It Felt Like a Kiss

Rock Hudson Doris Day Lee Harvey Oswald Sirhan Sirhan Saddam Hussein Osama bin Laden Fidel Castro Patrice Lumumba Joseph Mobutu Enos the chimp Richard Nixon JFK RFK CIA KGB HIV Velvet Underground Andy Warhol The Crystals Brian Wilson Lou Reed Phil Spector Tina Turner Bonanza the Manson Family My Lai mass marketing beauty salons electroconvulsive treatment self-immolation guns the Bomb psychotherapy sex appeal child pageants easy credit Texas School Book Depository World Trade Center = America

With It Felt Like a Kiss, Curtis reimagines recent American history as a tempestuous fever dream -- an angry, psychedelic rebuke to the old maxim "history is written by the winners." Not so much a narrative as a narrative being torn at the seams, its shredded reconstitution: This is what the crumbling of an empire looks and sounds like.

when you read ''starring: Rock Hudson, Saddam Hussein'' in the opening credits you just know it's gonna be an awesome movie

great music, cool footage, and though there supposedly is a point there is no real focus and it's really just a clusterfuck of incredibly loosely connected topics

An entrancing 54 minute infomercial on America's rise to power noting a lot of their screw ups aided by a pop music soundtrack that adapts itself perfectly. Wondrously made and completely captivating.

Difficult to make a final judgment, given that this was an element of a larger work I have not seen. Nevertheless, this is certainly a captivating attempt to convey the weave of history, and the individual and collective madness and stupidity that have underlied so much of American history in the last fifty years. While containing less information than his documentary series, this is an attempt to find new ways to use cinema as an instrument of documentation, analysis and critique. 54 minutes.

There are a lot of extremely disturbing images in this, but also some fascinating nuggets of information, and, of course, the juxtaposition of sound and footage is inspired.

What a film!

A captivating glimpse into parts of the US history. The choice of songs and images was wonderful.

Plays like a greatest hits of previous works / ideas of Curtis'.

It really felt like a kiss, even in Turkey, but it clearly wasn't. Incredible editing by Curtis. The songs line up perfectly with the narrative. Much more powerful than the usual documentaries because it doesn't tell the story of how the current American nation -highly sexualized (even the kids, unfortunately), individualistic customers- was created, but it SHOWS it through the songs, footages, etc.

Remember that montage from Michael Moore's BFC, portraying America's foreign policy while the song, "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong, is played in the background? Multiple that scene by 10, add a hefty ladleful of 'randomness', a pinch of 'whatever', overcook it by about 54 minutes and you've got this sad excuse for a documentary.

1st minute: OK, this is kinda weird. Not sure if this is going to be any good... 30th minute: The experiment works, this is awesome.

A mesmerizing stroll down the dark alleys of Americana.

I'd give anything to see the full version of this.

Slick as those montage/collages are there are a few too many with no new information here for it to work really well on it's own.

See, this is what Curtis can do when he doesn't narrate anything.

Being American I grew up with notions of our rise to power and effect on our world being related to me in a wholly positive light. As I grew my preconceived notions were shaken through my own studies of the time period, though I still regard America's rise as largely positive. Curtis shows us a side we rarely see in our history. While it is a mostly negative view on our path toward individualistic values, I find it no less important for the uninformed about our faults during the time period.

curiously absent, another song which epitomises the film with its twisted irony, desperate self-delusion and eerie faux-naivete: "i can make you mine, taste your lips of wine, anytime night or day... only trouble is, gee whiz, i'm dreamin' my life away..."

left-overs

a very bitter smashup of the 1960s, and by proxy, american history.

I really love Curtis (in strictly not gay way), but sometimes he sounds like a conspiracy crackpot. Yet it seems somehow worth believing. This one is not as great as the others I've seen by him.

Bunch of images with music. I'm not sure if I like it that much. It does have some interesting stuff, but not enough to blow me away

Documentarian Adam Curtis created this hour long experimental documentary as part of a larger, immersive theatrical exhibition that also included music by Damon Albarn recorded by the Kronos Quartet. The film uses a collage of stock footage images and popular songs from the era to tell a series of interconnected stories that tell how the rise in power of the United States post-WWII sculpted an image of the world and how people reacted to that image.