Val 2021 is an American documentary film. The film is rated R and it is an hour and 49 minutes.
Val 2021 Review
Val 2021 documentary film is directed and produced by Leo Scott and Ting Poo. It follows the life and career of actor Val Kilmer.
The film follows the life and career of actor Val Kilmer, including footage of Kilmer shot by himself throughout his career, footage of his childhood, and home movies.
Gratefully throughout his entire career, Val Kilmer filmed a ton of behind-the-scenes footage of himself on movies, his auditions, the films that he made with his brother when he was young. And this documentary painstakingly pours through that footage in a very revealing way.
You get to see footage of Kilmer with Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn when they did a play together, as well as some highly distressing footage of the making of The Island of Dr Moro, which was a cursed production from the start. And you can only see that even clearer now.
This is a very heartwarming documentary, especially if you’re a fan of Val Kilmer, which I am. Over the years, I have watched him take so many different roles.
He became known for a lot of bigger-budget stuff like Top Gun, Tombstone, or Batman Forever.
But in the 2000s onward, he started taking a lot of risky choices, and you realize quickly that that’s really more his mindset. That’s where he was more comfortable.
That’s the kind of stuff that made him feel like he was expressing his artistry. And as some of you may know, he tragically was diagnosed with throat cancer and has since recovered, but it has severely impaired his voice.
So the documentary also covers that time period where he was doing his Mark Twain play and trying to get financing for the film, which was, of course, halted by this diagnosis.
The Doc can be very heart-wrenching, but also very heartwarming. There are some scenes where you see that he has genuinely rebounded and has found sort of a new lease on life with his family.
The documentary is narrated by his son, Jack Kilmer, who sounds a lot like him, and that was a really wise choice.
But it reveals a far more personal side to Kilmer than we perhaps haven’t really even known about. And it sort of opens up your mind to the way we perceive celebrities.
Because despite the fact that we know their actors or directors or writers, whatever, and we know that their material isn’t necessarily them. It’s a little hard to detach from that.
You see him in Tombstone, you see him in Batman, you see him in Top Gun and kiss, kiss, bang, bang. And you’re like, yeah, that’s Val Kilmer. And yeah, but it’s not.
And great actors are very capable of making you believe things that they just don’t feel. And so it’s very revealing to see this behind-the-scenes look at someone who was a pure artist at heart and just wanted to express themselves through their creativity.
And that you don’t really know anybody when you watch them in movies there great at their job. They’re really good at pretending to be someone else. And so seeing behind the curtain, especially in Kilmer’s case, was enlightening.
There’s one sequence in particular that I found difficult to watch, and that’s when he’s trying to sign autographs at some Con, and he’s looking at all these pictures of, as he says, his old self. And he says he feels like he’s selling his old self and nobody cares about who he is now.
And it’s a very sad sequence, and you really feel for him. But since the documentary is edited by other people, it also doesn’t feel self-serving. It shows embarrassing moments.
It talks candidly about things. It’s very, very well done. And I would highly recommend watching it, even if you don’t necessarily find yourself being a fan of Kilmer’s work.
I think it’s worth watching if you’re an artist at heart, or especially if you have something in your life that’s keeping you from doing something you love and you have no control over it. I think that that documentary is going to speak to you as well.
It’s on Amazon Prime right now, and I would highly recommend checking it out.
Guys thank you so much as always for reading the review of Val 2021 Documentary Movie. See you next time.
Val 2021 Trailer
Check out the trailer of the new Documentary Biography film, Val.
