medium cool

chewy

anyone seen this before its on bbc tonight about 11

looks very different very interesting


Medium Cool is an almost impossible oddity: director Haskel Wexler wanted to shoot a fictional, narrative film wherein actors mingled with real people in an uncontrolled social environment. With that in mind, he began filming a movie about racial tensions in Chicago during the weeks prior to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, on the assumption that there would be a riot there. Then he brought his cast, crew, and camera to the scene of the proposed mayhem, and waited. . . and lo and behold, civil disorder broke out. It's intensely strange to see actors, playing characters, interacting in a real-life situation with real cops and real hippies fighting and running about. This is made stranger still by the story, about a reporter covering the growing unrest in the black ghettos of the city who discovers that the FBI may be in cahoots with his network. In preparing his script, Wexler assumed that the riot would be racial, but in fact it turned out that most of the rioters were white, so the final scenes seem to interrupt the narrative and make the film an odd pastiche and a commentary on the lack of connection between politics and life. Perhaps more of a curiosity than a wholly successful film, Medium Cool is still worth seeing for its striking footage and unprecedented combination of the real and the imaginary

Frank Grimes

I saw it before, the music is the only good part. I found the movie itself pretty boring.

mike65

I saw it when I was about 18 and thought the ending was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. But thinking back I suspect its all style and little substance.

Mike.

chewy

i'd just never seen a film like that done before where they stuck actors in real situations like that , the doc made it sound cooler then it was... nothing ever really happend in the movie...

it a great way of doing things i'd love to see more films like it it speciafily cinema verite? that does that?

the few scenes with the protest were cool but it never really engage in the issues....


and i don't know why the guy was interested in the girl?


i dunno why finished the movie like that, it was like they did't know what do ... but the camera turning on you was good

Pigman II

It's a mildly boring film that clearly IMHO only has the reputation it has because of the circumstances under which it was made and the fact that it incorporates actual real life events into it's pondering narrative. I liked the way the ending connected back to the very begining in a very cynical way, the only problem being the 100 or so minutes in between the two.

As you mentioned BBC2 showed it last night but the doc they showed the previous night (Look Out Haskell, it's real!) was actually more interesting than Medium Cool itself.