[sixties-l] re: Steal this movie

From: Jeffrey Apfel (japfel@risd.edu)
Date: Fri Jun 02 2000 - 13:27:50 CUT

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    radman wrote:

      radman says:
      anybody else see this thing? is it really that bad?

    No, but when I see a quote like this from the review

    >you not only know what's going to happen, you're already
    >wincing at how trite it all seems.

    it reminds me once again of a theme that surfaced in this group way back
    in the 1990s: the relative
    paucity of powerful films (fiction, too) dealing with the era. This
    hasn't been a problem where the
    war is concerned since war narratives have inherent power. But when
    literature or film turns to the
    broader Dionysian aspects of the sixties--the power of which took so
    many different manifestations,
    and the remembrance of which is arguably a key reason people frequent a
    group like this--things
    often seem to ring hollow. Rob Cohen's A Small Circle of Friends? . .
    .Stone's The Doors? The NBC TV-Movie The Sixties?

    Seems to me that the most powerful cinematic treatments of the sixties
    deal with the era in hindsight
    rather than "in the moment", as in Karel Reisz's excellent adaptation of
    Dog Soldiers (Who'll Stop
    the Rain), which views the Kesey era from the jaded vantage point of
    late Vietnam. Or even
    Soderbergh's quite recent The Limey, the sixties theme in which is also
    handled in hindsight. Of
    course, these are exercises in anti-nostalgia, and it says something,
    too, that jaded treatements seem
    more powerful than innocent ones.

    Jeff Apfel



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