Hemingway

If you are going to judge any writer or artist since a moral standard, a contemporary politically correct moral standard, you can rid off almost all the great art of the past because if you are looking for saints, people who love cats and feed birds, that people could be your type of friendly person of today, but they never will produce a piece of art, you are looking on the wrong part of humanity.

What make great Hemingway is not he was a admirer of bull fights, like millions of others. Was not he hunt animals like millions of others. Was not he use rifles and guns, like millions of others. Was not he get drunk every single day of his life like millions of others. He could be one piece of crap like million of others. But he created some of the most fascinating and important books from the last century, on any language. He could be like your sorry and politically correct and double standard ass of today, but he wasn't. He could have a farm with beautiful little animals. Nobody cares for someone like that, unless he finally write something absolutely marvelous, like all the great books he wrote. If you like animal care, you can retire to a farm and watch over piggies, cows, bulls, chickens and worms, and wait for someone film a biopic about you.

But Hemingway wrote some of the most important and memorable books of the past century on any language. Some of those books are brutal, because he live a brutal life, someone who ends by took his own life the way he lives. Millions of people has done that, too. But if you write The Oldman and the Fish, A farewell to arms, From whom the belss tolls, Death in the afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and win the Nobel Prize, man that's a life worth to live and worth to be told and retold.

I'm not American, but Mexican, but Hemingway is one of the most important writers not only from the US, but from the entire world. If that doesn't ring a bell, Moralists, you can go away to Gilligan's island. This is a biopic of an absolute admirable man, who could be like millions of others, like I just have said. Instead, he left a literary corpus that still is one of the American true treasures of their literary history, someone that can make you feel proud to be part of his nation, proud as human being, and also proud of reading him and find someone extraordinary, and not a poor drunk failure who liked to kiss cows and chickens in a remote farm.

If you like that, be my guest. But before that, please, read his books and if you doesn't end admiring his intelectual stature and his brilliance as a writer, then you don't know to read, and you deserve to live in the Fantasy island. This biopic is a masterpiece, well worth for the men who inspired it.

This is an excellent bio of an iconic figure in American literature. However, the choice of Jeff Daniels to voice Hemingway as he read excerpts from his novels and short stories left me scratching my head and turning on the mute feature. His reading was monotonous and one-note with absolutely no voice inflection whatsoever. The bio's narrator Peter Coyote would have been much more effective, or Liev Schreiber or Adrien Brody, for example, who all have rich, masculine voices. If you could get past Daniel's bland reading, Hemingway's life history done by Ken Burns was well done, informative, and enlightening.

This is the life of passionate and complex man. Here the documentary is very much one of an outsider looking in, like walking through an old museum and seeing lots of memorabilia in glass cases.

The format seems cookie cutter - a Burns documentary and flat narration where the subject of the day could be anything.

It shows what, but never really understands why.

Obviously there has been much effort in to collecting material. But, we are presented with a dry collage of events.

I enjoyed this documentary; as I do most all documentaries done by Mr. Burns and unlike so many other reviewers, I am a fan of Hemingway's writing; a millenial fan at that. And in the spirit of Hemingway, I'll keep this review short and to the point.

The main focus of this six hour affair was Hemingway's relationships; especially with regards to the women in his life. I found this choice interesting, and insightful. The only downside to said choice, is that other parts of his life were glossed over; parts I find exceedingly engrossing; i.e. His literary beefs (Faulkner immediately comes to mind) and the friendships he formed in Paris with his fellow artists. Despite me knowing quite a bit about most of his contemporaries in Paris, a little backstory about each would've been an welcomed addition. These are my only real complaints about the documentary. Here's to hoping an equally good Faulkner or Wolfe documentary is in the works.

This was broadcast this week in 2-hour time slots on three consecutive nights on PBS. It is very well done and I can't imagine anyone watching it and NOT learning a lot new about the man. His life certainly was not one of a role model and perhaps his many, many faults, both personal and interpersonal, were a necessary part of developing the writing style that made him indelibly famous.

Perhaps even less well known are Hemingway's four rules for writing well:

USE SHORT SENTENCES.

USE SHORT FIRST PARAGRAPHS.

USE VIGOROUS ENGLISH.

BE POSITIVE, NOT NEGATIVE.

Back in my working days I took a course on effective writing, the essence was the same. I would add "use active voice, not passive voice" when you can.