Planet Sick-Boy: http://www.sick-boy.com "We Put the SIN in Cinema"
© Copyright 2003 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.
The Weather Underground (opens Friday, November 14, at the Little Theatre) is about as good as a non-Errol Morris documentary can get. The subject are the radical domestic terrorists who called themselves the Weathermen and, throughout the first half of the '70s, detonated explosive devices in dozens of carefully chosen buildings, and were even responsible for capturing a hefty bounty for the prison liberation of Timothy Leary.
We see, via scads of home movies, news footage and present-day interviews with the interested parties, the origin of the group, a powerful splinter of the Students for a Democratic Society who took their name from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" lyric, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," and took control of the SDS at their annual meeting in 1969. Their message was "Bring the War Home," and their practices were so extreme and so intent on taking down The Man that even the Black Panthers were like, "Dude, that's too extreme even for us."
Which is funny, on account of the Weathermen's belief they were fighting for, among other things, an end to the war in Viet Nam and a halt to the government's persecution of groups like the Panthers. Were these just confused white kids with nothing better to do, or were they on to something? If you think it's the former, Underground is probably just going to make you mad because its two filmmakers (Sam Green and Bill Siegel - who also created documentary shorts like Pie Fight '69 and The Rainbow Man/John 3:16) are a little too compassionate towards the group's political views. This is a pretty one-sided movie.
Underground is narrated, at times, by Lili Taylor and is scored by the likes of Fugazi's Brendan Canty and Ian MacKaye, and it's really jam-packed full of great stuff, including what appears to be a real 8mm clip of a Weathermen orgy. Bottom line: They make today's protestors look like a bunch of douches. Fight the power!
1:32 - Not Rated
========== X-RAMR-ID: 36300 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1217906 X-RT-TitleID: 1123029 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 8/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews