Rourke played a Hollywood's Bukowski in Barfly. That is why Bukowski didn't like it. But if you have seen documentaries of Bukowski, footage, pictures and read his books, maybe you find that Factotum is very close to Bukowski's real appearance and attitudeDillon doesn't look like Bukowski at all but he did honor him in this movie and this you can see in his walking, his soft and low voice and his whole attitude through the movie. It is hard to portray Bukowski's life in a movie but I remember particularly the scenes where you see Dillon dropping his writings in the mailbox, having bad jobs and being homeless, all of which was a big part of Bukowski's life before he reached fame and made decent money. They even took the time to show a little about Bukowski's relationship with his father (whoever has read Ham on Rye could think that Buk's father in real life could have behave like the one in the movie (a despotic and acid man)Also memorable were his thoughts on writing and writers. The movie gave me the same feeling I get when I read Ch B. poetry or novels, but this is only my experience. I do trust the feelings and I think that this movie was done with respect and love for this writer and all what he went through before being discovered.

This movie has some good lines, but watching Dillon's less-than-masterful Rourke impersonation just left me wanting to see the original. I like Marisa Tomei but she's no Faye Dunaway.Also, in my opinion, the number one movie rule is to make the lead character someone you care about. You might not LOVE the character, but you should care what happens to him. This is achieved in Barfly with the hilarious running gag about the fights with Eddie the bartender. The main fight in Factotum is when, completely unprovoked, he stalks up to the Lily Taylor character in a bar, punches her to the floor and calls her a whore.The whole thing just didn't work. Again, some great lines -- some laugh-out-loud funny -- but as a movie overall it's a fail. Mediocre attempt at reinventing something that was brilliant, and you can't get past that. Next? Let's remake Breakfast at Tiffany's with Kate Hudson.

I wasted 90 minutes for the movie already, so i'll keep it short: the movie has NO story in it. It's about the life of a man losing one job after another. I'm still wondering how you can spend money to make a movie, after getting a script like that! There are so many scenes that i felt like they had to do, just to get enough material together to stretch the movie to 90 minutes. Scenes where they just sit there and no say a word and nothing at all happens. I guess i have seen worse, but it's definitely one of the most boring movies ever! The only reason for the second star is that Matt Dillon still did a good job. Even though there was not much to act.

I swear, I felt like taking a nice swig of some liquor, after watching it. This movie, is character driven, and Matt Dillon plays Henry Chinaski, a quite amusing character that calls himself a writer and goes on about life hitting the bottle, and finding new jobs and going through the motions with total disregard of it, the movie doesn't have an overall theme though, is just a more casual movie, with a very entertaining in a dark way character. The constant bar scenes, the constant drinking, that dark lull of it, has an odd and quite dark attraction to it. Some will say, that Chinaski slow crawl to degeneration will make someone be turn off to drinking. But quite the opposite, at least for me.This movie is not recommended for everyone, but if you stick around long enough, it could be a nice surprise though.