Medium Cool (1969)

Expected more

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

One of the craziest and most tension-filled time in America was during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. After all, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had just been killed, racial tensions were at an all-time high, folks were angry about Vietnam and people were simply scared. So, it's surprising that so few films actually deal with this in any way...and this is why I wanted to see "Medium Cool". Too bad the film was ponderous when is clearly should have been exciting.The story is an odd one. In some ways, it looks like a documentary film where a film crew follows a reporter (Robert Forrester) during the course of him doing his job. And, as the film unfurls, you see the crazy events of the day as they take place. This documentary approach is heightened by most of the folks in the picture, as they are non-actors. But other moments seem more staged (such as the fun sex scene that originally earned the film an X rating) and often they are a bit dull. Overall, the picture desperately looks like it was done by a first-time filmmaker--complete with sub-par camera work, poor pacing and a semi-professional look to it. For the life of me, I cannot see why this film has been so well received.

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.

A news cameraman from Chicago and a single mother from West Virginia. What are the chances of these two meeting and having a relationship? It happens in this movie and what's more, it happens in the midst of intense social and political turmoil. This movie captures the intensity of the political turbulence that surrounded the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. It conveys the anger of the protesters and their suppression by the police and the military. Indeed, this movie dramatizes the power of the government and what can happen when the government decides to assert its power. Robert Forster and Verna Bloom give incredibly strong performances as the two people who unwittingly get caught up in the maelstrom of the protests.

Movies have a way of capturing the moment better than recreating it. I can only dread what a recreated 1968 in Chicago would look like from a Hollywood perspective. It would probably resemble something out of Forrest Gump. But Medium Cool happened to capture some brutal fight scenes with police in Chicago as well as scenes from the black ghettos. You can't recreate this stuff. This isn't a documentary but cinema verité and combines fiction and non-fictional elements. It's all shot with Chicago of 68 in the background. A landmark and infamous year for the US with the assassinations of RFK and MLK as well as the 1968 Democratic National Convention which was met with severe state repression. The state wasn't negotiating at this time, it was brutally sending men off to war and attacking those at home with the hired goons of the police force.It's a great movie which manages to combine fiction and non-fiction and shows us what the sixties were really like. It wasn't all love beads and LSD, although there is an amusing psychedelic sequence which takes place in a club.I think what I liked most was that even people who were non-political were being dragged into the politics of the time. Events were that serious at the time and people had to begin picking sides, the pleasant, white, middle-class interior of the Chicago DNC or outside fighting and raging against the police.