Doc Watch: Film Geek (2023)

Watched:   09/15/2026

Format:  TCM on DVR

Viewing:  First

Director:  Richard Shepard

It's always weird to watch a documentary about someone talking about themselves and their family.  In this way, the recent award winning doc by Mariska Hargitay My Mom Jayne absolutely works.  As her mother Jayne Mansfield passed when she was so very young, it's really about her learning about her own mother decades after the fact.  She just happens to have the best possible access to Mansfield's history.  But she also is clear eyed about remaining objective and talking about it when she isn't and what it means to live with that legacy.

Film Geek (2023) tosses anything like objectivity out the window in the first minute of the film, and you're just along for the ride as film maker Richard Shepard recounts his youth in 1970's and 1980's Manhattan, which was a whirlwind of movie mania and NY-based Gen-X childhood.  This is paired with our director/narrator trying to unpack how movies tied him to a father he wants to present as a romantic rogue and bon vivant and his mother as a saint.

It can feel like just an endless reel of "remember this movie?" and "boy, Apocalypse Now sure is good", but does pick up a bit when he gets into specific movies and how they shifted his perspective, from All the President's Men to a briefly glimpsed porno at a drive-in.  

New York - the New York of the 70's and 80's, which is almost a thing of legend now - is a major character.  It's a city on the decline, but still bustling.  Just populated with pimps and hustlers instead of people in Smurf costumes trying to get you to take a picture for $20.  It's movie theaters tucked into buildings, near and far.  It's also a world we did see captured in movies up through the late 1980's when it seemed like actual filming in New York screeched to a halt, but was a place all of us of a certain age grew up seeing in our movies.  

The tougher angle is the one he tries to present of his father, who he still clearly and dearly loves, but what he pitches as surprises about his dad feels... oddly predictable?  He's a mystery figure with multiple sources of income but no 9-5 job who frames his world as that of an artist while not really producing art.  He seems *interesting* - but Shepard refuses to let us really know him.  He's protecting his father.  It does not take much imagination to connect dots that dad was up to stuff that wasn't going to make the cut, if our filmmaker knows.

I do understand what the story is:  here's an early Gen-X'er who came of age in an era when cinema could feel like catching a flame in your hand.  And his father was the one who showed him how.  It's a feral youth under parents who didn't want to stymie their kid.  He got to make movies.

But it can also feel like an excited kid showing you their baseball card collection.  It's interesting when they pull out a particularly special card, but it also kind of bleeds into a survey of movies someone saw.  And, yes, it's a remarkable youth in cinema, one predating HBO and even really rental of movies, and in a place where theaters are everywhere, all showing different things, which was not always the case in the suburbs.

And, yeah, it inspired Richard Shepard to make movies.  Which is maybe more inspiring in itself than becoming a podcaster or, worse, blogger.

I just am not sure there's enough there in the movie for the 2 hour runtime.  There's probably a version of this that feels less like name checking movies for an hour, but I did put on a movie called "Film Geek".