Mr. Freedom (1970)

And this almost made me hate William Klein.I love when directors have a message with their art. I am completely for being political with your art and that movies should be more than mindless entertainment. Secondly, I also am a moderate. Paint me wishy-washy, but I just don't believe that the antithesis of evil is good. Few people are truly evil and very few situations are absolute. Finally, I believe that the best way to convince someone to change their minds is to let people get to that conclusion on their own. Subtelty and forcing people to examine their own lives through arts to come to their own decision is the most effective way to communicate your message. Mr. Freedom does none of that.This is the most force-feeding movie I've ever seen. It is the longest hour-and-a-half sit-through of propaganda that I've ever seen. Hell, while I disagree with a good percentage of the movie, even the parts I did agree with turned me off. This is the problem that Al Franken and Michael Moore have. They don't understand that if you make too much of a jackass of yourself, you are just going to make your cause look bad. Mr. Freedom needs a huge dose of shut the hell up. I understand that the concept of "poet / prophet" needs the voice of an exile to tell the true nature of a nation's problems, but William Klein just comes off as extremely whiny and one-sided. I think that his message could have gotten across if he would treat his audience with some respect rather than presenting an oversimplistic view of a complicated situation. Really, he's treating his audience like their dumb and need this kind of information shoved down their throats.The biggest problem with being this blatant about a situation is that you are only going to be to preaching to the choir. No one who disagrees with this kind of politics would actively sit down and watch this movie. At the time, everyone who agreed would pull a Farenheit 911 and raised this movie onto an unfair cinematic pedestal, hailing it as the battle cry of a subculture. The rest would have scolded the movie without seeing it and only caused a greater rift between two distant ideas. William Klein blindly walks into this movie without thinking of the ramificaitons of what he was making.It is hard to review this movie form an aethetic point of view. He really is more concerned with his political propaganda that he avoids using really powerful imagery, instead using easy shots of the red-white-and-blue constantly. He only has one really inspired shot that wasn't meant to be "shocking" and that's what is used as the cover art on the Eclipse set. The tie to Captain America isn't exactly subtle either. But the analogy is somewhat lost because Klein uses popular culture as an absolute. Captain America commonly questioned U.S. policy in the comic books, taking an active stance against Watergate and the Nixon administration. To have a character who is clearly Captain America murdering black people for his country is offensive and ill researched.I really hated this movie. I'm not what you would call crazy conservative and the politics itself didn't bother me, but the approach is just terrible and actually made that one of the more painful hour and a halfs I've sat through. If you can avoid this one, do. You can only get it in the William Klein set, so good luck just leaving it on your shelf.