Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow (2006)

Nice effects though.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Hubert Selby was one of those tiresome flash-in-the-pan enthusiasms that infected the 1960s, when anti-social lowlife/outsider/under-achiever marginal types became the rage---for the fifteen minutes it took for it to wear out its welcome. My mother was the exec for library services at Grove Press in the late 1960s so this book, and others like it ("Naked Lunch", "Cain's Book", etc.) were around the house. I read "Last Exit To Brooklyn" and found it terminally boring---its "appeal" was readily apparent: small-time pathological nonentities consumed with negativity destroying themselves, described in morbidly clinical detail. Yuck.Selby's claim to fame as the King Of The 1960s Hipster Dung-heap was that he poured it on like a manic-obsessive autodidact junkie, which is what he was, and what the hipsters gobbled up---he furnished a proctologist's view of life. They're all here: the junkies, drunks, whores, perverts, psychos, all in the language of the gutter, the bullpen, the dopehouse. *Yawn*. "Last Exit To Brooklyn" is an ugly book about ugly losers doing ugly things. No insight, no challenge-revelation-transformation, nothing that characterizes *real* literature that stands the test of time. Authors of the previous dispensation used lowlifes as *counterpoint*---think Faulkner, Chekhov, Hemingway, Anderson et al. Marginal lowlife-outsiders are inherently uninteresting because they've got nothing to declare but their pathologies. Boring BORING B-O-R-R-R-I-N-G.Selby stood in apostolic succession to Malcolm Cowley, another one-book drunk, who wrote "Under The Volcano"-- -a tedious panorama of chronic inebriation. Boring at the sub-atomic level.This is what passed for "cool" back then, and now, at the dawn of the new century, lowlife-outsider types are back in fashion, so it's inevitable that the sludge of the 1960s-70s would be resurrected, like zombies in a cheap horror flick. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy for posturing chasers of "cool" who never missed a meal and always slept in their own beds."Last Exit" and "Naked Lunch" had/has its biggest appeal for suburban undergraduates, (and perpetual adolescents who never outgrow their teenage fixations) consumed with self-loathing who have a twisted emotional need to immerse themselves in the cesspool of semi-pornographic urban filth like "Last Exit", "Taxi Driver", John Waters movies, Robert Mapplethorpe photos, etc. People who actually come from neighborhoods like the one in "Last Exit" don't read books like "Last Exit". Why would they? It's not only loathsome and disgusting, it's dishonest writing at the most basic level---it furnishes a wish-fulfillment fantasy for spoiled college types, and perpetual adolescents in "the arts" (*hawk-ptoo*).The inside of this Selby's head is fully revealed in the next book he wrote, called "The Room". If you liked "Last Exit" you'll really get the hots for "The Room". It's the apotheosis of all that Selby was. But with that book, he was basically "written out"---he had nothing more to say, nothing anyone would pay to hear---his fans of the 1960s had grown up, and moved on.Now Selby is back, for another fifteen minutes. This numbing "documentary" about a Johnny-one-note "author" whose brief success was due solely to fashion, *not* merit (he's a terrible writer, like most self-taught scribblers) trots out all the inevitable '60s relics---Amiri Baraka, John Calder, Lou Reed, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ellen Burstyn as well as present-day porn-addicts Robert Downey Jr., Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jared Leto, Henry Rollins, Marlon Wayans, John Turturro, the usual suspects. Half of the aforementioned are communists, junkies, atheists and perverts themselves, and several have significant police records,which figures. This sorry cast all subscribe to the '60s mantra that to be "art" it's got to be SICK AND DIRTY.Uh, r-r-right. Moving right along...It's emblematic of these coprophagics that they stridently call junk like "Last Exit" "art", as if that's the get-out-of-jail-free pass for their morbid obsessions.This is the slimy bottom of the stinkiest dumpster you ever saw, and there will always be a market for it. If that sounds good to you, by all means, dive right in.

This film is a soulful, compassionate, funny, inspiring fly-on-the-wall look right into the heart and soul of one of the great, unsung minds of American letters. One of those movies where you come out wanting to run home and get right to work making the world a better, smarter place. Kenneth Shiffrin and Michael W. Dean show their love for their subject with great passion and understanding and uncanny skill in this impressive, no-budget directorial effort. We need more of this kind of insightful, passionate film-making in today's take the money and dumb-em- down, shoot-em-up medium.-- Jonathan Shaw (Author of 'Savage Grace' and 'Scabvendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist')

I saw this wonderful film last night at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. I have often wished I had met Cubby Selby in person - the directors, Kenneth Shiffrin and Michael W. Dean, did more than deliver a film - they create an outlet for us all to spend a moment with this unsung artist. The insight this movie gives into the world of Cubby Selby is pretty astonishing. I certainly wasn't expecting to be handed keys to his creative process while simultaneously being uplifted by the journey of this absolute spiritual being who was unapologetically human. Cause for both tears and laughter... this film will touch your heart.

Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll be Better Tomorrow touched me, taught me, revealed to me a man through the eyes of those who knew him, maybe loved him, but were most certainly enriched by him. The portrait they paint is not always pretty, often tragic, but the soul of the man shines throughout.Cubby's story is not a triumph, but it is exceedingly human and real. An exploration of the adversities that we all face, to greater and lesser degree, how they can bring us to swamp-crawling despair of self-destruction, yet be redeemed by the pure and simple will to overcome. Cubby persevered, and in that found glory over his darkness and demons. The devils still remain, but Cubby found the way to harness them, to drive them, not be driven by them.Art should be like a stone, thrown in a pond, creating ripples reaching further and further outward, disturbing, disrupting the placid quiet. This film shows Cubby as a boulder among pebbles.