gauthierdonna
Lifetime Total
1+
IMDb Member
15 years
Reviews
Waiting for Hockney (2008)
Is there a Billy in each of us?
Ever spend several months on a project at work and wait for the approval of your boss' boss? Well, Billy Pappas has you beat!
He spent 10 years on a small painstaking pencil portrait, doing nothing else for 10 hours a day, and bet all his marbles that one person in the world would approve. No, not approve but make him famous!
First time director Julie Checkoway excellently captures Billy's struggle over several years in Waiting for Hockney. The story is paced so we get to know Billy today and how he got this way. How he got out of bed each day to make just a few deliberate marks with his meticulously sharpened pencil. How he attracted some weird characters around him to also help him swing at windmills. And how the meeting and judgment with Hockney came out in the end.
I thoroughly enjoyed Waiting for Hockney far beyond learning how Billy ticks. His mother Cookie who dotes on her 30-something boy. The impresario Larry Link pulling Billy's strings. Someone in the audience asked into the air "where did they get these actors?" only to be reminded that this is a documentary and these are real folks with memorable lines that you swear came off a script page.
You'll laugh and cringe at Billy studying hair and lips to draw them so precisely. You'll cry at Cookie's love for her son and worry that fame will change and spoil him. I even got an important clue from her specifically-worded note to Hockney where Billy gets his exactitude. And you'll scratch your head at the cast of hangers-on.
In the end, you'll wonder if Billy will "win". You'll want to see the portrait in person, as I had a chance after the April screening in Baltimore. And then all the film's characters walked out of the darkened screening room in the flesh as if they'd just stepped off the screen. "They really do exist!" as the M&M and Santa Claus say to each other in that commercial.
And you'll think about who you allow to judge you and why any of us give away that control. This film will make you feel and think. See it!
He spent 10 years on a small painstaking pencil portrait, doing nothing else for 10 hours a day, and bet all his marbles that one person in the world would approve. No, not approve but make him famous!
First time director Julie Checkoway excellently captures Billy's struggle over several years in Waiting for Hockney. The story is paced so we get to know Billy today and how he got this way. How he got out of bed each day to make just a few deliberate marks with his meticulously sharpened pencil. How he attracted some weird characters around him to also help him swing at windmills. And how the meeting and judgment with Hockney came out in the end.
I thoroughly enjoyed Waiting for Hockney far beyond learning how Billy ticks. His mother Cookie who dotes on her 30-something boy. The impresario Larry Link pulling Billy's strings. Someone in the audience asked into the air "where did they get these actors?" only to be reminded that this is a documentary and these are real folks with memorable lines that you swear came off a script page.
You'll laugh and cringe at Billy studying hair and lips to draw them so precisely. You'll cry at Cookie's love for her son and worry that fame will change and spoil him. I even got an important clue from her specifically-worded note to Hockney where Billy gets his exactitude. And you'll scratch your head at the cast of hangers-on.
In the end, you'll wonder if Billy will "win". You'll want to see the portrait in person, as I had a chance after the April screening in Baltimore. And then all the film's characters walked out of the darkened screening room in the flesh as if they'd just stepped off the screen. "They really do exist!" as the M&M and Santa Claus say to each other in that commercial.
And you'll think about who you allow to judge you and why any of us give away that control. This film will make you feel and think. See it!