Hollywood just didn't get it in the Sixties and the best they could do was turn out stuff like "Wild in the Streets." But there were two films that did capture what was going on in those days and 'Medium Cool' was one of them. The other was 'Easy Rider,' and both of them were made in spite of Hollywood and not with the help of Hollywood. One picture dealt with the political upheaval in the streets and the other dealt with the cultural revolution.
I saw 'Medium Cool' the week it opened and I probably wasn't the only one who considered it a revolution in film making and figured it would be the first of many such films that tied documentary and narrative film together, but… Read more
Bukowski was right! This is a great work of American fiction set in the Los Angeles area during the height of the Great Depression. Fortunately the author John Fante did not live to see the theft of his work by the director Robert Towne who will turn this book into a major motion picture and attempt to recreate LA in SOUTH AFRICA in exchange for foreign subsidies, thereby creating Depression-era conditions for American film workers who will be jobless due to corporate greed. Read the book -- boycott the movie.
I took the 1997 first edition of this book on a recent trip to Cuba, and have just now finished it. I hope the current paperback edition is better. The edition I read contained more typos and translation errors than any book I've ever read -- my estimate is at least 300 in number. A further deficiency in this book is the lack of maps, which makes following Che's Cuban campaign extremely confusing, and I never fully understood the campaign until I saw a map of it in Havana's Museum of the Revolution.
The book is basically a chronological review of Che's life and at 600 pages it's an exhaustive review. Its unique feature is that all words attributed to Che are in bold print. There are a… Read more
