I first learned of Norman Mailer from the documentary "When We Were Kings", about Muhammad Ali's Rumble in the Jungle. I later read about him in a book of famous people from 1981, and saw a picture that Annie Leibovitz took of him in 1974.
So now I've seen a movie that Mailer directed. What a strange one. The idea of a celebrity president seemed far-fetched half a century ago, but now we've had both Reagan and Trump. "Maidstone" is done mockumentary-style, even more so than Christopher Guest's movies; this almost looks as if Mailer got a bunch of friends together to party.
What I concluded is that Mailer was a 14-year-old boy trapped in a grown man's body; the depiction of gender relations certainly implies that. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a terrible movie - anyone who's seen Woody Allen's "Everyone Says I Love You" knows the definition of a TRULY terrible movie - but not anything that I would recommend.
