We Blew It

To compare today's turbulent times unfavorably to the wonderful "Easy Rider" era is patently absurd. If the author of the film's synopsis had bothered to actually watch that movie, it should have been clear that the good old days were actually pretty crappy: Easy Rider ends with a couple of hippie-hating rural types (not all that much different from today's Trump worshippers) slaughtering the two free-spirited motorcyclists played by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. It wasn't much of a movie in the first place, but it sure didn't depict a world of peace, harmony and good will toward men. In fact, it more or less seems like that era -- including the right-wing "America Love It or Leave It" nastiness that dogged protestors of the Vietnam War in the 70s -- was setting the stage for the hot mess we're in today. So if the premise of the film is that things used to be great but they suddenly went bad, this "documentary" can't be worth watching. If you take your patriotic blinders off, America has a pretty dark history which continues to haunt its citizens to this day. I sure hope we can move past our troubles into brighter days. But creating a not-very-persuasive film that essentially reminisces about good times that were actually not good at all is not the way to accomplish that.

How did the United States change from Easy Rider to Donald Trump? The case is solved before the 12th minute. The second interviewee shown in this movie was a conservative biker in 1969, he has been suffering impoverishment and voted for Trump in 2016.

That film starts with Michael Mann talking both about the 60-70s era and about the 2016 political situation. It ends with posthumous Tobe Hooper bitter postmortem on his generation. Hooper's words did provide a title to Thoret. Mann's words gave him the occasion to disguise his fanboy exercise into a film talking about the transition between Easy Rider and Donald Trump.

Thoret is an obvious fan of old-school "cinéma de genre américain" (American genre cinema) and travelled to the United States to interview some of his favourite artists before their approaching death. In the end, we don't hear most of them talking about what was the 2016 political situation.

Most of the interviews in this film are interesting in themselves, especially those with ordinary people. This is then not unpleasing to watch but is paradoxically frustrating. Having more footage of Mann in the last 15 minutes is salvatory because he's the most transcending of all those interviewed filmmakers.

I appreciate what the Director/Producer was trying to do, but it made the movie boring. I didn't even watch the whole thing because it's a bunch of old people, my age, whining that today is not what they expected it to be. I'm sure my parents didn't think their future was what they had planned, but WWII happened anyway. The story tellers keep reminiscing about the past, how today's generation are wanna be's, and that the Government will make things better. Nice try, but I don't need the propaganda in my life.

Like many Americans, I still struggle sometimes to fully comprehend the repercussions of the 2016 Presidential Election. As such, I have watched a number of documentaries on the subject to try and gain some further perspective. Unfortunately, "We Blew It" has been the worst of those experiences.

The problem with this documentary is overwhelmingly obvious: there is no central focus or thesis. It sort of just rambles on about the "Easy Rider" era and the current "Trump era" without any definition on where it was all going. Fifteen minutes into it, I thought it showed real potential. After about an hour, however, it turned so muddy and scattershot that I didn't want to even sink another hour into the proceedings.

Perhaps older viewers who lived through the 1960s/70s will find more interesting material, but this 32-year old viewer saw it primarily as a jumble of conversations that lacked anything tying it all together.

More than a documentary about cinema, this film asks the following question : how did we go from "Easy Rider" to Donald Trump ? Traveling through the United States, the filmmaker meets everyday people and some famous directors (Michael Mann, Tobe Hooper, Bob Rafelson, Peter Hyams...). With the use of beautiful photography, clever editing and great music, Jean-Baptiste Thoret digs deep in the heritage of the sixties and seventies, and gradually comes to the conclusion that it might not have been such a "golden era". "We blew it" is a road-movie that thinks, asks questions, and tries to define what is left of an era when cinema was important to people, and when it gave them answers to what they were living. A must-see for those in love with American cinema, and the USA in general.