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Following Sean (2006)
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Reviews Counted:22
Fresh:19
Rotten:3
Average Rating:7/10
Theatrical Release:Jan 13, 2006 Limited
Synopsis: Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck first met Sean while living as a graduate student in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury neighborhood at the height of the 1960s. The city was awash with the trappings of... Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck first met Sean while living as a graduate student in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury neighborhood at the height of the 1960s. The city was awash with the trappings of America's cultural revolution-the San Francisco State University campus flooded with cops in riot gear, the Haight filled with drifters and idealists, and, on the third floor of Arlyck's building, a come-one-come-all crashpad apartment. It was from this top floor commune that the precocious 4-year-old Sean would occasionally wander downstairs to visit and talk-and one day Arlyck turned on his camera. Sean's casual commentary on everything from smoking pot to living with speed freaks was delivered in simple sincerity throughout the soon-to-be famous 15-minute film. This First Child of the notorious decade may have shaken the audience with his simple sentence- "Sure, I smoke pot"-but it was his barefoot impishness which would encapsulate the hope that lay in front of the nation: a promise of infinite possibility. Thirty years, three generations, and a lifetime later, Arlyck has returned to San Francisco in search of who the adult Sean might have become. And what he finds, to his surprise, tells him as much about his own east-coast migration as it does about the Californian life he left behind-that the choices we're handed and the choices we make are, very often, quite odd bedfellows. --© Official Site [More]
Director: Ralph Arlyck
Director: Ralph Arlyck
Reviews for Following Sean
Arlyck is as pleasant and self-effacing a guide as one could ask for through this meandering but still focused work.
In what has become rather epidemic among U.S. documentary filmmakers, Ralph Arlyck's Following Sean is ultimately more about Ralph Arlyck than its ostensible title subject.
Arlyck's compulsion is to our great fortune. Patient and elegant, his film is a quietly devastating meditation on family, work, and the unrelenting passage of time.
Aryck lightly but complicatedly distills our existence into a series of dichotomies (rich/poor, idle/mobile), using his available subjects to tap into the source of what stunts us emotionally and separates us as philosophical beings.
Character-driven and full of tender contradictions, the film is reminiscent of a Chekhov short story. And as such, it touches on a universality that transcends VW buses and Bush-era politics.
What emerges from Arlyck's musings is a penetrating cinematic essay on how generations in the last century struggled to take hold of history and reconfigure the shape of daily life.
Arlyck's new film is an honest and thoughtful examination of the people and events that most influenced his adult life and what the '60s really meant to the bigger picture, viewed with the benefit of hindsight.
Following Sean is an almost shapeless film. But it's clever enough to know that its multiple reflections eventually reveal something profound.
Underlying subtexts of idealism, utopianism, the power of fate, the interconnectivity of all life emerge...taking Arlyck's original rather small quest into much deeper philosophical territory.
An uncommonly perceptive look at the counter-culture and the difficulties of preserving a sense of freedom and integrity in American society.
A fascinating portrait of an American family in 1969 (much of the short film 'Sean' is included) and today, strained by different value systems and yet still bound by love.
Ralph Arlyck's ruminative essay film picks up the trail of Sean Farrell, the former child of San Francisco hippies and the subject of his 1969 short film Sean.
Without belaboring his narrative shaping, Arlyck asks big questions about life paths and philosophical drift.
While the film is ostensibly a "49 Up" style look at how Sean the child grew into the man, what it really is is a penetrating look at how Arlyck the young man grew into an old one.
As fascinating as it is frustrating, docu raises a raft of nicely unresolved questions about parenting and parentage.
| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie | Date |
|---|---|---|
| 87% 87% | The White Ribbon | 12/30 |
| 100% 100% | Daybreakers | 1/8 |
| | Leap Year | 1/8 |
| 83% 83% | Youth in Revolt | 1/8 |
| | The Book of Eli | 1/15 |
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