"Hearts and Minds"

Films/DVD Asylum

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I'm presently viewing the Criterion DVD release of "Hearts and Minds".
It's one of those brain challenging releases, seemingly timeless, film releases, that is compelling...no matter what your political views on the subject are...meaning, that it's compelling, in every sense of the word, and to all of one's senses.
I wasn't There...but I feel the thing we all share...those from That Generation...was that we were "there", in the sense that we lived through the collective social trauma of The Thing, that was Viet Nam...without having actually, to have been, in the war itself.
What yours or my political sentiments are, isn't what's important about this film!
Director Peter Davis, in this film, rather than, to express all of the classic, knee-jerk "liberal" sentiments of that Time, really has created what is, something special...a motion picture experience.
It's hard to imagine, that a documentary film...of a modern generation...expounding one philosophy and one point of view, that can do this...but it does. Documentary has become something of a watered-down, weakened, hybrid, since the advent of Tv News. Tv has has diluted the impact of realism in Media, and how it impacts on the viewer.
I can only think of one other film, of this generation...
Barbara Koppel's "Harlan County"...that has approximated, what documentary REALLY is, to the viewer...in it's purest form...up to Michael Moore's "recent" examination of Flint, Michigan. While Fredrick Wiseman's "Titticut Follies", and the Maysles "Salesman", are touchstones, theatrical motion picture documentary has become a lost, and largely, desecrated, media art. And alot of that has to do with Tv News, and its various forms of "news expose'" and weak bastardizations by Geraldo Rivera (his Willowbrook Hospital Tv expose/documentary was just a straight "Titticut Follies" rip-off, and "new", only, to those who were, at the time, Tv News spoonfed), et al.
Anyway....this is Essential for people who love to experience the Power, of what Film can do, to those who view it. Change minds.
Very dangerous stuff, indeed, these days !

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Kimber Kable

Topic - "Hearts and Minds" - mikenyc 00:40:50 07/22/02 (3)

Re: "Hearts and Minds" - gware 05:34:00 07/22/02 (2)

"Anyone approaching this subject in any medium today is brave by default; " - mikenyc 09:42:59 07/22/02 (0)

Re: "Hearts and Minds" continued..... - mikenyc 06:19:40 07/22/02 (0)

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