The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation (2005 TV Movie) User Reviews

Isn't All History Written From The View Of the Author?

[Leaning-Left · 9/10 · 1 February 2007]

As a child of the 60s, I celebrate those years. From the horror of the war in Viet Nam, as a Marine; to the horror of the assassination of both of the Kennedy's and Dr. King; from Selma to Chicago; we learned that our country could and would be able to recover and go on. It doesn't take a wannabe hippie to see how those changes shaped us, if not as children of specifically the decade of the 1960's, then at least of that generation. We burned draft cards, bras, crosses and large portions of cities. We put on the uniform of 'democracy' and went to die in countries we could not find on a map. We did terrible things and we did wonderful things.

As a country, we hated those who were different and, at the same time, we wanted to love those who were different. From the perspective of 40 years, I recognize that there are few of us who do not wear historical blinders of some type. If this creates revisionist history, so be it.

The film is excellent in its presentation. It is totally unreasonable to expect that those major personalities appearing in the film are not putting the best 'spin' on the events as they were involved in them. History didn't give any of them the chance to contemplate how they would look on film 40 years after the events. They acted and reacted as they were led to do at that moment in time. History has shown that some of their decisions were very good and others equally bad. All in all, they played an important role in not only shaping those times, but the generation that came from them. This is the picture that the film presents, almost without blemish. I recommend it highly.

An extremely good piece of propaganda

[RT Firefly · 5 September 2006]

This so called documentary highlights a new technique in revisionist history. It is one of the smartest films I have ever seen, but I say that in a bad way. It seems hippies have discovered they need not run from their failures, but, rather, just embrace them. Though I don't mean to grant significance to this project beyond what it possesses, I would like to warn people that this film is nothing more than thinly veiled propaganda.

First and foremost, 'The 60's: The Years That Shaped a Generation' is not about the decade the 60's. That is the first deception. But if you titled your film "Hippies: The People That Really Weren't That Bad" someone might think you have a bias. This is a film about hippies and, more broadly, the counter-culture revolution. Virtually nothing from '60's popular culture is discussed. Most of the film centers on the sociopolitical events that took place from 1967 to 1974. If you want to call that "the 60's" then so be it.

So far as I can tell, here is the thrust of this project: We hippies have a dilemma - When people look back on our legacy it is fraught with scandal, overt drug use, lawlessness, irresponsibility, reckless sexual behavior, snotty faced rebelliousness, naïveté and an overall creepiness factor. How do you 'spin' that? An epiphany is had. Why waste energy lying and running from your failures when you can just embrace them! Sure, we did drugs like Pez candy, but they were new and we were experimenting with everything 'new'. Sure, we behaved like dogs sexually, but we were shedding the ages of blind conformity. Sure, we had a complete and total disregard for authority, the same authority we now force others to accept as unmitigated truths, but… did I mention Nixon yet? Here's the game plan with our project. First call it a documentary. People trust documentaries. Second, we tell people it's about "the 60's". That will cloak it in history, not opinion and sermonizing. Along those lines, we'll populate the movie with historians on our side and on their side we'll have villainized pundits. Third, we DO point out the faults of the hippies, but don't dwell on them. Just brush against them briefly in the context of history, and don't assign any culpability. Then quickly compare that to the faults of those we disagreed with and make sure we do assign culpability on their part (never mind the fact that most of those faults occurred in a different decade, apparently morality isn't the only ambiguous truth to hippies). Lastly, we leave open to speculation the failures of our efforts. We didn't all burn out on drugs and eventually need to "conform" in order to function on this planet. Who told you that? No, the problem was two of our leaders were assassinated and that took the wind out of our sails. Who would do such a thing? (if there's anything people love more than a spicy documentary, it's a good conspiracy!) It is worth noting that the murderers of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and their motives are not even mentioned. The film also does not mention why, with the wind gone from their sails, the hippies proceeded to have the worlds largest orgy on a farm in New York just a year later. Was that a Irish wake of sorts? Nor does it mention how their flaccid sails relate to the plethora of failed attempts on the part of the counter-culture to achieve "new freedom" in the years to follow. The wind has gone out of the sails and it's not our fault. In closing, we wrap every thing up with a wedding reception pass-the-mike for blessings, "look at all the great things us hippies have done with our lives". So, in a way, one could say the message is 'it doesn't matter how great the institution you tear down, what matters is do you drink organic shade grown cappuccinos'?

Many conservative icons appear in this film, and I can't say I blame them for taking the opportunity - who wouldn't want to give their opinion on what went wrong with the hippies - but how could you not know that the film makers of a PBS documentary on the '60's are NOT going to try to make conservatives look irrelevant, or worse? As such, all conservative comments are used to underscore the absurdity of a contrary view. Absurdities such as Robert Bork saying that rock music fueled the rebellion. He's such a cretin! Right out of Reefer Madness I tell you! Never mind that earlier in the documentary those on the left were bragging about how rock music fueled their rebellion. Hypocrisy must be relative, too.

The film itself is well made and, I think, very interesting. The producers are masterful in there imagery and the flow of the "story", however, I might recommend spending a few more dollars at the stock footage library. I saw some clips, notably, a police line advancing towards a rioting crowd, as many as three times for various emphasis. My criticisms of this film are not having to do with it being poorly made. As most reviews focus on this quality of a film, this review may seem a bit unfair. But with the making of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, et. al., I think people are beginning to realize there is more to movie making than just entertainment. No doubt there were many slick and "poignant" films made by the Nazi party, should their misrepresentations be ignored?

the missing years 1960 - 1963

[chasmilt777 · 4/10 · 15 May 2007]

I have always enjoyed PBS documentaries, but I was very disappointed in this one. It starts off with LBJ and the Vietnam war in 1964. What happened to the first three years of that decade ? To me, it was how LBJ got into power and all the corruption and deception to the American people that made the youth revolt in the streets. Seeing the murder of JFK in streets of Dallas had to be the starting point of the darkest years in my generation. The United States was on the verge of another Civil War because the people felt that they no longer ran the country and wanted to express their views. These students tested the powers in control. They knew that they would be beaten, arrested, and perhaps shot down for there beliefs. They wanted to take back their country from the corrupt politicians and corporations who were supplying a war machine.

This DVD did bring out some interesting facts, especially the students who marched in other parts of the world, such as Prague, Germany, and France.

A last shot before slipping into irrelevancy......

[diurnalemissions · 3/10 · 13 August 2008]

The people that shaped the "revolution" (the replacement of 50's Statist Conservatism with 60's Statist Progressivism) are now in their 60's and approaching their 70's. Who can blame them for yet another regurgitation of how wonderful they were before they are shuffled off to homes and forgotten? One more shrill yowl about how they were so right about everything, unleashing new forms of Force hither and yon.

And the old "whoops, I guess we were wrong about the whole drug thing". Well, drugs weren't the only thing you were wrong about. Being preachy, left statist idiots doesn't enter on the correct side of the ledger. The revolution for REAL freedom we needed was rolling back the tide of unfunded entitlements. YES, shake off the shackles of repugnant Statist laws that impinge on human action, but don't rot the culture with socialism and non-accountability. Being free comes with responsibility, not passing the bill to someone else. The 30's and 40's forged making everyone's pocketbooks part of the treasury, any net earnings were merely a loan callable at any time. This MIGHT have been fine, noxious as it is, but when good behaviors declined and bad behaviors were encouraged in the 60's, the societal cost was massive. All I get from the 60's revolution is everyone got to do "their thing", "whatever your bag is, man" yet the responsibility was collective. THE TWO CANNOT GO TOGETHER IN ANY WAY.

So, YES, end brutish State interruption in personal behavior but make the responsibility for bad choices fall on the individual, not the collective. Any subsidy from one to another to mitigate the other's bad choices has to be completely voluntary.

The 60's were a selfish, spoiled child period of having to get your way and hang the cost on everyone else.

Stephen "Leave It to Beaver" Talbot's paean to his generation

[Jordan_Haelend · 23 December 2006]

I'm wary whenever I read that a film is a "documentary." The term seems to be used rather loosely these days-- some people even apply it to Michael Moore's offerings (even when he has contradicted that notion.) A film like this is not a documentary. It is a propaganda set-piece intended to make the hippie generation look like heroes, whether they were or not. Personally, I don't think that theirs' is a legacy to be very proud of.

Mr. Talbot was a typical campus anti-war protester of the time, so it only makes sense that he would paint "his" generation in the best possible light. This, to say the least, detracts from the balance one would expect of an authentic documentary.

As an aside, it's always amused me that it was the radical Left that practically destroyed the Democratic Party's chances at the Chicago Convention in 1968-- and thus paved the way and rolled out the red carpet for Richard M. Nixon.

60's

[rahandsome14 · 3/10 · 9 January 2007]

If you do some research on the "60's Revolution"... check out the Tavistock Think Tank, and Stanford Research Institute! The Beatles, Rolling Stones.. in fact all of the British Invasion, and the Drug Induced Independence were all part of a Social Engineering Experitment... Don't Believe me - Please Do the Research think for yourself, something which was obviously very lacking in the 60's.

Tavistock, paid young girls to scream, paid journalists to talk about "Drug Exploration", and even had Ed Sullivan sign on to the "Social Experiments"! Rock & Roll wasn't coined by Allen Freed, it was coined by Tavistock and Stanford R.I.! Sandoz was paid handsomely to produce LSD! The 60's did exactly what the Globalists (i.e. Rockefellers, Rothschilds, and J.P. Morgans ) wanted.. the Christian American Family Unit was destroyed..

And we thought we were rebelling.. it hurts to find out how manipulated we were.

Please don't scream and yell - or even worse - ignore this post.

Do some research, sometimes Rebelling is "Exactly" what they wanted us to do!

Well done but clearly misnamed, as the documentary is not about THE 1960s--just certain aspects of it.

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 29 March 2012]

Making a documentary about a decade and condensing it into two hours is a seemingly impossible task. Doing this with the VERY eventful 1960s is clearly an impossibility and the makers of "The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation" failed miserably to really represent the 1960s. Instead, they focused on portions--and because of this the show is surely misnamed. It also talked a bit about the 1970s--such as the Watergate Scandal and Roe vs. Wade! Perhaps calling it "The Radical 1960s and Beyond" or "The Tumult Beginning in the LATE 1960s" or "1968 to the Early to Mid-1970s" would have been better. For example, although the film talks about the civil rights movement, NOTHING about it before 1968 is mentioned!! No March on Washington, no civil rights legislation, no burning of churches and no murder of civil rights workers like Medgar Evers is mentioned! The film picks up just before the murder of Martin Luther King in '68--as if THAT was the entirety of the movement!

If you are a young person watching this film, you might have seriously some mistaken ideas about the decade. You might assume that everyone in the 60s fell into camps like the hippies, the Black Panthers and...well, that is all. You would assume we never landed in the moon or even went into space. You might assume that there was no music until the Monterrey Pop Festival--so there were no Beatles, British Invasion, Motown or Do-Wop. You might assume that there was no Berlin or Cuban Missile Crisis. And, you would have no idea who John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Sandy Koufax, Yuri Gagarin or Nelson Mandela were. You would have no idea that Israel was nearly wiped out during the Six-Day War. You'd have no idea what was happening in HUGE countries like India or China. Clearly, the film did a lousy job of conveying information or adequately exploring the entire decade.

Instead, this film is clearly a look back at the radical late 60s--particularly the hippies, Panthers and even the students during the uprisings in Prague and Mexico City. These are very good topics for a documentary--but the title just doesn't seem to indicate that this was the thrust. But the film also seemed to indicate that this was almost exclusively a good thing--whereas history has shown that a lot of good and bad came about from these movements. But aside from an amusing interview with Pat Buchanan, there really wasn't a lot to provide balance, perspective or insight. Several times I wish the documentary would have taken some risk--such as confronting Robert McNamara when he asserted that he KNEW the war was unwinnable yet he remained in the Johnson administration as Secretary of War (wow--that struck me as incredibly evil).

Overall, quite interesting and woefully incomplete. If you are on the left, you will probably enjoy the film a bit more than those on the right (mostly because the film seems focused on the left--such as the woman discussing her three abortions) but even then you might be very disappointed because of its omission of so much important history.

My feeling is that to ADEQUATELY portray the 60s, you'd need a film of ten hours...or a lot more.