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To me, this movie is perfection.

best movie i've ever seen.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The Criterion Collection has brought out a remastered, stunning 'Medium Cool'. America's answer to 'Cinema Verite'. Haskell Wexler's film could have been made yesterday, given the conditions in the US today. Although the technology of filming has changed drastically. In fact, given the success of 'Tangerine', it is easy to envision 'Medium Cool' shot exclusively on a Smartphone. Gone are the 40 pound cameras, the heavy television cameras set up at conventions, the one way voice boxes and the like. As Marshall McCluhan, the high priest and theorist of communication, posited: 'the medium is the message'. And Wexler took this guru's words to heart. We're in Chicago on the eve and during the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention. The story is half fiction half cinema truth, of a fun loving news photographer whose passion is the story and getting it right. Through his camera, we travel through the racial, economic and political stress and high drama of the times. (For good reporting, see Norman Mailer's 'Miami and the Siege of Chicago'). The 'hero' John Cassellis is shocked that his footage has been handed over by his employer to the FBI. So what else is new today? In scenes with blacks militants he is accused of being an undercover FBI agent, and they knew what they were talking about, for until then he was clueless. The world of the poor whites from the coal mines of West Virginia, the banter in the newsroom about the role of journalism. The spirit of the turbulent 60s has run out of steam but in some eddies here and there of on the fringe reporters, social media and streamed dailies or weeklies. And yet, documentaries are making a comeback, and showing the grim side of life and some moments of good works. Episodic as the film is, it is worth seeing, to see how everything old is new again

9/11/2011 is probably the wrong time to be writing a review of this ground breaking film, but it was an almost perfect time to re-watch this evocation of some of the painful events of our college years.The "cinema verité" look of this film has taken on a somewhat dated feel with the years, and Robert Forster's intense stares have not gained in stature as examples of great acting - but both still accomplish what they did originally, wrapping us up in the emotions of a world gone slightly mad, being pulled apart by generations unable to agree on how best to defend freedoms both believed they believed in.The riots - youth and police - that marked the 1968 Chicago convention (following the other party's now generally forgotten charade in Miami) were the beginning of something we are only now beginning to recover from in this country. Then as now, a foreign civil war which part of the country felt it was in our interest to meddle in was tearing the country apart. (Meddling which proved mistaken in that case - misunderstanding how nationalism trumped a foolish "Domino Theory" and not helped by the failure of the media to adequately REPORT the ramifications and LEADERS of the independence movement which had transformed the former "French" Indochina into Vietnam in the 1950's, making the ultimate victors in the civil war all but inevitable). MEDIUM COOL was a somewhat disjointed but stirring attempt to come to grips with and hold a mirror up to a nation uncomfortable with seeing itself - let alone establishing a dialog across generational lines or dealing with the issues dividing it.Perhaps edgy popular entertainment was a hopeless tool to try to bridge that cap, especially without addressing the external causes driving the rift, but it was a start - and the artifact remains today a powerful glimpse back at what seemed like a world of irreconcilable political differences that may help us put some of today's stresses in perspective.One can only wish that rather than preserving two holes in the ground (no matter how "prettied up" by trees and benches) someone would genuinely memorialize the tragic events Americans have come to know as "9/11" by making a MEDIUM COOL-type film looking at the well meaning terrorists on both sides in the ten years since the Towers fell. That might be the best memorial - one people could actually learn from - to the thousands of people killed that day and in the wars and political upheaval which followed.

A rare directorial outing by all-time great cinematographer Wexler, this is generally acknowledged as the most politically radical film ever produced by a major studio. In freewheeling, semi-improvised, ideologically calculated scene after scene, it depicts an apolitical television cameraman's awakening of consciousness and abandonment of the role of passive observer. The class and race politics are four notches up on any comparable contemporary studio feature, that's for sure - with the surprisingly patient explanation of how 6-o-clock-news ideology oppresses minority communities, leading in to a love affair with a working-class single mother instead of some vanguard hippie, you could even argue that this Americanization of Godard has better ideological legs than the master himself. Sure it meanders a tad, and the stylistics can date, but there's nothing else in any movie ever that compares with the climax, as the actors make their way through actual documentary footage of the 1968 Democratic convention and attendant street battles. I mean, how did such a finely balanced mix of integrated narrative, Euro-tics, American underground film and straight-up documentary even occur to them? And how did they then manage to actually pull it off with honors? Pretty damned impressive.

This film is better upon the second viewing, the first time I saw this I thought it was somewhat dated or boring, I couldn't have been more wrong. Initially I watched this film because it was directed by Haskell Wexler whose work I admire, and I'm from Chicago and had heard it shows much of the city and the riots of 68. I enjoyed seeing the city forty years ago to see what was the same and what had changed, much has changed yet much remains the same from what I have seen of the people, places, buildings etc. It was great to see the Kinetic Playground on there, Chicago's electric ballroom, and other area's such as Lincoln Park. On the second viewing, I realized that this is a very important film in that it adroitly captures a moment in time, a moment we can never have again that is lost forever, that one second in our history that pivoted us as a nation between innocence and awareness and possibly that crucial moment which has brought us to the point we are at today. This movie is very important as a document of history, not to mention how well it's shot. The angles, the color, the way he goes in and out of focus make this a true gem that gets better the more you see it. Great soundtrack as well, Zappa, Mike Bloomfield and others.