DVD REVIEW: Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth – “Descartes Walks Into a Bar…”

Sharp Teeth

He is the most honored writer living today. He’s been a nitro truck driver, a tuna fisherman, short order cook and a door-to-door brush salesman, among other things. He’s changed the face of science/speculative fiction with his anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions. He’s written novels, short stories, comics, television criticism, television and movies. He is Harlan Ellison and he is a man to be reckoned with.

Dreams With Sharp Teeth attempts to track Ellison’s life from hot-tempered kid, to the Angry Young Man/Enfant Terrible of the arts to his current state of eminent curmudgeondom. It features home movies from his childhood, his reminiscences and interviews with many of the people who are numbered among his friends. The film opens with Robin Williams reciting some of the more incredible events alleged to be part of his life – and he acknowledges or denies them.

There are sequences shot within the confines of the rambling and decidedly odd [in a good way] Ellison Wonderland [pictured below], his home of more than forty years. Neil Gaiman, another extremely well known writer describes as being the dream home of an eleven-year old boy – “minus the octopus pit.” He is not wrong. Gaiman became friends with Ellison even before he created the Sandman series that made him famous – suggesting that if one is not mortifyingly stupid, there’s a good chance that the crusty legend might like you, too. [Truth in advertising moment: Ellison replied to a letter I wrote him in my youth, in two very conversations I had with him at comic Con in 1991, he did not call me an idiot, so I consider myself thrice blessed].

Ellison Wonderland

Among other bright moments in the film, we see Ellison genuinely moved as he plays two brief home movies that are the only photographic remembrances he has of his father; typing away in a bookstore’s front window, and being made up for a scene that was eventually cut from the Masters of Science Fiction television adaptation of his short story, The Discarded. Even the Enemies of Ellison are touched upon [as Gaiman notes, you have to live a pretty specific life to engender that kind of malice]. Plus, the legendary Richard Thompson provides the film’s excellent score.

As film biographies go, Dreams With Sharp Teeth wastes no time on niceties and pulls no punches [director Erik Nelson clearly understands his subject well] – and Ellison wouldn’t want it any other way. Indeed, he cheerfully admits to his flaws and insists that without them he wouldn’t be the [angry] man he is. Oh, yes, the Descartes thing? Is a joke that Ellison tells in the film. It’s strangely more appropriate coming from him than almost anyone else I can think of.

Features include: Six Readings by Harlan Ellison; An Evening With Sharp Teeth: The Film’s Premiere, and Pizza With Mr. Harlan Ellison and Mr. Neil Gaiman.

Grade: Dreams With Sharp Teeth – A

Grade: Features: B

Final Grade: A-