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DVD American Dream
Director Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning rendering of a crippling strike at a Minnesota meat-packing plant may look dated, but the underlying theme of individuals crushed by big business remains all too timely. Using a briskly engrossing combination of first-person interviews, news broadcasts, and fly-on-the-wall encounters, Kopple creates an indelible document of a community's dissolution at the hands of larger forces. (The film is clearly on the side of the workers, but at the same time it refuses to ignore the petty infighting that eventually helped contribute to their ruin.) An alternately depressing, uplifting, and often profanely funny film that, at times, echoes Michael Moore's Roger and Me , but without that movie's distancing smarm. A movie's title has never seemed quite so bitterly apt. The director, who had previously won an Oscar for the equally arresting Harlan County USA, would later go on to document yet another traumatic event with Woody Allen's Wild Man Blues. --Andrew Wright
This documentary provides a fascinating look at an era that was passing even when the documentary was made in 1989, and has since ended. The days of big companies, big labor and big clashes between the two. In this corner: the meatpackers union, fighting to get more for doing less; in the other corner, Hormel, fighting for just the opposite. Well, the status quo at least. The war -- one of attrition, lasting 15 rounds. The winner? You probably guessed.
An American Dream? or Nightmare
My husband was part of that American Dream. He was a member of the union and a very active part of the strike. He was spit on by some of the townspeople and harrassed and made to feel like a rebel most of the time because he was fighting for something he believed to be important. The strike was a very hard thing for everyone, company and union members alike. In the end the strike was broken and so were peoples lives and families. But, the unions are still a very important part of the American Dream and unfortunately the companies get away with trying to take that away from the workers. The film was great and if you knew anyone that was invovled with it, it was heartbreaking to relive it. The author, however, should be commended for producing a great film.
A good look at Labor and its decline
"American Dream" breaks your heart. No matter what side of the labor movement you are on, if you are for or against it, you see its toll on the people involved, but also the hope it instills in a group. Personally, as a pro-union man who thinks that unions actually have a place in our society and are not something of the past, I felt that the movie also showed the lack of solidarity within the movement. Instead of a concrete effort to defeat Hormel, the union was set against itself somewhat at first, without the backing of the international. That, I believe, speaks to all people in society. You cannot accomplish things if you are not united... a good lesson no matter what walk of life someone is from, and something totally unrelated to unions that this movie tells.
An epic in length and breadth, this documentary aims at nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the most dominant institution on the planet Earth in our lifetime--a phenomenon all the more remarkable, if not downright frightening, when you consider that the corporation as we know it has been around for only about 150 years. It used to be that corporations were, by definition, short-lived and finite in agenda. If a town needed a bridge built, a corporation was set up to finance and complete the project; when the bridge was an accomplished fact, the corporation ceased to be. Then came the 19th-century robber barons, and the courts were prevailed upon to define corporations not as get-the-job-done mechanisms but as persons under the 14th Amendment with full civil rights to life,... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Mark Achbar - Jennifer Abbott DVD Release Date: Released the 05 April 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A little-known chapter of American labor history is brought vividly to life in this period drama from writer-director John Sayles. It's a fictional story about labor wars among West Virginia coal miners during the 1920's, but every detail is so right that the film has the unmistakable ring of truth. The tension begins when the Stone Mountain Coal Company of Matewan, West Virginia, announces a lower pay rate for miners, who respond by calling a strike under the leadership of a United Mine Workers representative (Chris Cooper). Proving strength in numbers, the miners are joined by black and Italian miners who initially resist the strike, and a fateful battle ensues when detectives hired by the coal company attempt to evict miners from company housing. Violence erupts in a sequence of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Chris Cooper - James Earl Jones Director(s): John Sayles DVD Release Date: Released the 14 August 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A very rare movie, in any nation. I've never seen one like this before. At the local video store, few customers rent it out, because it doesn't look like your typical fun puff-piece or thriller/chiller. Political movies usually do poorly. The actors are not incredibly sexy, don't have witty remarks, and the atmosphere isn't breathtakingly beautiful. As a matter of fact, the opposite is largely true. Even I, a political junkie to some extent, was reluctant to rent it out. One day, however, feeling more than usually virtuous, I decided to give this movie a try. The movie covers the labor struggle of illegal immigrant janitors in Los Angeles being paid $5.45 an hour with no benefits, no vacation, no lunch break, no rights and subject to sexual harassment and arbitrary abuse and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Pilar Padilla - Adrien Brody Director(s): Ken Loach DVD Release Date: Released the 27 November 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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