KING COHEN: THE WILD WORLD OF FILMMAKER LARRY COHEN – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

Documentaries as of late have been getting great reviews, but I’d be hard pressed to find a recent one that I really enjoyed. Festival darlings, Won’t You Be My Neighbor and Three Identical Strangers were both pieces of work that had interesting enough subjects but were films marred by bad pacing and an overall lack of flow from one section to the next. There are many that would disagree with this statement, but to me, the best documentaries are those that do their material justice while also being engaging cinematic experiences and only one documentary I’ve seen of recent has actually done that: King Cohen.

Now admittedly, there might be some bias involved here. Being a movie buff, I tend to enjoy the stories of filmmaking more than the stories of anything else, but the material and the filmmaking on display here is undeniably entertaining. Larry Cohen has been a popular writer/producer/director of films like Black Caesar, God Made Me Do It, Q: The Winged Serpent and The Stuff. Regardless of what you think of this oeuvre (I tend to respect it more than love the films themselves), the exploration of his career, from working as a writer in television to being one of the most respected filmmakers in Hollywood is entertaining. There’s a soullessness to the idea of the Hollywood system: the endless rewrites, the shaping of art around marketing trends, the corporate nature that can often collapse good ideas into bad ones, Cohen looks at those trends and flourishes within them. And he’s smiling throughout all of it.

Director Steve Mitchell, smartly, puts that smile, that energy, at the heart of the film. There are moments when the movie drags its feet (especially as it starts to move away from Cohen’s most fruitful periods and into the modern day) but all the while there’s a confidence imbued in the filmmaking that seems to sprout from Cohen himself. He’s just joyous to be in the world of moviemaking. Doesn’t matter the movie, doesn’t matter the maker. There’s also an exciting element of genius to the way that he operates. Cohen is a notorious rule breaker, something that is highlighted with an uncontainable admiration. Some of the stories are hilarious, some are scary, but all are incredible.

King Cohen is a documentary worth seeing, that might just be enough. It’s a breezy, entertaining time about a man who has lived dangerously and lived to tell the tale. The footage of Cohen’s work and his stories surrounding them are so good even a bad documentary could have made them worth watching, but this is actually a good one so that helps.

 4 out of 5 Stars