Chicago 10

CHICAGO 10 (2008) ***1/2 (Voices of: Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Roy Scheider, Liev Schreiber, James Urbaniak, Jeffrey Wright) Fascinating history lesson by way of state-of-the-art rotoscope animation about the infamous Chicago 10 trial of the 1968 anti-war demonstration at The Democratic National Convention led by "yippie" Abbie Hoffman curtailing into a monkey trial with dubious results and if anything a clear-eyed viewpoint of just how radical things were then and how it eerily reflects America's politics today. While the animation is hit-and-miss (and a bit eerie ala "Heavy Metal") the archival footage of the real-life instigators/participants is truly remarkable and should be seen by all who wondered what it was to live during a revolution. (Dir: Brett Morgen)

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.

In 1968 thousands of young people got angry and rioted as an unpopular President expanded an unpopular war overseas. As Ryan Harvey sung recently "The Times They *Aren't* A Chaning". The documentary footage from the protests is amazing, timely, and very reminiscent of news footage from recent political protests in North America. The animated sequences could have been better. They have the look of a very low budget show on Cartoon Network. Occasionally, a different kind of animation is used and this one is less realistic but much more effective. I'm not sure why this type of animation wasn't used throughout the trial sequences.

Roy Scheider I must add was very effective and creepy as Judge Hoffman, the authoritarian and one-sided judge who presided over the trial.

The movie is a reminder that things aren't changing but it's always important to fight.

I just attended a screening of Chicago 10 at Sundance. Wow. What a unique and important movie. The mix of archival footage and animation blend together much better than I anticipated. The animated scenes are primarily courtroom scenes. The dialog during the animated courtroom scenes are taken directly from the court transcripts. The soundtrack is perfect. There is a combination of old and new including songs from contemporary artists such as Rage Against The Machine & Eminem. Although archival footage was used, and court transcripts were used as dialog, I'm not too sure that I'd call this film a documentary. This film was moving, powerful, and well worth seeing. I thought that the film was such a gem that I'm trying to get a tickets to see it again during the festival.

This is a really poorly movie. It may have been an interesting time in Amerikan history but this movie is far from interesting.

The makers chose to use really bad cartoons and actors to play the Chicago defendants. It doesn't work. The cartoons look nothing like the characters and their dialog is forced.

Frankly, a way better movie could have been made using only archival footage of the characters involved. It could have been truly compelling. Instead we got a really boring piece of celluloid that isn't even truthful to the events at hand.

Throughout the movie there are shots of the characters speaking to "crowds" and shots of massive numbers of people rallying. This is phony. It never happened. They inserted footage from other rallies to try to pretend these guys had such a following!

Shame on you.

And of course they never even mentioned that Jerry Rubin became a rabid capitalist after jail time ( I met him during his networking days in NYC) and Abbie Hoffman (who I always thought was the real deal) started dealing coke big time, went on the lam for years.