Another long overdue review … this is going to get random and gushy ‘cos it’s amazing after countless viewings how this one continues to blow me away.

Everytime I watch this I think it’s going to lose something; but, everytime I watch it, it seems only to become more intense, to move and inspire me more. I need to watch it more often. There are so many more great moments in this movie than I ever come to it expecting. First and foremost the one thing that will satisfy almost anybody, I think, is the soundtrack. I’m constantly wracking my brains over why this movie is so hard to find these days (it’s on TCM here in the UK about twice annually, and you’ll find about as many VHS copies on eBay each year too … well worth grabbing, I promise) and the most logical seems to me that there are a lot of expensive music rights involved (including Lennon / McCartney’s “Give Peace a Chance”) (my other most prominent theory is simply to do with how stunningly relevant the movie remains, the cynic in me believing that no major media corporation with all today’s political pressure would want to make available a movie like this … I swear there’s every chance it would lead to uprising if enough people saw it).

Anyway, it’s one of the great movie soundtracks, the easiest comparison is to Cameron Crowe’s selections for his movies … the movie itself actually kinda resembles Almost Famous to me in a lot of ways – Bruce Davison looks a lot like Patrick Fugit in places, and his position in relation to the main story is similar, a spectator swept along by one of the 60s-70s’ many wild waves.

There’s the love story – the way I react to Linda (beautiful Kim Darby, another aspect of the movie that seems to improve with each viewing) and Simon (Bruce Davison) in this movie definitely leads me to believe it’s purely a personal thing, I can’t put into words how I feel my insides churning when these two look at each other … only to say it’s a similar feeling to that I get when talking to my own true love. There’s some amazing chemistry between these two actors. When they’re on the fairground ride, as she mouths, “do you love me?” to CSNY’s “Our House” – that would be the moment I instantly pinpoint as to why I love this movie so much. Well OK, that and the final line – “PROVE YOURSELF ALIVE!” – set to Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “The Circle Game”.

The violence in the end scenes had me shaking on this viewing even more than I did the first time. As with a number of other movies (Soldier Blue and Dawn of the Dead spring to mind), I found myself wondering if I was seeing a different cut altogether. It’s a truly horrifying finale – I finally recognised Bud Cort (Harold in Harold and Maude) this time round, and I think maybe that was a factor in how much the ending got to me – I was a lot more into his character, and watching him in those final scenes is almost too much to bear. It’s the way the movie swishes from the light to the dark – 30 minutes earlier you were laughing at him holding his nose in the presence of a couple of people smoking pot; suddenly his life is on the line for no reason but pure pathetic human stupidity. I think that’s what the movie captures best about James Simon Kunen’s book, the way Simon is a spectator, neither on one side nor the other with any particular level of commitment. Depending on how you view it, the movie arguably highlights the craziness, the lack of direction of the protestors just as much as it does that of the pigs, the politicians, the authorities. Kunen’s book is all about that ambivalent approach to things and as you might have noticed from this site’s URL, I’m all about ambivalence

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 8:00 pm in 5 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as political, Seventies, soundtrack, top 250. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.