professional opportunities. There is debate on both sides whether or not Crane at the time of his murder was attempting to change his life.

Near the end it is clear Crane had grown tired of "Carpie" and had basically told him the friendship as they knew it was coming to an end. This was just a day or so before his murder. Carpenter was arrested and tried years later for the murder but acquitted. He died in 1998, and the case officially remains unsolved.

Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) directs so well this lurid and unflinching story. The DVD has lots of extras, including 3 different commentaries. The first by Kinnear and Dafoe, is good. Schrader's commentary is best as it offers a lot of insight into how they were able to make a relatively low-budget picture ($7 million I recall) look like they easily spent twice that amount. There is a third commentary was by the screenplay writers that I found dull. The deleted scenes are worth watching. For those interested in the Crane murder and the "whodunit" aspect there is a 45 minute feature entitled "Murder in Scottsdale" loaded with interviews and archival footage. The movie is based on Robert Graysmith's The Murder of Bob Crane, which I found to be interesting reading.

As anyone who is reading this knows, this was the story of TV's Bob Crane, star of "Hogan's Heroes," a popular show in the 1960s. The story of Crane, the one that makes him a subject of a major motion picture of his life, are two things: 1 - the good-guy TV hero was, behind the scenes, a huge sex addict; 2 - he was murdered, with no one ever convicted of the crime. To this day, it is still unsolved.

The movie hints very strongly that the killer was Bob Carpenter, played here by Willem Dafoe. Carpenter was a close friend of Crane's. Greg Kinnear does a credible job of portraying the television star.

However, the part about Crane's murder is only dealt with in the final minutes of the film! That was very disappointing and I was hoping to find out something or at least be given more information. They just kind tacked this on the end of the film.

Most of the film was about Crane's and Carpenter's escapades with women.....lots of women, beautiful and big-chested women, which you see in abundance in this film. Dafoe is the sleazy friend who introduces Crane to the beginning of the VCR age. That led to a whole bunch of sex-on-film and really whetted Crane's big sexual appetite.

Anyway, for people who watched "Hogan's Heroes," and there were plenty, this is a bio of him and perhaps, for those who know nothing about his death, who killed him.

A cautionary tale of the dangers of sexual addiction, `Auto Focus' shows what can happen when a person attempts to lead a double life – in this case, a straight-laced family man by day and a pornography-obsessed playboy by night. In `Auto Focus,' the family man/pornographer turns out to be none other than the well-known actor Bob Crane, the star of TV's `Hogan's Heroes,' who was found murdered in a Scottsdale, Arizona hotel room in 1978 under mysterious and sensational circumstances that included the uncovering of tapes Crane had made of his own sexual experiences. The general public was shocked to discover that a man they had invited into their living rooms every week for six years had been living such an unsavory parallel existence – though those who knew him well were apparently far less shocked by the revelation. Drawing on Robert Graysmith's book `The Murder of Bob Crane' for its inspiration and viewpoint, the film, written by Michael Gerbosi and directed by Paul Schrader, chronicles the rise and fall of this handsome actor, from his days as a successful LA disc jockey and his meteoric rise to fame as star of a hit comedy series, to his growing obsession with promiscuity and pornography, which led to the disintegration of both his personal and professional life - and, ultimately, to his death, most likely at the hands of his buddy-in-sleaze, videographer John Carpenter (though he was never convicted of the murder).

`Auto Focus' certainly does not shy away from revealing many of the salacious details of this true-life story. Schrader deals head-on with the disturbing nature of a mind so all consumed with the subject of sex that all other aspects of life become obliterated and distorted. What's fascinating about Crane – at least in the way he is depicted in this film – is that he seems to have had some sort of self-destructive death wish, for not only does he risk his career by sleeping with countless women, but he insists on leaving behind the evidence by videotaping many of his encounters, and then flaunting his `accomplishments' to others in the Hollywood community. In a way, such a cavalier attitude only underlines the sickness at the core of Crane's soul – which in a perverse, paradoxical way, actually makes Crane a more sympathetic figure than he otherwise might be. An enormous amount of credit for this also goes to Greg Kinnear who does a superb job of not only replicating Crane's style of acting but of showing us the tortured man Crane became in his later years. He was truly a man driven to madness by the demons within him, and we can all identify in some sense with that condition (our demons may not be sexual in nature, but they probably eat away at us just as ravenously as they did Crane). Kinnear gets outstanding support from Willem Dafoe as Carpenter, the Svengali-like figure who lures Crane into his world of photographed sex, and Ron Leibman, as Crane's well-meaning, caring agent who can do little but stand by helplessly as his client throws his career and his life away to feed this devouring passion.

The filmmakers have done an amazing job capturing the sights and sounds of the era in which the film is set. Especially impressive are the scenes recreating `Hogan's Heroes,' with Kurt Fuller, in particular, a standout as Werner Klemperer (Colonel Klink). It's also fascinating to see the evolution of videotape technology as portrayed in the film. How many of us knew that such equipment existed for home consumption as early as the mid-60's?

There's a real sadness to the final stretches of the film, made all the more poignant by having the dirge-like musical score run uninterrupted under the action. The effect is that we really get a sense of the total desolation of Crane's life at that point – as he has lost his family, his career, and his self-respect to the master he chose early on to serve. The loss of his life seems almost de rigueur given all that has gone before. `Auto Focus' is not always an easy film to watch, but for its unflinching look at an often-unappetizing subject, it deserves to be seen.

John Carpenter was a suspect in the murder, as were others. Carpenter was ultimately brought to trial and acquitted. The crime scene had been sloppily handled, and by the time Carpenter was arrested years later, evidence was missing. Carpenter died four years after his trial. The film's point of view suggests he was indeed the killer.

Crane had told his son that Carpenter was a hanger-on and he was getting ready to dump him, which police felt was a good motive for anger leading to murder.

Paul Schrader does a good job of directing, and the performances are solid from Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe especially. I do have to say that Kurt Fuller, a favorite of mine, was absolutely fantastic as Werner Klemperer in his role of Colonel Klink - one would have thought he was Werner - the look, the accent, the mannerisms - perfect.

Schrader shows Crane's decline, using both music and atmosphere to create what became the empty life of a man looking for something that he could never find. The DVD has a documentary about the murder on it, and his daughter states when interviewed that Crane was a wonderful father, "very doting." A sad story of the double life of someone who lit up the TV screen in the '60s.

Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) is a radio DJ in Hollywood looking for acting work. In 1965, he gets an offer for an unconventional project. It's a comedy in a Nazi POW camp. Hogan's Heroes becomes a big hit. He befriends home video salesman John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) in a strip club. Unlike his public wholesome image, his interests in strippers, sex, and home video are heightened by Carpenter and his state-of-the-art cameras. It's a toxic friendship of easy women, sexual proclivity, and hidden videos. In 1970, he divorces his wife Anne (Rita Wilson) and marries his co-star Sigrid Valdis, real name Patricia Olson (Maria Bello). Crane and Carpenter's friendship based on their sad common interest degenerates.

Director Paul Schrader often dives into the darker side of humanity. It's a sad portrait well delivered by Kinnear. On the other hand, the movie is not always great at delivering the danger and tension. For half of the movie, Bob Crane is not threatened with discovery. This keeps the tension low. It's got a chipper tone which is weird. It would have been nice to speed up the first half. It takes too long to get to his downfall. Willem Dafoe is equally strong and necessary for this movie to work. There is interesting work here but this should be more intense.

Bob Crane was a well known TV face whose lopsided grin and cheeky-chappie personality took him to fame and (modest) fortune with the 1965-71 TV series Hogan's Heroes (a family safe rip-off the film Stalag 17); but like many that have passed before him, his human weaknesses - in his case towards free love, porn and sleaze - provided his ultimate downfall.

This is 1,000 word review that could go, exclusively, many ways: The most obvious would be simply to review the film as an entertainment piece, which while fair and valid, wouldn't tell the whole story. The second would be as an exploration of the moral questions raised, taking on the very nature of "addiction and obsession." A third would be to review the nature of show biz itself and how - like Crane - you can easily go from "flavour of the month" to being "last year's model."

In many ways the above debates are more interesting than the film itself: which while being both credible and interesting, never bursts in to full flame. Indeed it spends long periods not really going anywhere or doing anything other than following Crane and his self-styled "best friend" John Carpenter (not the famous director!) - played by the oddball part specialist William Dafoe - from one sexual encounter to the next.

(The filming of these sexual encounters, while true and unquestioned, adds nothing to my understanding of Crane himself. The act would have happened, filmed or unfilmed. Indeed I never did learn whether he had any REAL interest in photography - which he claims in the film proper - beyond using it as a device for gaining extra sex gratification. Equally how expensive is the early video equipment and his all-embracing sex hobby? Are these the only reason he is broke after six years playing the lead in a hit TV show? )

Some of this party-to-party time would have been better spent explaining the early life of Crane, allowing us to understand "where he comes from" better. Is he a classic case of someone who married too young and ended up spliced to his "mother?" And like real mother's they are always finding embarrassing items hidden around the house!

(However even this argument becomes devalued when you consider his second marriage - to a contrasting blonde libertarian sex pot - also ended in acrimony and divorce!)

Given that this is a film of "best guesses", mine would be that Crane never really had a proper teenage life (he came from a strict Catholic household) and wanted to live his out decades after the fact. This film wants to portray him as someone who was lead astray by others, simply because that is easier to explain than someone who changes course dramatically of their own freewill.

Crane was approaching middle age when he first met the techno-wizard (and fellow sexual traveller) John Carpenter, his sexuality and taste simply couldn't have been influenced by any outside parties so late in life. Outsiders could only have been facilitators to living it out. Nevertheless his wider actions show a curious lack of maturity, who else would skip off work on a prime-time TV show in order to play drums behind some cheap stripper?

Director Paul Schrader (of Taxi Driver fame) has obviously being watching a lot of TV movies recently and scratching his balding pate over how to cover familiar material (family man presented with temptation, rise and fall, wages of sin, etc.) without cliché. Not to mention filming what is unfilmable: The inside of another man's head!

He has come up with only partial answers and a few professional fudges: Starting with a very standard approach (complete with horrible "cold fact" giving voice-over about Hogan's Heroes) before slowly sliding in to the modern "creeping hand-held camera with filters" approach and technique.

(Something that works quite well with some productions, presumably because we are used to documentary and news being presented in this manner. Maybe we, subconsciously, mistake poor production quality with reality? Here it adds little.)

Greg Kinear does an excellent job portraying not only Crane the ham actor, but also Crane the daydream believer and sex junkie. While going a little glassy-eyed and unfocused is in the scope of most actors, Kinear never goes over-the-top while slowly losing the plot. He also remains strangely sympathetic while exploiting his own fame and position for sexual purposes: A male perspective, but all I have.

The film starts with Crane - the LA DJ - spouting the happy-go-lucky banalities that radio professionals go in for, before being further introduced as a bouncy "success story" who is "going places in radio-land." However he want to act and employs a ("touch wood") agent to find him the right part. The upshot is an unlikely comedy about an unlikely German concentration camp.

He is a non smoking, non drinking, church going Christian, who rushes straight home - post radio show - to his long time straight-laced wife and picture-perfect children. In other words, a great place to start a sexual and moral slide from!

Crane, like many empty men that stumble in to things that make their heart go boom-bang-a-bang for the first time, hasn't the wit and wherewith all to see the limits and short comings of their new found hobby. He didn't realize that not everybody took his easygoing view of casual sex and by not being selective he alienated people.

No one should die because they enjoy casual consenting sex or cheat on their wives, but Crane died never having learnt there was (and is) a life beyond cheap thrills and that your casual actions can hurt the ones you love the most. A simple message, but Auto Focus takes 105 minutes to get it across.

Greg Kinnear plays Bob Crane, the star of the TV series "Hogan's Heroes". It follows his life from 1964 (when "Hogan's" started) to his murder in 1978. It chronicles his friendship with sleazy John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) and his obsession with photographing nude women and having sex.

The story starts off all sunny and bright with him being a very nice guy--he has a wife, kids and a house in the suburbs. Then he gets the TV series, meets Carpenter and slowly gets obsessed with sex and photography. Here's where the film made a real error for me--it's never explained where this sudden craving came from. It's suggested that Carpenter had something to do with it, but that's about it. It's not Kinnear's fault--his performance is great (even if he doesn't look a thing like Crane)--it's the script's fault. And the movie gets more and more depressing as Crane's marriages fall apart, his career crumbles and he can't stop himself. Also the movie changes--the film stock changes to video, the color fades, the camerawork gets jumpy...all adding to the downbeat feel. Basically, this is a very bleak look at the life of a man who let his obsession kill him. Also, if you're looking for any insights on to who killed Bob Crane forget it. The murder is still unsolved and the movie just shows a shadowy figure committing it.

The acting is good--Kinnear is just great--it's really good to see him stop doing those lame romantic comedies and taking a chance. Dafoe is, as usual, excellent. Also Rita Wilson, Maria Bello and Rob Liebman are very good.

This was a huge box office disaster when it came out (it's easy to see why) but it's not a bad movie. Worth a look...but it's grim.

I believe that this was the most severely underrated film of 2002, and it was also my personal favorite for a great year in film. Now, I sincerely doubt that many moviegoers would consider this one of the year's best, or even a great film, so this comes with a tentative recommendation. I wouldn't recommend this movie to just anybody, but I feel that fans of the prior work of Scorsese and Schrader will consider this a worthwhile endeavor. With this work Schrader continues his legacy of disturbed, distorted, doomed men whose selfishness and shallow nature ultimately lead them to great suffering as they destroy those who come close to them. Greg Kinnear's Bob Crane joins the likes of DeNiro's Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Gene Hackman's Harry Caul in The Conversation, and Nick Nolte's Wade Whitehouse in another Schrader masterpiece, Affliction. These are sad, empty men, for whom we can only half-sympathize; we feel for them because we suffer, but we condemn them because they force themselves and others to suffer.

The film follows the sexual exploits of Greg Kinnear as Bob Crane, the real-life star of Hogan's Heroes, who during and after the show became a full-blown sex addict, ruining two marriages and possibly sabotaging his career in the process. Willem Dafoe is John Carpenter (no, I know what you're thinking, and he's not), Crane's partner in crime who lacks Crane's charisma with women but is fed some scraps by Crane in return for his extensive knowledge of and access to video equipment. Crane's fetish is using the home video cameras to record his sexual trysts, which he reviews over and over again, looking for something that we can't see, and that he probably can't see either.

Kinnear and Dafoe's performances alone are worth the price of admission. This is the best, boldest, and most nuanced work that Kinnear has ever done. His performance is all subtlety and detail; he introduces Crane as a regular, aw shucks family man, but as the movie progresses we gradually see the facade fall as his quiet desperation and insatiable sexual appetite begin to consume him. Not content to go over the top and yell at the top of his lungs to be effective, Kinnear instead puts on a fake smile and charms with a velvety voice while openly degrading and hitting on women. The effect is one of the most genuinely creepy performances ever committed to film. Dafoe is the perfect companion to Kinnear's subtle predator; Carpenter is a pathetic loser, easily angered and easily hurt. He gets angry, yells, and does all of the things that you've seen Dafoe do in his other portrayals of guys you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley, or a lighted one, for that matter. It's effective elsewhere, and it's effective here. Together, these men form a pair so utterly joyless and shallow that just seeing them on-screen together made my stomach churn. Their dialogue is only incidental, usually reminiscing on previous sexual escapades or planning new ones, but it's the little tics, gestures, Kinnear's untouchable confidence foiled by Dafoe's insecurity, Kinnear's hidden hunger foiled by Dafoe's overt desperation, that give these scenes their resounding power.

Not to shortchange Schrader's direction, though, which as usual is right on target for the material. He begins in a brightly colored, idealized suburban landscape, filled with all of the usual imagery you'd expect in this sort of light-hearted period and location. Then, slowly, he slides into darker territory, carrying us into the decadent seventies, breaking shots into shorter lengths, shaking the camera, depicting with his cinematography and editing the fall of his protagonist. Admittedly, the techniques Schrader employs here to depict Crane's breakdown have been used many times before, but I still found them extremely effective here.

For the last thirty minutes of the film, I felt genuinely ill; not because I thought the projector was out of focus, as many have complained, but because Schrader and Kinnear were taking me to a dark place and immersing me in it. As I said before, this type of film is not for everybody, but for those interested in the dark side of man, this film is not to be missed. I think that at the very least, the merit of these depressing morality tales is that they provide an exact blueprint of the way not to live our lives. I suppose that showing Crane checking himself into therapy and dealing with his problems and utimately healing himself would be valuable as well, but it wouldn't make for a good film, or a true one. Some people argue against the very existence of this type of movie. My response to them is that in real life for every strong-willed person who solves their problems and triumphs over adversity, there is another loser who ultimately fails to deal with life and implodes upon their own insecurity and weakness. Until this changes, someone needs to continue making these films.

"Auto Focus" is a biopic/drama which explores the career and life of Bob Crane, sexaholic and star of the late 60's sitcom "Hogan's Heros". A highly sanitized drama with a la-de-da milieu and the look and feel of a sitcom, "Auto Focus" deals only superficially with the neurotic protag's preoccupation with sex while failing to dig deep into his aberrant psychodynamics and the seedy subculture he inhabited by night. A solid production in all respects, "Auto Focus" will most likely be of interest to those who remember Crane while younger viewers may find the film somewhat unsatisfying. (B-)

The film deals about Bob Crane(Kinnear), he's happily married (to Rita Wilson), he's posteriorly divorced and will meet various women(Maria Bello and others) in a troublesome activity. He obtained a lot of success with ¨Hogan's heroes¨ television series. His easy life falls apart as he becomes literally addicted to sex. The picture narrates the relationship with John Carpenter(Willem Dafoe)a video technician who would open him a new life style continuing a spiral of failures and sex towards the downfall . It's based on real deeds about the authentic existence and death of Bob Crane.

At the flick there are comedy,drama,love,humor,sex,tongue in cheek and a little bit of violence. Runtime movie is adjusted ,the run is approximately two hours . However is almost tiring but happen numerous scabrous and disagreeable events. This interesting story is basically a drama of one man's ruination. The picture is classified ¨R¨ because of crude and harsh scenes,sex,nudism, besides of a violent and cruel murder. The film attained limited box office and was a flop but the issues narrated are embarrassing and unpleasant for the great public. The motion picture is a slightly slow moving and for that reason is a bit boring , furthermore is mainly developed on interior scenarios. Greg Kinnear interpretation is excellent, he's sympathetic,memorable,comic, but also greedy and vulnerable. Willem Dafoe is very fine and Maria Bello is enjoyable and attractive. The soundtrack is well composed and conducted by Angel Badalamenti(Twin Peaks) and Fred Murphy cinematography is nice. This well-told movie is rightly directed by Paul Schrader. Rating: Good but with disagreeable moments.

Actor Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear), star of Hogan's Heroes, forms a friendship with a video enthusiast (Willem Dafoe) and together they become obsessed with sex, swinging, and photographing or filming the action.

This is a brilliantly disturbing movie. Kinnear carefully plays Crane as a blank-faced cypher who cannot see himself, and is comfortable with the surface of things. Thus photography is the perfect obsession for him; he can look without participating, even when he's looking at his own participation. Auto Focus is a clever title, referring to both the photography and the only person upon whom Crane can focus. He is lost in a world of obsessively meaningless behavior.

A look at IMDb's message board for the film shows that one of Crane's two sons is fighting the misinformation presented by director Paul Schrader and Crane's other son. It does seem that the movie distorts some biographical facts, but what biopic doesn't? This story of obsession and doom is worth much more than its attention to one man's biography.

Fifteen years before "Auto Focus" was a parallel film about Brit Playwright Joe Orton, his climb to fame, secret life, and subsequent demise at the hand of his close friend, Kenneth Halliwell.

In "Auto Focus" it's sometime-lead, often second-tier-actor Bob Crane, who's revealed to live a clandestine style during his rise to the top, and his ultimate end--with the implication of his close friend John Carpenter.

Whereas the earlier effort enjoyed superior direction by Stephen Frears, the latter is quite earthbound at the hand of Paul Schrader.

The quality of the photography of "Auto Focus" looks a bit like its title. Just place the dial there, point and shoot. Results: quite ordinary, like made with discount equipment picked up at a local video camera store.

The cast, however, is quite up to the project, with William Dafoe and especially Greg Kinnear rendering solid performances.

The question is, how does one make a remarkable film about rather routine talent and career? With a more expansive script elevating to the philosophical and spiritual, a more significant product might have emerged. As it is, this is a decent presentation about the consequences of excess and addition that makes its points through a good cast.

I didn't know very much about Bob Crane (or even about "Hogan's Heroes") when "Auto Focus" came out, but the story shocked me. More than simply looking at his obsession with snuff films, the movie itself is like two movies. At the beginning, everything looks all rosy and idealistic, but by the end, everything is grim and outright bleak. We might say that this represents not only Crane's lifestyle, but the world around him: when "Hogan's Heroes" debuted, our nationwide mentality was still one of innocence and optimism; by the time that the show ended, we were living in a world of cynicism. The movie does a good, if unpleasant, job showing that.

As for the movie itself, Greg Kinnear is intense as Crane, showing him starting out as a nice family man (at least he appears to be), but becoming very screwed up as time goes by. Willem Dafoe, as Crane's partner-in-porn John Carpenter (not the horror director), has a role as nasty as the Green Goblin, and makes the most of it. Also starring are Rita Wilson as Crane's first wife Anne, Maria Bello as the woman who co-starred on the show, and also Ron Leibman, Ed Begley Jr and Michael McKean.

Pretty good.

Sleazing its way through the invention of video cameras and the age of hippie ‘free love', Auto Focus tells the tragic tale of Bob Crane, star of the 60's TV hit series Hogan's Heroes. From an initial perfect-family-man image, his success takes him the way of addiction to pleasures of the unlimited-and-available-women kind, and he not only seeks vainly to justify his addiction but keeps making the same mistakes. Features rather too much nakedness to be a triumph for the holier-than-thou brigade, but remains a well-told and historically captivating tale.

"Auto Focus" tells the sad, sad true story of Bob Crane, the sitcom star of "Hogan's Heroes" whose life became a rapid downward spiral due to his obsession with sex and homemade pornography. It cost him two marriages, his relationship with his three children, and eventually his life, when he was beaten to death with a tripod in an Arizona motel room in 1978, a murder which is unsolved to this day.

Greg Kinnear, in a very good and convincing performance, plays Crane as a man who is sympathetic and just wants to be liked but is weak in the face of temptation and self-involved. We feel really sorry for him as he lets himself get deeper and deeper into the muck, but it's even sadder because he had no one to blame but himself.

His best friend, John Carpenter (not the horror director), is a tech whiz who always has the very latest video equipment and it is him who led Crane into making homemade pornography. He's played by Willem Dafoe in a great, twitchy performance. Dafoe is so good at playing creepy, greasy characters that it's hard to believe the guy has actually played nice, honorable characters before in movies like "Platoon" and "Mississippi Burning".

There are some problems with "Auto Focus". Even though it has a fascinating story to tell, it never really, REALLY grabbed me the way it should have. The character of Bob Crane is viewed from a distance; even with Kinnear's excellent performance I never felt like I really knew or understood him. As a result, the movie lacks the emotional punch that I felt it should have had.

I was really glad that Paul Schrader was the one that directed this film because sex is what ruined Bob Crane and a no holes barred approach is what is needed if your going to accurately portray Crane's sordid life. This just could not have been made by the Lifetime Network and still have the impact. Greg Kinnear is perfect as the so called normal guy with the innocent smile. Kinnear has that type of persona so he's extremely well cast and what I thought was interesting was how he conveys Crane as a sex addict who absolutely does not think that what he is doing is wrong. Willem Dafoe is also excellent as his buddy John Carpenter (Not the filmmaker). Fascinating to watch Crane allow sex to totally consume him and wreck not only his career but two marriages as well. I don't think its a great film, we really don't see anything that we didn't know already and of course we don't know who murders him in the end which leaves the ending a little inconclusive. But it's very well made and I wouldn't be surprised if Kinnear and Dafoe both pick up Oscar nominations.

Wow, is Greg Kinnear nothing short of amazing in this film or what! An incredible performance as Bob Crane, seriously virtuoso. When, towards the end, he visits his agent and is all messed up, and starts saying "sex is normal. I'm normal" - Kinnear reaches a pinnacle in his young film acting career. I have always felt that actors ascend to the next level of craft and stardom when they breakthrough with a biographical role; see - Denzel Washington in Malcom X, Ben Kingsley in Ghandi, Robert Downey Jr in Chaplin, Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. And now Greg Kinnear has made that leap with Auto Focus, a well-crafted and seductive film by Paul Schrader, Hollywood's last bastion of non-sugar coated filmmakers. Basically the story of Hollywood's most intriguing unsolved murder, Auto Focus also pulls back the curtain on "good guy" Bob Crane's lecherous and painfully discombobulated private and secret life. What is also amazing about this film is how is records the birth of video and the VCR. Bob Crane turns out to be one of the pioneer "users" of this technology. When we see or hear video, video cameras, or VCRs, we probably automatically think of home movies, recording episodes of Star Trek, or the Star Wars prequels' lack of cinematic quality. When Bob Crane heard about video cameras and VCRs, he automatically thought of sex. Though the film makes no mention of it, it is quite prophetic in showing us how the technology of video created hard-core pornography and turned it into a billion dollar industry. If you think about it, nothing has profited more from video than porno, and nothing ever relied so dearly on video like porno. Bob Crane instinctively felt this, though he never was a pornographer, so to speak; he knew that sex and video can go hand in hand. Unfortunately, this was also his downfall. Like most Paul Schrader writ or directed films, by the end you get that queasy feeling, the feeling you get at the end of Goodfellas, the feeling of sadness that this great ride is over and the feeling of emptiness and loss that all that greatness came crashing down. Bob Crane's descent into moral madness can be sickening, especially when juxtaposed with Hogan's Heroes. I almost felt the desire to shower, to cleanse myself after viewing this film. I love movies that produce reactions from me, movies that linger for days. This is one of them.

I saw this film at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival. Fascinating material here. Auto Focus is a film about the life and murder of TV actor Bob Crane, best known for playing the titular character in Hogan's Heroes. The film traces Crane's career during and after the series, focusing on his increasing involvement with John Carpenter, a man with whom he picked up women and made pornographic films. I was hoping that Schrader would try to dig a little under the surface, since obviously this man was leading a double life, but instead he gives us a strangely upbeat voice-over from Bob Crane, who can state with equal chirpiness "the show was a big hit" and "John Carpenter was acquitted of the murder." It was almost as if the point he is trying to make is that Crane himself had no insight into his duality, and no real guilt, either. It made the film oddly unsatisfying, as if there should have been more "weight" to the story. Nonetheless, Greg Kinnear (as Crane) and Willem Dafoe were superb.

Let's face it: Bob Crane was a lightweight actor, whose one-note portrayal of Col. Hogan in the unlikeliest sitcom hit of the 60s made him a household name. Personally, I never understood the appeal of either "Hogan's Heroes" or its star.

Greg Kinnear taps into Bob Crane, though, from the first frame.

The viewer learns that the pre-Hogan Crane was an affable, lovable kind of guy whose LA radio show had a big following. His agent sees him as a combination of Jack Lemmon and Jack Benny, a potential star of fluffy sex comedies with a benign sort of sex appeal and a knack for snappy one-liners All of that was a vast overestimation of Crane's talents.

Crane reveled in the fame that "Hogan" brought him, but he seems never to have taken a long view of his career. When the show ended he was left rudderless and idle, having slowly cut the ties that bound him to ordinary life -- his work, a stable home life, and his religious faith.

While he coasted, Crane took advantage of the easy, cynical charm he conveyed on screen to lure women. By the dozen. I think he probably enjoyed being the least likely man in Hollywood to skulk strip clubs looking for prey, and to devote thousands of yards of videotape to his exploits with them. But his naivete is telling: Crane allows himself to be led into a netherworld by John Carpenter, (Willem Dafoe), who teaches him that putting sex on film is more fun than having it. And there is a brief scene where Crane meets a dominatrix and reveals himself as not quite savvy enough to play this game to win.

Addictions tend to claim those who are on the way up or the way down. Even before Peg Entwistle famously jumped off the Hollywoodland sign in 1922, there have been scores of aspirants to fame or has-beens whose compulsions have killed them, leaving their work on screen the least compelling,least-remembered part of their lives.

This is NOT a good movie. I don't know what you people are being fooled by. Is it all the breasts? Is it because it's dark subject matter that Paul Schrader is directing? I really don't get it, 'cause this is a bad movie. It's a boring story, that is not worth telling. It is not well acted, written, or directed. So, please, everyone remove your head from your posterior and realize that this is not a great, or even good film. It's mock-intellectual. That is all.