Directed By: Bobby Kennedy III
Starring: Jay Bulger, Cheryl Hines, Blair Carlyle, Weston Cage Coppola
This is one horrible movie. We watched it, so that you don’t have to.
You want to make a movie that is supposed to be a parody, fun, and have it parallel today’s political realities- but you have to know how to do that. Kennedy III and his team do not know how to do that. They are showing us chaos and inconvenient behaviour in a hippy community for an entire movie. What’s new here? What don’t we a;ready know? That the hippies are dirty and smelly. We know that already.. They are not consistent- so when the political establishment throws them a bone- they take the bait and stay quiet smoking their pot til the next episode. We already know that too. So what is the point of this movie? Really, it’s hard to know.
The whole point is that this so-called freelance journalist, Hunter Thompson, who is temporarily living in Aspen, Colorado in 1970, wants to try to become county sheriff solely based on the votes of: junkies, hippies, and other kinds of freaks hanging around Aspen at that time. He is campaigning while emptying countless six-packs and smoking tons of any kind of grass hoping that he will be elected. It doesn’t happen. He loses the race for county sheriff. He couldn’t topple the political establishment.
So, again, the main question: what is new and exciting here? The establishment cannot be beaten, the whole rigged system is working like a well oiled machine then, now, and forever. Stop debating about that and face reality.
The only sweet moment of the movie was when the polls are closing and Thompson’s campaign manager shouts to all the hippies in the room, “Ok people, it’s all over. Now we wait for the counting of votes. So let’s get the party started!” This is why you could like hippies: win or lose, their party is always on- and is always high.
Also if you decide to watch this movie maybe one kind of benefit will be seeing the reality and atmosphere of some other, very much different time than what we live in today. Those generations were living in fear of wars, world inequality, political, economic, and existential crisis and stress. But, if you draw parallels with today’s fears and uncertainties, those times were really happy times. The troubles of that time and the monster troubles of today cannot be compared. If somehow there is an ability to move them all, as a group – Thompson and his followers- from 1970 to today- they would be lost and there probably would not be any survivors. There is no intention to underestimate the tectonic nature of the world’s troubles in hippy times of the 60s and 70s, but compared to today’s extremely evil troubles of all possible kinds- the flower power era looks like: “walk in the park” while you you’re eating a “piece of cake”.
