The Edge of Paradise

A perfect documentary. Everything is covered. This is truly history. The production is extremely professional. Many viewpoints are expressed. It's a story about humanity. It's a story about war. It's the story that not every human on earth is going to do the exact same thing as every other human and we need to know the stories. There is some healing here. There are some tears for me. There's a good story about police and society. There's a good story about land ownership. There's a story about addiction and finding something to live for. I don't know what could've been added to this movie to make it better than it was. So as a history film, I'm going to read this 10 of 10.

Taylor Camp was a strange moment at a strange time in history -- a place in a Kauai where, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of so-called hippies managed to create a small heaven on earth, a place where everyone who reminisces about it only has lovely thoughts to express, a place where everyone got along famously, a place where everyone who was there seems to have come away feeling they were extraordinarily lucky to have been there. Makes you wish you'd been there too.

Unfortunately, there's no story here, there's no thread, there's no through-line in the documentary. It's just one interview after another, giving the impression that these are the reels that the doc will be made from. As a result, because there are so many of these moments, you never get to know any one person, you never get to rest on any one particular story. It's just a dizzying array of interview after interview. A shame, because if there had been an attempt to build a narrative, this could have been great.