The Worst Film Ever

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

I am not usually a fan of added-in animation. There are a few movies, Pink Floyd's extraordinary antiWar film 'The Wall' one of them, in which the animation provides graphic imagery to enhance the surreal feeling for the viewer. But in that movie the imagery is mostly a nod to Jungian archetypes morphing as it does from animal form to out-of-control mechanical killing machines. There are times when it works beautifully to complement the protagonist's suicidal angst, and times when it doesn't work as well, but it meshes well with the score to heighten the mood of the music. In 'Chicago 10' the animation provides the courtroom re-enactment to fill in the gap of not having actual courtroom video. The actual human beings are rendered in cartoon form. Does it succeed?-- for me it isn't as powerful as having live actors either impersonate or interpolate the roles of the courtroom persona. I think for me it would have worked better to have re-done those scenes with actors. But . . . But I want to say how powerful the movie is. . . I knew the outcome, I am of that time----but the tension continued to accumulate as the trial and the actual scenes wove a story of an overview of America in the heartland in 1968.This should be required viewing for anyone born after 1965 and maybe earlier. It has always been difficult for me to describe to my children how polarized the nation was during this period... I've never felt I could generate for them that vicarious tension necessary for understanding. This movie accomplishes that. The animation isn't to my taste--but it works nonetheless. Would it have been more powerful if real actors were used for the court scenes?? Maybe. And maybe it is that cartoonish abstraction from reality that the filmmakers were trying to achieve, at an event which perfectly embodied the insanity of those who were siding with militarism while it was killing their own. There is enough actual video used to allow a lot of the film to show us the people involved as they were then, and what happened to them, with the animation overlaying. I think that more footage of the Vietnam war, the obscene news footage that Americans were exposed to nightly, might have been useful too, in recreating the ambiance of that time. Quite the contrast to the sanitized photojournalism of the current war in Iraq which stays conveniently and purposefully out of view, out of mind for American citizens since 2003, the Vietnam drama took place live in primetime, and the shockingly visceral quality of that televised carnage finally overcame the credibility of government rhetoric about stopping the Red menace. Thank you for this look, and feeling, back in time. Well done.

The Kid Stays in the Picture was a great documentary with a refreshing style that managed to keep me hooked into a subject that I honestly wasn't very interested in. So I was extremely excited to see Brett Morgen creating this documentary about history that I was very interesting in and.. Well, Morgen probably reached a little too far on this one.This documentary is a mix of the very powerful archive footage of the demonstrations and events leading up to them, and a rather insipid animated recreation of the trial. There are no retrospective interviews (many of the 8 are now deceased) and there is no narration - both omissions that suit the style of the director and help emphasize the time and place of the events.The archive footage could possibly have carried the film by itself. But this documentary is also about the trial. Without any footage or audio of the trial, how do you recreate it so that it appears as the farce that it was - while doing justice to the amazing news footage of protesters being maced and beaten? To do so would honestly have been an amazing accomplishment. Animating the trial was a bold move, but the end result is visually inadequate and mixes poorly with the news footage.I have no problem with the use of animation, but the animation itself is of very low quality and isn't rather creative. For the trial scenes, I believe the intention was to create a comic look and feel to highlight the nature of the trial itself - but the uninspired designs are too smoothly rendered with wooden mo-cap movement that appears borderline uncanny valley. Other demonstration scenes were animated in a hand drawn/cut out style at an extremely jerky 3-4 frames per second that is difficult to watch to say the least - thankfully they are short. The one redeeming quality of the animation is the voice acting which is top notch across the board, even if Hank Azaria's Abbie Hoffman sounds a lot like Moe from The Simpsons.My other complaint is the soundtrack, which is about half a mix of 90's rap and another half a mixed bag of pop and metal. The music has no connection to time or events and seems to only take away from the authenticity of the events. I've read the interviews where Morgen describes this movie as being about now, and not 1968 - but I think that is a disservice to the Chicago 8. Sure, there is a war going on right now as was then - but in 2008 young people are more likely to protest high gas prices than the current war.

Brett Morgan's Chicago 10 might not deliver any groundbreaking revelations about one of the most notorious of protests-gone-bad sagas in American history, where after four days and nights (mostly) non-violent protesters and loaded-for-bear police clashed horrifically on the streets of Chicago and then the masterminds in the 'Yippies' (i.e. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin) were put on a trial where all were sent to some jail time. It's not about revelations, per-say, though one might say that the story itself- encompassing 1968's volcanic political and societal tumult- could be a revelation for some younger audience members numbed out by cable news and desensitization. What it's about is presentation, of taking apart agitprop of the period, assembling it together with rotoscoping of the Chicago 7 trial, music from the likes of Rage Against the Machine, Eminem and the Beastie Boys, and loads of raw footage documenting much of the actual on-the-street and behind-closed-doors action in Chicago. It's probably the most striking sort one's seen since The Filth and the Fury, however in a context of instead 70s punk rock 1968's culmination of anti-war demonstration.It's an ugly, breathtaking and (unlikely) savagely funny movie, where older viewers can experience their memories of a time and place in a sometimes bizarre and sometimes sobering context (of hindsight being '20-20') and younger viewers (i.e. guys and gals in their 20s and 30s) get a peek at an era that seems all the more ballsy in the perspective of America's involvement in Iraq. Morgan also does something a little dangerous, but successful, in portraying the "heroes" for all they were in this time and place: stalwart idealists in the guise of immature not-totally American insurgents whose 'spiritual experimenter' was oft-meditating poet-dude Allen Ginsberg. What to think of these men like Abbie Hoffmann and the leader of the Black Panthers? A little biased? Perhaps - but in light of how the trial went down, why carp?It's editing is fast-paced, but not too much so, and its technique of animation is multi-faceted. On top of the rotoscoping (some of the best in recent memory along with A Scanner Darkly), there's a night-time demonstration done in 2-D, like something out of a nightmare with its somewhat primitive movement, and then the figures of the Chicago 7 appearing before crowds (usually with great voice-work from Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker and Mark Ruffalo, plus a great career finale from Roy Scheider as the cantankerous judge in the trial). It's the kind of visual assault that for the prepared is like a bit of ironic bliss.If you've seen the trailer, or know a bit about the trial, or about Chicago in 68 (which Hunter S. Thompson, looking back in just 1972, said brought him to tears), or just about the friction between anti and the establishment, you'll know if this is for you. It certainly is like nothing else you'll see this year as a piece of sublime, subversive history. 9.5/10

The story telling in Chicago 10 is inviting. Once inside it transforms the audience into witnesses. With your own senses you see what many have for decades refused to see. It is a work well done. 1968 was a year that changed the US of A as much as May '68 changed France. The movie is not an history lesson. This movie brings us into that time in a way that allows us to reflect not only upon what happened in Chicago, but moreover what was yet to come in the USA. The trial of the Chicago 7 almost did not happen. Ramsey Clark the US Attorney General until January 20, 1969 was not going to allow this case to be prosecuted. After January 20th, Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell made sure that the silent majority got their show trial. It backfired. The rest is in the movie.