My Generation

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$13

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Film

Presented by Michael Caine, and often in the first person (though the script is credited to those Likely Lads, Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais), this is a bright and breezy retread of the revolutionary decade when, briefly, Britannia got her groove back and London was the most happening place on the planet. Granted, it’s not exactly an untold story, but Batty’s entertaining doc benefits from first hand anecdotes by an all-star cast of actors, models, photographers and rock-n-rollers, among them Paul McCartney, Roger Daltrey, Twiggy, and Marianne Faithful.

"When I grew up the news was read by a gentleman wearing a tuxedo, and he was on the radio," Caine remembers wryly. Certainly this was a time of exceptional social upheaval and creative energy. For the first time the class system that kept everybody in his place was ruptured, and the Establishment could only watch in dismay as the youth ran away with the country, embracing sex, drugs, and what would become known as the permissive society. Caine himself credits blacklisted American director Cy Endfield for transforming his career when he cast him as a posh officer in Zulu; "No British director would have done that." Suddenly working class heroes were all the rage. The excitement even proved exportable, as the Beatles proved.

"The use of archival footage in this movie is staggering… and the soundtrack is pretty killer too." Glenn Kenny, rogerebert.com

"Glorious… vibrant… rousing…" Jeremy Aspinall, Radio Times

"There’s a tremendous amount of pleasure to be had in David Batty’s My Generation, a sloppy wet kiss to Michael Caine and British youth culture of the 1960s. Loaded with great footage from the era and accompanied by superbly cleaned-up music tracks from the Kinks, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and many others, this love letter-as-documentary offers 85 minutes of good old fun." Jay Weissberg, Variety