Artivels Undescribable Perfection

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

gavin6942 A TV news cameraman in Chicago find himself becoming personally involved in the violence that erupts around the 1968 Democratic National Convention.Roger Ebert credited Haskell Wexler with masterfully combining multiple levels of filmmaking to create a film that is "important and absorbing". That is an understatement. This film is great on its own (without the real world footage), but Wexler really lucked out on his choice of subject matter. He was in the right place at the right time to get these kind of shots.What results is not only a film of the highest caliber, but a piece of American history presented in a way that might even be called entertaining. And heck, it has a young Peter Boyle, so you cannot beat that.

dougdoepke This unusual film combines fictional narrative with live footage of the turbulent 1968 Democratic convention.The movie made a splash upon first release. At the time, it couldn't have been more topical for the explosive political events then taking place. Director Wexler had his camera fortuitously placed to catch the bloody clash between protesters and Chicago cops backed up by the National Guard at the 1968 Democratic convention. Wexler caught the afternoon clash in the park, but not the probably unfilmable bloodier riot of that evening. Nonetheless, it's near documentary footage of an historic event that remains the movie's chief attraction.The movie itself is non-linear, with little narrative or dialogue. Instead it fades in and out on reporter Cassellis (Forster) as he learns some ugly truths about the state of the nation, circa- 1968. His and cameraman Gus's (Bonerz's) run-in with the black radicals in a Chicago ghetto remains a haunting slice of angry cinema and appears, to me at least, to be largely unscripted. I expect it was the first personal exposure many white audiences had to black rage then bubbling up in urban centers. This angry encounter, combining with raucous anti- war protesters and paramilitary police, present a vivid profile of the civil unrest of the time-- (Oddly, however, I don't believe the word 'Vietnam' is uttered once in the dialogue).We also get a sense of dislocation through the characters of Eileen (Bloom) and small son Harold (Blankenship). Uprooted from their West Virginia home by an absentee father, Eileen now ekes out a living in Chicago, while Harold tries to adjust to city ways. Their rural background and accents mark them as hillbillies in their new surroundings. Nonetheless, the sophisticated Cassellis finds Eileen's naïve simplicity appealing, and their little tour of the psychedelic nightclub reveals something of the urban counterculture flourishing at the time.I get the feeling Wexler wasn't sure how to end the quasi-narrative part of the movie, and there, I believe, he stumbles by settling for a clear contrivance. Nonetheless, the movie's last shot of his turning the camera onto us suggests we too are part of the story, which seems fitting for a film of this innovative sort. Anyway, the movie remains a one-of-a-kind, and though no longer topical, does furnish a fascinating glimpse of a turbulent time, which in many ways is still with us.

jonathan-577 A rare directorial outing by all-time great cinematographer Wexler, this is generally acknowledged as the most politically radical film ever produced by a major studio. In freewheeling, semi-improvised, ideologically calculated scene after scene, it depicts an apolitical television cameraman's awakening of consciousness and abandonment of the role of passive observer. The class and race politics are four notches up on any comparable contemporary studio feature, that's for sure - with the surprisingly patient explanation of how 6-o-clock-news ideology oppresses minority communities, leading in to a love affair with a working-class single mother instead of some vanguard hippie, you could even argue that this Americanization of Godard has better ideological legs than the master himself. Sure it meanders a tad, and the stylistics can date, but there's nothing else in any movie ever that compares with the climax, as the actors make their way through actual documentary footage of the 1968 Democratic convention and attendant street battles. I mean, how did such a finely balanced mix of integrated narrative, Euro-tics, American underground film and straight-up documentary even occur to them? And how did they then manage to actually pull it off with honors? Pretty damned impressive.

andrew-j-mcguire Seriously, what is this movie? I am a young man, and I know my generation seemingly all suffers from ADD but I can sit and watch the original Pride and Prejudice without feeling super antsy. I am familiar with classic Hollywood, I am familiar with exploitation films, I study films which might make this all the more surprising to hear me say that I absolutely hate this film. I feel that there is no central plot and honestly there is nothing about the Dem. convention until very late in the film.Before I go any further, I have seen this film only once, it could take more than one viewing to fully appreciate the direction-less train wreck that is Medium Cool, but I will never take hours out of my life for this movie again. To those who have not seen it, unless you need some background noise for your nap, skip this. To those who praise this film endlessly for no apparent reason, please inform me as to why this movie is so great. I am not trying to be condescending in any way, I truly am curious as to why people rave about this film.