Dope

One of the best documentary I've ever seen. The matching music/images is perfect, at a time, seeing this work two times or more, you are going to be another friend among the characters are acting (better: living) in front of you. You can touch their skin and breath with them. Is like opening a window on their lives and jump in for 90 min. I bought the DVD to Flame Schon (new name for Diane Rochlin) and I talk to her with some mails and she explained me a lot about the film and the era. I spent my money well. Caroline (the main character) is a sort of guiding light for all the film who permits us to meet all the other people. I also appreciate the high quality of the images and the refinement of photography. The editing was high so every cut match perfectly with the others, and there are a lot of cuts.

Poorly filmed, audio that is either unintelligible, out of sync or completely unrelated to the visual and not a thread of a story. To call this a documentary is false advertising at the least and intentionally misleading at worst. One hour, twenty nine minutes and twenty two seconds of random scenes cut together with no discernible relationship to each other. If you don't know what the plot of this "documentary" is (supposed to be) before watching it, you'll have even less of an idea after you've seen it. There are no spoilers in this review because there is nothing to spoil. While yes, it does have actual footage of real people taking real drugs during the late 60s, in places that look to be London, there's no way you can call this cobbled together mess a documentary.

Shot in the lilting, evocative style of filmmakers Sheldon and Diane Rochlin (now Flame Schon), DOPE-celebrated for its subversive content-was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. Praised as a film " ahead of its time" by Ricky Leacock, the Rochlins signed a distribution contract with Leacock-Pennebaker. But just as the final editing was completed, the distribution arm of Leacock-Pennebaker went bankrupt. The film has remained an underground indie classic ever since.

It really is a masterpiece, and people know that when they get the rare chance to see it.

The film works as a clear magnifying glass into the swinging London drug scene of the '60s with a great sound track mixed by Mark Dichter. Some beautiful as well as chilling shots of that in-between realm-the fragile edges of reality and dream, order and chaos, inertia and motion-reflecting transience, mortality and impermanence. Light and atmospheric, DOPE is a heady drama perfumed with scenes of heroin and hashish.