The Cruise

A well done, extremely funny documentary that leaves you wondering if it is actually staged. The "plot" of a neurotic NYC tour guide operator is full of acute observations of life, by a person who may or may not be deranged. He is a romantic, but not in a classical sense. Rather, he fills you with a sad humor and made me draw a comparison to another misguided societal interpreter, Ignatius Reilly (of Confederacy of Dunces fame).

This movie is just fascinating to me. It is essentially just a documentary that follow a quirky New York tour guide around. Then you begin to listen to what he is saying and you get under his skin in a weird way. You realize that here is a man with an absolute joy of life and a philosophy that truly does work for him. As strange as he may be, we should all be so lucky to have it all figured as as he seems to. He speaks in a flowing stream-of-consciousness style and seems to enjoy using multi-syllabic words. We watch as he lectures his tour groups on various aspects of New York history and landmarks and on only one occasion do we see anyone sort of laughing and mocking. No one else seems fazed by him at all. Is this just New York? He is a philosopher of the city. His philosophy reflects living in an urban jungle of steel and concrete. He feels the city as a Native American might "feel" the woods. This movie is highly recommended. Seek it out.

I loved the idea of this film! I love New York and stories about the creative and eccentric people that live there. But from the opening scene I knew that his nasal whine would irritate me, and it did. I made it through this movie even though I was tempted to turn it off a few times. There were several moments that were amusing and artistic (several comments on the tour bus; spinning in between the Twin Towers), but overall I found it to be annoying and pretentious. I guess I am getting bored with unambitious schlubs whining about the world and how much it sucks. It just seems trite to me at this point. There is a difference between living in a rebellious state, and TALKING endlessly about it like you are the most important person in the universe. And the guy in this film seemed like the latter to me. Many of his monologues were just ridiculous, and I did not care about his point of view at all. I more enjoyed watching the people around him, than him.

Part Allen Ginsberg, part Woody Allen with a sprinkling of Harvey Fierstein and Albert Camus Timothy Speed Levitch takes you on a unforgettable tour of NYC - The genuineness of his love for NYC, it's history, it's culture is infectious- There is an alluring innocence about Levitch though you can't help wondering what the issue or issues are that darken his soul; is it drugs, his sexuality, mental illness? Add Levitch to the long list of highly actualized, highly troubled human beings whose struggles illuminate the journey. The scene of his visit to the grounds of the twin towers is haunting and you wonder if this film could have been made in post 9/11 world

The Cruise (1998)

Who is Timothy Speed Levitch?

A New Yorker, most of all. If you're a New Yorker, you know what I mean.

He's a quirky individualist who is the tour guide on one of those buses with an open second layer on top, and he rambles with idiosyncratic abandon about different aspects of the city. It would be fun to have him for your real tour guide, but I don't do tour buses, and of course the movie is all most of us have instead, so you do get something here of the man's style and his love of the city. Eventually it becomes more than a weird love letter to New York, and we come to see how a man is coping with being alive in the city and making sense of the systems that he finds insidious (including the justice system, which he once negotiated as an accused).

If you like documentaries, and you like New York, and you appreciate oddball people, this might just be a great little movie. Overall, I found it too narrow, too dependent on liking the main and only character, and too unexceptional (actually) to take off.

"Don't look up until after you're dizzy." This is just after he tells a boy on the bus that it's fun to stand between the twin towers and spin until you get dizzy, and they you can look up and it seems like the two buildings are about to fall on you. In a way, this defines fully half of the man, his boyish lack of restraint, his joy for life. He layers lots of facts about New York City into this zany fun outlook.

I didn't get swept up by his monologues partly because I've known too many people like Levitch, at least in pieces, just by knowing lots of artists and others who want to do their thing and the world can take it or leave it. His freewheeling theories are really not that strange, either, and the self-aggrandizing hidden by a veneer of humility is a bit too much about ego. Listen to me, he says, and we have to listen, even when it's not really so interesting. Don't get me wrong, I find Levitch to be an attractive kind of person, someone who is alive on their own terms, who has theories about how that world works that can't hold water but are functional anyway, and who is actually happy amidst all the grey sadness.

Still, I got a bit restless and bored by the not-so-brilliant after all chatter. Yet, it occurs to me that other people may not have run into these kinds of people, and this movie is a great entry point, and hopefully one that makes you appreciate all of them, Levitch in particular. Really, I wish I was more like him, and maybe in my own way I am, though I lack his unselfconsciousness. But what I mean is we are all secretly wishing we could just throw out all the worries we have and live what seems to be a very simple life, giving people pleasure on these bus tours and therefore seeing New York yourself, and lots of different kinds of people, every day you go to work.

It's not enough for a great movie, but it's unique enough and unpretentious, and filmed with a low-budget accessibility (by the director), you should give it a shot. You'll know after ten minutes what the flavor of the whole movie is, and even much of the content.