Review of Medium Cool (1969) by Asif K — 16 Sep 2011

OK, so I watched a film about journalistic integrity and how it was challenged in the late '60s with the anti-war protests. This film captures more of the chaos and the anarchy of that time period than "The Help" (which did, for the most part, showed its share of unsettling things concerning the turbulent South) - and my God, instead of settling down in pure fiction, the film actually gets into the nitty-gritty of what happened in that time period and shows you how uneasy it was to live in '68.

Like most cinema verite films, there really isn't much of a plot. Hell, compared to Cassavetes' films, "Medium Cool" feels more like the father of films like "Gimme Shelter" where ideas, not stories, tend to run a story. Anything can be shown on screen in order to show the disarray and chaos of modern America as it transforms from something of a nice, if Stepford-esque, world into the full-blown nightmare that we're slowly immersed into from minute one. Starting with a car crash (and ending with one) and showing the unwillingness of cameramen to "alter the story" in order to draw audiences in with tales of violence and tragedy, this film drives on the idea that its audience is unwilling to sit through so-called "mainstream" explanations for what was happening.

To me, this is the anti-"Easy Rider" - a film that, rather than trying to experiment within a given format (aka being a modernized acid Western in a world that, like "Medium Cool"'s, is falling apart - albeit with conventional villainy), documents what was happening in the world while trying to develop characters without trying to conform to any given plot other than "a cameraman wants to tell the truth and ends up in the middle of chaos" - which director Haskell Wexler does in this film. He tells a story about a man while going into the depths of Hell himself. I thought that this guy actually paid money to stage the Democratic National Convention and the riots all over again just to tell a relevant, if extremely non-linear, story - however, there came a point when I simply realized that this man actually shot in the middle of the riots. This man was walking with the people - walking into the police barrier - walking into the National Guard's base - in order to capture the explosion of unrest that happened during this era.

So, yeah, do I recommend it for anybody? 17 and older. This film is pretty disturbing and it does require your full attention to understand what in the world's going on, but sometimes, I do think that Wexler wanted you to get lost in the world of Chicago circa August 1968. Sounds like the insane pretentiousness of somebody like Miranda July or Jean-Luc Godard, but for some reason, it doesn't feel pretentious. It merely feels real. Realer than anything I have watched. Also, there's some nudity in it (you know, like a similar film about a guy who simply wants to document real-life events for the purpose of art - "Blow-Up") and there's the fact that this film was originally rated X for its strong political themes (that the country's tearing itself apart because of stupid issues like a war we shouldn't have intervened in and political extremists who don't see any good in a government that's trying their best to fix all of these problems - racism, economy, equal rights, desensitization to violence).

And to be fair, this film is pretty much still relevant to this day. No, really. We're in a war that we're (slowly) getting out of; there are increased reports of militarized political groups (Tea Party); and the end of an old era (and hopefully the beginning of a better one).

Now, I want somebody to reprint the DVD so I can have this in my collection.