Has anyone actually seen this at Sundance? If so, how is it? The topic's interesting, the "cast" is great, but how is the actual film?
shareI saw it last Saturday and as far as I am concerned it is a mish mash about hippies drunk on fame and making a name for themselves rather than trying to stop war. The graphics and film making was good. What annoys me the most is that people these days will read into it as history repeating itself and praise the director for being so politically daring. Unless you have experienced it you can't have a viable opinion on it.
shareThanks for your opinion! I agree with the last statement, hence me asking for the opinions of people who've actually seen it :) Yeah, any film these days with the slightest hint of politics is being taken as a commentary on current situations. Just to clarify, when you wrote "it is a mish mash about hippies drunk on fame and making a name for themselves rather than trying to stop war," are you referring to the film or the events themselves? Or both?
shareI was referring to the events and the "characters" it just seemed that they played up so much for the media attention and being celebrities than really getting down to business so to speak. The film has made me want to look into the actual events to see the historical aspect of it all. Fair play to the director (his name escapes me) when he introduced it he said "if you are looking for a history lesson this is not it" it is merely his interpretation of the film reels and documents he had. People will still believe everything that they see though and this is how history is changed. When I said you have to experience it to comment on it, I meant the actual events, I am not saying that I was there but I have been witness to other international crisis events that have been marred and skewed by film makers who just see dollar signs.
With documentaries and things like this I always prefer that it is telling peoples own stories rather than someone elses vision.
Brett Morgen said he started making this film five years ago, and admitted that he thought the Iraq war would be over by 2003. He didn't intend for it to parallel the current situation, it's just that history has a nasty habit of repeating itself. And as for your comment on the hippies, they were called yippies by the way, only caring about attention, Abbie Hoffman became so despondent about his failure to enact social change that he ultimately took his own life.
shareUnless you have experienced it you can't have a viable opinion on it.
That is how he ended his comment. Like the people living in America now do not know about living in a country that sends them to war to fill the private pockets of the industrial military complex?
Are you kidding me? This *beep* is going on more than ever in this country. The only difference now, is that we have become so *beep* brainwashed, docile and scared to sacrifice a few luxurious. The public is stupid and weak.
Stop looking at the world through the narrow chinks of your cavern.
Getting famous for telling the truth, let em get hi of of their fame. Focus on the message, not the medium. Become cognitive!
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Did you experience it? If not, then why are YOU expressing an opinion on it?
But frankly I don't think that statement is true: I can and do have viable opinions on all sorts of events and people that I have not directly experienced, either because they occurred far away or even before my time. For instance, I have viable opinions on Hitler and the Holocaust, but it happened before I was born. How is this possible? Because there are documents and film and historical accounts of all kinds (including eye witnesses) and I can read and think.
I wasn't in Chicago the year of the police riots, although I was certainly of the right age and culture to have been. But - strangely - I still have an opinion of the events and people. If what you said were in any way true, the government could do anything it wants without repercussions simply because the rest of us would not be able to have a viable opinion of their actions.
As for "hippies drunk on fame" - first off, they were facing the very real possibility of jail time. What they were "high" on was a sense of history and moral concern. And it is a matter of history repeating itself: this year in St Paul MN, there was another police riot, journalists were seized and their video equipment confiscated BEFORE the protests began, to lessen the chance the illegal police actions could be filmed. Pure fascist tactics, and - once more - in protection of a party dedicated to pursuing an unpopular and murderous war. It would be sheer blindness NOT to see some parallels.
i haven't seen it but i'm curious...i got to work a bit on some of the 2d animation in it but i was kinda sad to see the majority was cg mo-cap. oh well...drawing abbie's hair over and over was becoming a pain anyways. haha.
shareTraverse City Film Festival aired this tonight, august 1, 2007, and i'll be the first to say this is the best film i've seen in six or seven years! amazing films are few and far inbetween, and this one is amazing.
shareI saw this recently and I don't know what IN THE MOVIE ITSELF is supposed to be a comment on current events. I'm sure many viewers can see parallels, but the movie doesn't really make any explicit comparisons. Most of this movie is based on actual court transcripts, so while it certainly has some liberal sympathies, it's not guilty of the "liberal bias" I'm sure it will inevitably be accused of--whatever you think of Abbie Hoffman and co. this movie is unlikely to change your mind. The only thing they bothered me was that they kind of implied that all the violence on the Chicago demonstrators was done by undercover police provacateurs. Even if that were true, there's no way of really knowing that.
shareWell, I don't know about the undercover police part. I do know that many of the officers in riot gear wore strips of cloth over their badge numbers so as to avoid any repurcussions for their actions in the street. Also, I don't know if it's in the film and it's not important, but Abbie Hoffman had a yo-yo in court one day and "walked the dog" across the entire courtroom.
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Yes, at Sundance last year. I'm glad to see it is finally being released. It's a very good film. I hope it inspires a new generation to speak up!
I don't think that it'll be released wide enough to make an impact on the "youth of today" as such films like Meet the Spartans and Juno do.
You won't find many teenagers today that would have interest in a documentary about the chicago riots.
Be kind rewind videos a la carte, bleeop!
My son is 15 and he liked "Chicago 10" a lot. It's not a documentary in the usual sense of the genre. No talking heads. No subtitles of who is who and what is what. It mixes kinds of film: animation, music video, action film, documentary. I found it very interesting because of that mix. It's not really very accurate as a depiction of what happened in Chicago in August of 1968--it's a celebration of one point of view of what happened: the point of view of the Yippies and especially Abbie Hoffman.
shareI just saw it and loved it. I thought it was so well done, and the animation really was such a creative and novel way to portray the trial. The music was beautiful, appropriate, and riviting.
I actually cried when I saw the protesters being beaten. It was so shameful that our country would deny our right to protest in order to serve the agenda of those in office...my how history repeats itself.
I read the trial transcripts a few years ago, and I can't begin to tell you what a blatant disregard for constitutional rights that trial was,of course, thanks to Judge Hoffman. The fact that every single conviction was overturned by the appellate court tells one what a shameful miscarriage of justice this trial became. I've been working in litigation for over 12 years, and this was just downright stunning...no other way to describe the fiasco.
Hi, Indiepoo.
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