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Backstory
Billed as the follow up to a 14-minute film made by filmmaker Ralph Arlyck in 1969 about a four-year-old boy named Sean who lived with his communist hippie parents in Haight Ashbury and revealed that he liked to smoke pot.
Feature
Striving for 49-Up-style poignancy, Arlyck’s film catches up with Sean and his oddball family in the present day where he seems like a reasonably well-adjusted young adult with an opinion about his past as ambivalent as the filmmakers. While the film achieves some nicely poetic moments, its problem is that it strives a bit too hard to attain what a filmmaker like Michael Apted (49 Up) lets the process discover. As his own kids say to him at one point: “can you be more disingenuous?”
Extras
Lots of deleted scenes of limited appeal including one in which the grown up Sean reveals he never really smoked pot as a child, thereby negating the hook of the whole damn project.
Verdict
Relevant and interesting but something less than art.
Billed as the follow up to a 14-minute film made by filmmaker Ralph Arlyck in 1969 about a four-year-old boy named Sean who lived with his communist hippie parents in Haight Ashbury and revealed that he liked to smoke pot.
Feature
Striving for 49-Up-style poignancy, Arlyck’s film catches up with Sean and his oddball family in the present day where he seems like a reasonably well-adjusted young adult with an opinion about his past as ambivalent as the filmmakers. While the film achieves some nicely poetic moments, its problem is that it strives a bit too hard to attain what a filmmaker like Michael Apted (49 Up) lets the process discover. As his own kids say to him at one point: “can you be more disingenuous?”
Extras
Lots of deleted scenes of limited appeal including one in which the grown up Sean reveals he never really smoked pot as a child, thereby negating the hook of the whole damn project.
Verdict
Relevant and interesting but something less than art.
