Londons Falling

Weather Underground

Rating: 5/5
Comments:
The Weather Underground Organization is an extremely interesting domestic backlash from the Vietnam War. Maybe misguided individuals fighting for a just cause. A quite unorthodox method of spreading their ideology. The important thing is that everybody should know not only what the Weather Underground has done, but what they did it for.

I Was Going To Rate This Higher....

Rating: 3/5
Comments:
Having been born in the late seventies, I missed two whole decades of influential history. This history is too recent to have been covered in my history classes and too far back for me to have had any personal experience. To fill the hole, I've been watching films.

I had not heard of 'The Weathermen' before I came across this film. (I had heard of Bill Ayers, of course, but knew very little about him). I knew that groups like this existed into the seventies from references made to them in other movies (The ??? Liberation ???), being the most often referenced and parodied (they're the ones that kidnapped an heiress, right? - I'm still looking for the film that explains this in detail).

For me this film was quite informative. Being a Chicago native, I learned about a number of big things that happened right here in my own back yard. However, I couldn't shake the sense that something was missing. The film presented this group as sort of soft core. A lot a harsh talk, but only "non-violent" action (non-violent in that they only hurt property, never people). ::I don't think that is what Dr. King had in mind.:: Anyway, for a group that never hurt anyone, they sure had a lot of enemies. The original SDS founder seems super-fumed & hyper-concerned about their association with his group. There is video of a member of the Black Panthers saying effectively - 'These stupid, priveliged, kids are WAY out of control. We don't want anything to do with them.' - Wow!

In the movie they do come off as a group of idealistic, over-priveliged white-kids, playing with bombs, but it is repeated ad-nauseum that they didn't hurt people. It sounded untrue based on the things others in the film had to say about them and I have since found some pretty disturbing information about this group, most especially the Bernadette Dohrn comments about the Manson murders.

This movie gains three stars for pointing me off into a direction of interesting research, but loses two for obvious bias.

"When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things"

Rating: 4/5
Comments:
This is an interesting and well-made documentary that tracks the evolution of "The Weather Underground", a late 60s and early 70s USA radical movement that used violent means in order to fight against a government its members didn t believe in.

According to some, their struggle was "like a children's crusade gone mad". I completely agree, but I think that the strongest point of this documentary is the way in which it highlights the reasons why an student living in that period might have felt attracted to the kind of distorted political activism that "The Weather Underground" proposed.

In that sense, this film includes not only footage from that epoch, providing a good historical context, but also more recent interviews with former members of this movement, that give their retrospective opinions on what happened. A few would do exactly the same thing again, while others regret their deeds, saying that their intentions were good but their means weren t. One of them sums things up in what I think should be the tagline of this documentary: "When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things".

Highly recommended....

Belen Alcat