Netflix<\/a> on that extraordinary year, feature cunningly edited clips from Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville and Taxi Driver? It does. Are excerpts intercut with Donna Summers\u2019s Love to Love You Baby? Uh-huh. Is it narrated by Jodie Foster? You bet. That may be the only information you need to set aside 96 minutes over the festive period.<\/p>\nIn truth, Morgan Neville\u2019s film begins as if it is going to give you only what you expect. Talking heads such as Josh Brolin, Ellen Burstyn and Seth Rogen turn up to assure us this was a time like no other. We hear again that the unstoppable success of Steven Spielberg\u2019s Jaws, an imperishable classic, then gave the studios the ammunition they needed to curtail the perceived excesses of the post-1960s film-making oddballs. Peter Bart, veteran producer and writer, tells us 1975 was the most important year in the history of American cinema. <\/p>\n
So far, so familiar.<\/p>\n
As the film zips on, however, it turns into a wider history of how the US processed the legacies of Watergate and Vietnam. The former crisis was reflected in films such as The Conversation and All the President\u2019s Men. Vietnam was, however, so far as cinema then went, the \u201ctopic nobody wanted to talk about\u201d. <\/p>\n
Away from the movie theatre, Neville, an Oscar winner for 20 Feet from Stardom, settles on the near-forgotten phenomenon of Est \u2013 derived from Erhard Seminars Training \u2013 as a key to unlock the solipsism at the centre of the decade. <\/p>\n
This bizarre self-improvement project invited devotees into an epically comforting fatalism that excused any personal miscalculations. What better non-religion for an era that someone here describes as \u201cpost-everything and pre-nothing\u201d?<\/p>\n
Breakdown: 1975, like the best films of that period, never lets up on entertainment as it pursues a serious end. We don\u2019t get just Network and Harlan County, USA; we also get The Towering Inferno and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All contribute to sharp analysis of a body politic apparently unaware of its own psychological instability. <\/p>\n
Dickens was really on to something with that \u201cbest of times … worst of times\u201d stuff. The age of wisdom. The age of foolishness.<\/p>\n
Streams on Netflix from Friday, December <\/i> 19th<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.irishtimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Breakdown: 1975 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 Director: Morgan Neville Cert: None Starring: Albert Brooks, Bill Gates, Ellen Burstyn, Frank Rich, Joan Tewkesbury, Josh Brolin, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Patton Oswalt, Peter Bart Running Time: 1 hr 36 mins The average cinephile will require no encouragement to check out any random documentary about the cinema […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[316971,23191,309280],"class_list":["post-2202351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-jodie-foster","tag-netflix","tag-steven-spielberg"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2202351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2202352,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202351\/revisions\/2202352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2202351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2202351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2202351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}