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Timothy Leary's Dead (Special Edition)

Timothy Leary's Dead (Special Edition)

List Price: $19.98
Your Price: $17.98
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: you can't go wrong with tim
Review: a great compilation of tim interviews ranging from back in the day to just before his departure. unfortunately there is a bit of litter to step around on the way...although i honor the film makers for choosing an excellent person to document...i think the questions they posed to tim in their interviews were a bit ridiculous (tim handles them quite tastefully and humourously), the "neo-hippie" footage gave it away...the producers were in it for the cash and the chicks. bad boys..."isn't it delicious to be naughty and get spanked?"...disappointing. the ending scene is quite surreal but, i have read that it was not approved of by neither leary or his family...i hope the people who made this film can sleep ok at night because if it were me, i'd be ashamed. even though you may be hesitant at this time to give your money to these people, it's still the best leary video i've seen. PLEASE SOMEBODY!, MAKE A GREAT LEARY DOCUMENTARY!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: A documentary with fabricated footage in it
Review: I thought this documentary was of value until I read up on it and found out that the scene with Leary's head being cut off is a fake. In reality, Leary was planning to freeze his head, but never went ahead with this plan. That a documentary should include bogus footage is entirely outrageous, not even mentioning how disrespectful to Leary, his family, and his followers such a gruesome fake must feel. ...

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: A documentary with fabricated footage in it
Review: I thought this documentary was of value until I read up on it and found out that the scene with Leary's head being cut off is a fake. In reality, Leary was planning to freeze his head, but never went ahead with this plan. That a documentary should include bogus footage is entirely outrageous, not even mentioning how disrespectful to Leary, his family, and his followers such a gruesome fake must feel. ...

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: the end is very disturbing
Review: its a pretty good documentary, but i wasn't able to sleep for a week after watching it because the final shot of tim's severed head keeps haunting me. eeech!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: the end is very disturbing
Review: Not a very well-edited film. It's very worth-seeing though. The ending of it is pretty um.. shocking. The subject of the film is Tim Leary, and it's not too hard to make an interesting documentary of him. Still, there's a lot of good commentary by people other than Leary too. There's some funny stuff done with this film. I loved some of the scenes that were made up, like the one with the alien and the one with a kid about to eat Leary's brain. This film is pretty subversive and also pretty daring. I liked some of what the director did with Leary's audio and various pictures and videos of him. The soundtrack to this is all wrong. It could actually pass as a great documentary if it had some great music. My final complaint is that it didn't present things as big as they were. Like the fact that he escaped from prison. As Zach Leary said, that was pretty mythic. It was only brought up for about a minute of two here. It seemed small.

So it's a very flawed film, but it's als very worth watching. It was cool, but it wasn't great. That's a shame. It had potential.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Boring documentary on an electric subject.
Review: Not a very well-edited film. It's very worth-seeing though. The ending of it is pretty um.. shocking. The subject of the film is Tim Leary, and it's not too hard to make an interesting documentary of him. Still, there's a lot of good commentary by people other than Leary too. There's some funny stuff done with this film. I loved some of the scenes that were made up, like the one with the alien and the one with a kid about to eat Leary's brain. This film is pretty subversive and also pretty daring. I liked some of what the director did with Leary's audio and various pictures and videos of him. The soundtrack to this is all wrong. It could actually pass as a great documentary if it had some great music. My final complaint is that it didn't present things as big as they were. Like the fact that he escaped from prison. As Zach Leary said, that was pretty mythic. It was only brought up for about a minute of two here. It seemed small.

So it's a very flawed film, but it's als very worth watching. It was cool, but it wasn't great. That's a shame. It had potential.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: AS OUTRAGEOUS & MIND-BLOWING AS LEARY'S LIFE
Review: Reviewers such as THE NEW YORK TIMES' Janet Maslin got it right when she called this doc "The right final vision of Leary and his times" - and so did the Toronto Sun which said "Somewhere over the rainbow Timothy Leary is laughing his head off, if he still has a head, that is." Anyone who takes all the scenes in this movie literally (like some of the reviwers below) ought to have his head examined, since the movie makes obvious leaps into psychedelic madness everywhere, including a scene filmed like a silent movie in which a frantic mother cautions her son not to eat Timothy Leary's brain, and another scene in which Leary's opinions about alien abduction are dramatized by an alien hopping into bed with a little ol' lady from Iowa. To those who think Leary's family was shocked by the film, they obviously are unaware that Leary's ex-wife Rosemary invited friends to a private screening in San Fran and gave the film her blessing by saying Tim would have loved it (he passed before its completion). For those who scream it's unauthorized, they should note that Leary not only signed a contract giving the producers permission to do exactly what they have done in the movie, but he cooperated every step of the way, leaving a big hint in the end credits about how to separate reality from the surreal in the film. For more clues, check out the Director's Commentary on the DVD, which deals with the controversy this film created. The bottom line: Any movie about Timothy Leary that doesn't blow your mind doesn't even begin to convey the real Leary, and this one delivers Big Time. Besides, the film wouldn't be doing its job if it didn't make some opinionated fans angry (as well as offend some of the stodgy webmasters of the official Leary website who have been in misery for years because their own effort at a Leary biopic was never released). However, by all means, avoid this film if your mind has fossilized, and you do not want your views about reality (or about who Leary was) to be challenged. Also avoid it if you think you need to believe everything you see in a documentary.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Timothy Leary revelation of a daring life.
Review: Timothy Leary comes off as a man ahead of his time: fearless, sacreligious, funny, defiant, quick-witted, iconoclastic. No wonder Richard Nixon called him the most dangerous man alive, he was afraid of Leary's Irish wit...I would recommend the film to anyone who, "thinks for himself," or is curious about a man whose appetite for life was, arguably, as big as the sword-fighter-scientiest explorer's: Sir Richard Burton. I couldn't take my eyes off Leary.


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