2024 the best of eneies review
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1968 USA is in political turmoil due to the Viet Nam War and a presidential primaries are starting. 3rd ranked ABC decides to hold commentary debates after each broadcast between ultra conservative author, political commentator William F. Buckley Jr. And liberal author/screenwriter/commentator Gore Vidal. The lively debates lit up television, politics, and America, and elevated ABC's floundering news division.
MPAA rating : R (Restricted)
Product Dimensions : 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.12 ounces
Item model number : 35234950
Media Format : Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC, Color, Multiple Formats
Run time : 1 hour and 28 minutes
Release date : November 3, 2015
Actors : Gore Vidal
Subtitles: : Spanish, French
Studio : Magnolia Home Ent
ASIN : B013W7LS44
Number of discs : 1
Reviewer: Sony_XL
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: is it really news?
Review: "Best of Enemies" is incredibly effective at achieving multiple thematic ends without coming off as dense. Here's a few of things it managed to touch on.It's a sound, but passive, attack on the current state of our discourse, giving us a history lesson on the genesis moment of television punditry.It's a fascinating look inside network news in the time of American political convention "gavel- to-gavel" coverage. The last time that ever happened.It's an exploration of how TV changes us, or at the very least, reveals us to ourselves, both as people who long to sit in front of its cameras, and as a nation who watches its images.It's about how the two sides of the late 60's culture war found their primetime voices.It's about class, and how where we come, or how we where we wish we had come from, affects how and what we think.It's about the personal journeys of the intellectuals at the center of it - gay-left leaning best selling counter-culture author Vidal and establishment defending policy-affecting conservative Buckley - and how their confrontation never really left the center stage of their own minds.But most spectacularly, it's about how the issues of a turbulent period (our republic caught in an ongoing war of attrition, race riots in the streets, the all too familiar rhetoric of income and racial inequality at the center of the political debate) never really ended.And it does all of those things with a sense of real legitimacy, never once feeling like it's assigning more importance to the story than it deserves. A perennial fault in the doc genre. But it's not just a good story. It's a good story told well.The whole thing is brilliantly structured, wonderfully cut together, incredibly funny and tragic, and far-reaching in its ambition. It's political positioning is measured, either because of or in spite of it's co-director being affiliated with the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation.It features great talking heads, including political historian Sam Tanenhaus (who I sorely miss as the New York Times Book Review editor) and avowed socialist/Marxist/anti-leftist/cultural contrarian Christopher Hitchens, who manages to bloviate even from beyond the grave.
Reviewer: J. R. Russell
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: 1968 was a tragic but interesting watershed in American history: this is a great exploration of it.
Review: I watched the Buckley-Vidal confrontation live during the week of the violent Democratic convention of Chicago, August 1968. Vietnam was in full swing. The USSR had invaded Czechoslovakia. America was divided into two, maybe more, nations. I was fourteen, fascinated, repressed, scared. William F. Buckley, the rich, elite conservative who delighted in needling and humiliating people, lost his temper and called Gore Vidal a "queer". Gore Vidal had called him a "crypto-Nazi". Vidal was gay, and had he been less wealthy and privileged he could have been imprisoned in a mental asylum, or just dead in the street- as many of us were. (This was a year before Stonewall.) Buckley was no Nazi either. But the lines were drawn, American public debate had become a gladiatorial blood sport, and we were on the way to the bad, polarized place where we are now. This documentary film contextualizes the debates, and contains interviews with extremely thoughtful people who were there, who knew these men. I recommend the film. It's sobering- I see my own limitations and hatreds and crudities in it and it makes me want to overcome them. What did the Man say? "Love your enemy." That's a start. The healing of the world must start within each one of us.
Reviewer: Geoff Pratt
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The Debate Still Goes On
Review: I had the privilege of seeing this documentary at the True -False Film Festival in Columbia, MO last March when it debuted. Though I saw a number of fine documentary features, this one about two of America's favorite elitist snobs from opposite directions of the political spectrum debating their views during the political conventions in that tumultuous year of 1968 was the best. ABC News was in the cellar of the ratings that year and needed a boost in their coverage of the Republican and Democratic Conventions that year. They hired William Buckley of the National Review to represent the Conservative viewpoint and Liberal author Gore Vidal to face off on live television. What ABC News got was a huge ratings boost from these debates as they more or less insulted one another as much as each other's respective positions. What America got out of it has been just as long lasting. The end of civility in how we communicate with each other over our differing political opinions. While Vidal likely won the debates by keeping his cool as compared to Buckley losing his, it would be Buckley who would get some vindication in the end. His candidate, Ronald Reagan won the White House just twelve years later. Overall, "Best of Enemies" doesn't miss a beat as it balances itself as entertainment and education quite well. It is indeed a reminder that these two men absolutely hated one another, but also that nothing has really changed in nearly fifty years.
Reviewer: Cameron Cullen
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: August 28th 1968 isn't a memorable date. Yet, it haunted William F. Buckley Jr. forever. Buckley the Conservative intellectual lost his temper debating live on the American ABC network. Not just a slight raised voice, but a savage insult which he found difficult to justify. His opponent was Democratic intellectual Gore Vidal who had parried with Buckley to the point where the red mist descended. This impressive documentary charts the build up to this event and the aftermath. Buckley could never quite rid himself of his lapse of character in front of ten million viewers. The proceedings were the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and each nightly edition as taped live is used in the documentary. At some point after the event Buckley managed to have the master tape wiped of his meltdown confrontation. Unfortunately for him, but thankfully for posterity a black and white low grade viewing copy did survive. And it somewhat unnerved Buckley a decade later when a clip was shown in a retrospective. Both men were at fault, yet Buckley was left with his conscience but Vidal quipped to him "Well Bill, we really gave them their money's worth tonight!" Both Buckley and Vidal were brilliant talents who were polar opposites in character yet both shared a self of their own brilliance. That intellectual vanity is something missing from TV debate today and it's what makes this film special.
Reviewer: dr george pollard
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Remarkable story, even if the culmination of the debates is somewhat shattering. dgp
Reviewer: British Screenjolts Ltd
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Barely veiled/unveiled hostility in a critics review of the 1968 US National Political Convention summer season.
Reviewer: Terry Ames
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Excellent television.
Reviewer: Mark Pack
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: The 1968 US Presidential contest is famous for many reasons, and one of the longer-lasting if lesser mentioned impacts was the way it changed TV coverage of American politics. For it was during the 1968 party conventions that ABC pioneered a new, more raucous and more opinionated form of coverage by putting on live head-to-head debates between two of the country's most high profile - and most divergent - political pundits: Gore Vidal (liberal) and William F Buckley Jr. (conservative).The documentary film Best of Enemies retells the run-up to the debates, the course of the debates and the life-long fall out from them. Ironically, the best moments of the film are not the actual debate footage. That's because the style of political confrontation on the media has got so much harsher since that even the moment when Buckley threatened to punch Vidal sounds to modern ears rather genteel, with the elegant tone and laidback body language that went with the flash of anger.In its own way, that powerfully makes the point about how much TV coverage of politics has changed since. It does also leave a slightly odd hole at the heart of what is a fascinating film, thanks to the way the debates themselves have so aged.But the surrounding material, including copious interviews and other contemporary footage, is so good that this is really a curio rather than a flaw in what is a fascinating movie.