The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2007/Lionsgate/DVD) + 20 To Life – The Life & Times Of John Sinclair (2007/MVD
Visual)
Picture:
C+/C Sound: B-/C+ Extras: B-/C- Documentaries: B/C+
As a
great flipside to the 1988 documentary Imagine
– John Lennon (reviewed elsewhere on this site,) Yoko Ono backed a new look
at dissent and how it affected her and her husband in the David Leaf/John
Scheinfeld documentary The U.S. vs. John
Lennon (2007) shows how Lennon’s sense of right and wrong became
politicized in the face of government oppression and how that is further fused
by Ono entering his life.
The
always involving 96 minutes tells the story of how Lennon, naïve as he might
have been in some cases, took on friends who were increasingly becoming the new
enemies of the state and landing up on President Nixon’s famed “enemies list”
to boot. However, when he joined a
concert in protest of poet/revolutionary/Leftist John Sinclair for spending
insane amounts of time and in isolation for simple drug possession, the
authorities suddenly let him out of prison for time serves.
This got
the shocked notice of the federal authorities, who started keeping a file on
Lennon, tried to have him deported for years and spied on every aspect of his
life. Though he finally won his case
years later, the spying apparently continued all the way up to the still
questionable “lone nut” fatal shooting he suffered in 1980 as a significant
transition of power occurred in the U.S., which is surprisingly not lost on
Ono.
Ono is
joined by other interviewees including Carl Bernstein, Walter Cronkite, Mario
Cuomo, John Dean, Ron Kovic, G. Gordon Liddy, Bobby Seale, Gore Vidal and Tom
Smothers. You just cannot pass that up!
Though
not as good as the Imagine film, it
is still very powerful and at this particular period, could not have better
timing. It is one of the must see
documentaries of the year. At the same
time and with much less reach is a documentary on the actual John
Sinclair. 20 To Life – The Life & Times Of John Sinclair (2007, 86.5
minutes) shows how he was politically radical from the start, what his agenda
was and how his life intersected with Lennon’s, freeing him from a politically
motivated incarceration.
Going on
longer than it should, wallowing in Sinclair’s indulgences when it should
examine more of the history and political implications of what was going on, it
makes a worth-a-look companion to The
U.S. vs. John Lennon showing the man who Lennon put his neck out for. Was Lennon ever properly thanked? Not here, but Lennon’s success was built on
the everyman and it is no surprise he would be so selfless.
The 1.78
X 1 image on The U.S. vs. John Lennon
has plenty of great still and stock film and analog video footage, but
unfortunately, the interviews are shot in HD and it does not look as good,
consistent or smooth as Imagine as a
result. The new footage also has motion
blur and somewhat plugged color. I
wonder how this will look in Blu-ray.
The 1.33 X 1 color image in Sinclair
is all analog NTSC video, is softer and is even less consistent, but is
watchable. Both have Dolby Digital sound
encoding, 2.0 Stereo in both cases and 5.1 on The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which has some good surrounds at times
and good use of music.
Extras on
Sinclair are just a sampling of his poems, while The U.S. vs. John Lennon offers much more, including a DVD-ROM
accessible text interview form Tariq Ali’s book Streetfighting Years: An Autobiography Of The Sixties. The regular DVD includes Yoko’s letters to
the parole board and several featurettes including Becoming John Lennon, Power
To The People, Dissent vs. Disloyalty,
Walter Cronkite Meets The Beatles, The One To One Benefit Concert, The “Two
Virgins” Album Cover and a look at the classic songs Imagine and Sometime In New York.
The Sinclair
disc is worth seeing just to now who Lennon went out of his way for, but The U.S. vs. John Lennon is the kind of
work more than a few people would like to censor, burn and stop you from
seeing. Don’t let them get away with
that!
- Nicholas Sheffo
