The '60s

Originally posed Aug. 1999Great music, great cast, great acting but the story could use some work.

So there's a lower middle-class family in Chicago who live a very conservative existence. Well, what happens when their oldest son goes to Vietnam, their youngest son becomes a civil rights activist, and their daughter gets knocked up?

For weeks prior to the premiere of The 60's I heard a lot of hype about how it was going to be an accurate portrayal of the 1960's. There was so much hype surrounding the mini-series, yet I found that when I watched it, the program did not live up to its intents.

This movie started slowly, then gained momentum towards the middle. However, the fact that the movie ran over two nights broke that momentum at its peak.

Do we really need any more narcissistic garbage on the Baby Boomer generation? Technically, I am a Boomer, though at the time when all the "idealistic youths" of the '60s were reading Marx, burning their draft cards, and generally prolonging a war which destroyed tens of thousands of lives; I was still in grade school.

I love the mini series. I loved how they switched from black and white to color.

Even if you could get past the idea that these boring characters personally witnessed every Significant Moment of the 1960s (ok, so Katie didn't join the Manson Family, and nobody died at Altamont), this movie was still unbelievably awful. I got the impression that the "writers" just locked themselves in a room and watched "Forrest Gump," "The Wonder Years," and Oliver Stone's 60s films over and over again and called it research.

I really enjoyed this program. True, it was somewhat soap-opera-ish, and it concentrated more on the love lives of the characters than perhaps it should have, but it covered so much ground about the '60's and was so delightfully entertaining.

Being that I was not around in the 60's, I don't know how accurate the portrayal was. However, I think the actors and actresses did a good job with their characters.