From the filmmaker that brought us The Kid Stays in the Picture comes an animated docudrama about the infamous 1960’s Chicago Democratic National Convention riot. Brett Morgen’s new film combines real life news footage with cell-shaded computer animated sequences (cheaper looking visuals similar to Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly) to fill in the blanks and tell the story of the infamous Chicago Seven trial.
In the wake of Martin Luther King’s death, the resulting riots and fires resulted in Chicago becoming a police state. A revolutionary group of hippies named the Yuppies crossed state lines to conduct an unpermitted protest in Lincoln Park. A riot broke out resulting in some of the worst police brutality of the century.
But most of the story is retold within the famous trial, using the aforementioned animation to reenact court transcriptions, flashing-back from time to time. The use of animation is brilliant because the events that transcribe in the courtroom are-almost too unbelievable and surreal for a filmed reenactment. But the real gem is when the film hit’s it’s climax and we are transported into the middle of the all out riot using an unprecedented amount of video sources. The result is very moving.’
The film is edited to a soundtrack of anti-establishment music from yesteryear and today. The film has an eerie relevance to the current politics of today. I’ve always found it ironic that we must FIGHT for PEACE. It’s sad to see out nation in such an incontrollable state. It makes you wonder how it came to this and could we be headed to that place again. I hope not.
/Film Rating: 6 out of 10
February 1st, 2007 at 1:56 pm
To Riverside County authorities the following information may concern:
I have reason to believe that Paul Krassner was behind the recent so-called children’s school strike against the Iraq War at Desert Hot Springs High School on 1/8 in an effort to generate publicity for a anti-war movie he helped script about the sixties, “Chicago 10″, that was shown recently, 1/17-1/27, at the Sundance Film Festival, in an attempt to help acquire a distributor for the film, without which it would be a financial failure, its current status.
As to the intentions of this well known homosexual, bisexual pervert, where he is coming from and his attitude towards children, you can see from his own words in a piece written by him for the LA Times.
The Parts Left Out of “Chicago 10″ by Paul Krassner
…Now we were tripping on LSD as the hurricane reached full force. “Hey,” Abbie yelled over the roar, “this is powerful [bleepin'] acid!”…On the afternoon of December 31, several…friends gathered at the Hoffman’s Lower East Side apartment, smoking Columbian marijuana and planned for Chicago….PAUL: Did you ever see that movie, “Wild in the Streets? [A thought balloon shows the image of a group of teenagers dumping LSD into the water supply.]…I decided to take a tab of LSD at lunch before testifying…For millions of young people LSD served as …deprogramming…from mainstream culture…
The need for brevity affects context in the above, but his encouragement of drug use, etc., remains clear in the full reading of the 1/28 LA Times article. The crass effort by this irresponsible predator to generate publicity for a movie using a school strike disgusts some of us in its misuse of school children for motives of money and profit.
This note was originally sent to Desert Hot Springs High School teachers and administrators directly touched by the strike with the suggestion that they, as Riverside County residents, might want to contact child abuse authorities for further investigation. The extent to which ordinary people are cowed by celebrity prompts this follow up letter from LA County residents who are perhaps closer to the issue.
Excuse the anonymity of myself and my contacts, unavoidable given the nature of the film industry. We are already being accused of being anti-Semitic and homophobic in making our information known though a good half of us fall into the above two categories in some manner. The issue transcends name calling and is a matter of a violation of the public trust for reasons of personal profit. It goes one step beyond the outrageous Cartoon Network stunt in Boston in its use of children as the vehicle for publicity and deserves further investigation to insure that such things do not happen again.
November 17th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Want to find more bisexuals on biloves.com.
Good luck!
March 1st, 2008 at 2:26 am
That’s Yippies, not Yuppies!
April 17th, 2008 at 9:27 am
I was there. My life was permanently altered by the events. I could make my own movie about what I saw, didn’t see, and wished for.
I see that “hysteria” is alive and well in the antagonisms against the idealists for peace. Had we had the internet that war would have ended long before it did. Why has this Iraq war continued I will never understand until I’m 90 when the truth finally surfaces.
The reason I respond is that the movie has finally made it to Alabama.