Available at Amazon.com
Directed by David Leaf & John Scheinfeld
Featuring:
Carl Bernstein
Noam Chomsky
Walter Cronkite
Mario Cuomo
Angela Davis
John Dean
Yoko Ono Lennon
G. Gordon Liddy
George McGovern
Geraldo Rivera
Bobby Seale
Tom Smothers
Gore Vidal
Rated PG-13
Running Time: 96 minutes
Release date: Tuesday, February 13th 2007
The Movie
The U.S. vs. John Lennon is troubling. Lennon is such an interesting character, a rebellious, outspoken, intelligent, charismatic, peacenik punk. It would be hard to make an uninteresting documentary about the man. This film, at times, comes close. The presence of Lennon, the political turmoil of the ’60s and ’70s, and super-villain G. Gordon Liddy make this film entertaining enough, but it never approaches its potential as a documentary.
A good chunk of the problems with The U.S. vs. John Lennon lies with the film’s lack of focus. The people interviewed for the film are a strange mixed lot. It is never really explained what, say, Geraldo Rivera or Mario Cuomo have to do with Lennon. (An explanation for the former is afforded in the extras.) Ostensibly, the documentary is about Lennon’s fight to stave off deportation by the INS, but much of the run time is devoted towards haphazardly covering events of the era, and recreating and endorsing Lennon’s various anti-war mantras. As such, the movie lacks a main course and becomes a meal of appetizers.
You might not be able to judge a book by it’s cover, but very often one can judge a DVD by its cover quotes. It sends a foreboding message that the front quote on this DVD case is from professional shill Peter Travers. The real insight, however, is to be gleaned from the Yoko Ono quote on the back. “Of all the documentaries made about John, this is the one he would have loved.” What can we learn from this statement? Well, A) there already exist documentaries of Lennon and B) this one is the most flattering.
Therein lies another big problem with the film. Lennon isn’t just the film’s subject; he’s the film’s super-hero. He’s the poor orphan who changed the world. He isn’t shown to have any flaws or any limits to what he could accomplish.
In that sense, we are given a rather incomplete look at Lennon, the man. But their portrayal of Lennon is more fractional than that. There is little time devoted to the Beatles, and no time devoted to the three other Beatles. There is no mention of Lennon’s first son. Granted, no documentary can be completely comprehensive, but the things shown versus the things omitted from this movie lead me to believe that it is more of a persuasive piece than a document of history.
The film: 6.5/10
The DVD
The extras provided here consist of Trailers, a DVD-rom, and Bonus Footage. I don’t care about trailers. I don’t have a DVD-rom drive, and that feature consists solely of the transcript of a Lennon/Ono interview by Tariq Ali.
So let’s focus on the bonus footage. This section contains what amounts to 10 deleted scenes which, all together, comprise just under an hour of footage. About half of the stuff here is of interest, and it seems that with the right editing one can smoosh this into the main film and get a good 90 minute picture.
The Bonus Footage also seems to be more controversial than the film proper. There are multiple comparisons made of the Nixon administration to the current administration, with the general consensus being that the former is preferable to the latter. There is also some discussion of the always controversial song “Woman is the Nigger of the World” as well as a section devoted to the “Two Virgins” album cover.
The most memorable and heartbreaking bit of the extras is Yoko Ono Lennon’s Letter to the Parole Board, in which Yoko reads her 2000 letter regarding Mark David Chapman’s pending parole. It is a simple piece of painful humanity that is lacking elsewhere on the disc.
