Don't trust the pointless, academic negativity you see here. Directed by Joe Berlinger of critical darling "Paradise Lost," "TONY ROBBINS: I AM NOT YOUR GURU" is a powerful piece of vérité about a most unconventional, controversial man. The naïve negative reviews you see here for this film are simply bad because the reviewers are reviewing the "man," and not the film. There are pointless accusations that Robbins believes he is "cool," because he uses foul language. What, on earth, would that simplistic point, an inference, no less, mean in a documentary? Maybe he should have created a less complex portrait by cleaning up his language for the first- graders who saw this by accident. There are pointless slams about his lack of psychological education, when that entire industry—has anyone seen the mental gymnastics it took to explain the latest, wildly wrong- headed DSM by a psychiatric and psychological community who have expressed embarrassment about the discipline's lack of direction—and, again, this has nothing to do with the film. Neither does denying that some individual could experience cathartic change from the oddness of the Robbins event put under a microscope in this film—from its planners and facilitators to the bizarrely American come-from-nothing story of Robbins himself, a man who knows the significant abuse many of his followers have come to share (we are talking genuine abuse: murders; rapes; abandonment—not tiny things). The film, in a sense, poses a question can someone articulate, a genuine communicator, who has suffered and risen above enormous pain—is someone like that, even when that individual becomes a cottage industry onto himself—better than an academic who has only sat outside true pain and does his or her best to understand what that other, the patient who has endured the unspeakable, has gone through? For a strong portrait of a uniquely individual American, see it; if you're a die-hard skeptic—I double welcome you. But grade the film—not the man or what you believe is possible.
