Hadrina
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
Arianna Moses
Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.
Marva-nova
Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.
synesthetico
This could have been a great exercise in understanding the human condition and the nature of religious cults but instead we get a half-hearted, breezy little film with clumsy editing and shallow, childish themes. It completely fails to intelligently assess what happened.The romanticized ending where the ex-members go on in tears about how they tried to create paradise on earth and that even though it failed, at least they made the effort was just too much. Free from the cult, these people continue to be idiotic, pathetically vulnerable human beings without a shred of dignity or intelligence - completely content with playing "victim". Sure were brainwashed and abused but it's been years since the incident and these grown men and women are still unable to assume partial responsibility for the mass killings of innocent kids and random politicians. Jim Jones is just one man. Ultimately it's the blind followers and sad, silly, co-dependent escapists easily lured by unrealistic promises who enable psychopaths like Jim Jones to thrive. This film deserves to be burned for ending on such a ridiculous, offensive note.
dhainline1
The documentary "The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple" dives into the 1978 murder/suicide of over 900 members of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple due to poisoned punch and is told from the POV of former cult members. These members, all men and women, black and white tell their stories of cult life in an honest, non-flinching way. Jim Jones opened his cult to every walk of human society; young, old, white, black, male and female. These former members tell stories about Jim Jones' drug abuse, God complex, and sexual molestation against them and others. Some like Hue Folsom use a defense mechanism of laughing about Jones' perversions and others like Tim Carver are more solemn when talking about such things. People are different and everyone reacts to trauma in his or her own way. To hear these traumatized ex-members talk about the aftermath of the poisoning is quite sad and chilling. You can see the pain in the eyes of Grace Stoen, Tim Carver, and Vern Gosney when they talk about the loss of their young sons in Jonestown!I do hope doing this documentary was therapeutic for all involved and they receive love and support from the viewers of this documentary and from others.
hannasdeli
This is one of these stories that can be revisited over and over again while trying to understand what actually happened. What are the reasons that make people do horrible things without really wanting or understanding why do they do them. It is a film about collective delusion and manipulation... or maybe it is a film about fear and uncertainty towards life?Well, I wish I could answer these questions after this documentary. But I can't, because despite it's very acceptable technical quality, the choice of a chronological narration doesn't do much to add depth to a character larger than life as Jim Jones was. The film did a lot to enlighten me in the origins of the church, it's racial integration and also its claims against social inequality. But the character itself remains a mystery to me. His motivations, the techniques he used to control his followers. It is all depicted very lightly and without much intellectual depth. There are moments when some of the cult followers say things about Jones that could be further explored, but unfortunately the director chooses to leave them as nearly an anecdote.And this is what I think it is the biggest concern I have against this very interesting film. The narration makes Jones appear as an eccentric egomaniac. But the truth is that one hints there was so much more in his plans. It is just not plausible that he just made up the mass suicide- murder idea on the go. There is something utterly well thought out about how everything happened. This is pure evil at work, not very different to the Jew extermination by the Nazis. There was a plan, and I am sure that in this case there was a very well laid out plan. But the film makes it all appear almost as random as the weather. It is a pity, because the archive footage is varied and excellent. But I can't help but wonder what Errol Morris would have done of this film. Probably a masterpiece, because he would have made what he does best: Portray characters with total precision. Still, an interesting documentary to watch.
dreverativy
This is a very accomplished documentary. It reveals, via its interviewees, a level of despair and dismay that the past twenty eight years have yet to efface. Whole families - indeed an entire community were liquidated in minutes on November 18, 1978. Jim Jones was a conventional mid-western preacher in every respect bar one - his empathy for African Americans, and therefore his commitment to the idea of a racially integrated church. Of course many conventional churches - Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, etc., reached out to marginalised communities, but this tendency was perhaps less pronounced in the southern evangelical tradition, which was highly influential in Jones' home state of Indiana (which had been the epicentre of Klu Klux Klan activity in the decade before Jones' birth under the leadership of Ed Jackson and the infamous David Stephenson). The fact that Jones was a little ahead of the curve on the most sensitive and essential issue in American society, and since he was cursed by an unusual sense of self-belief, it led him to believe that he was special, and that his message and the principles by which he operated his church, were unique. Once he comprehended the uniqueness of his mission there was really no limit to his ambitions - he could be anything - he could be the son of God or he could be an avenging angel. In fact he was also a huckster and con-man of the first order with a vastly inflated sense of his own importance, and his relative ignorance of ecclesiastical history prevented him from acknowledging that there have been several important communistic sects in the Christian tradition - not least in America (viz. the early Anabaptists in Reformation Germany, the Diggers/True Levellers in Commonwealth England, the Shakers and certain aspects of Mormonism, etc.).As Jones staked out ever greater claims for himself, he placed himself on a trajectory of spiritual fraud that was so steep that any mis-step or retreat might bring his whole house of cards to the point of collapse. He therefore became hopelessly compromised: he could either become the messiah or another one of California's many prison inmates. The stress of this might explain the paranoia, the abuse of those in his power and the self-abuse that occurred as his 'ministry' progressed. In the end he had taken his loyal and long-suffering congregation so far (both emotionally and physically) that he must have reasoned that the only way of evading an wretched reckoning was by some form of abdication - which took the form of his own suicide and the murder of almost all of his followers. Jones was all of a piece with the likes of Charles Manson or David Koresh.In view of his increasingly outré behaviour, it was almost inevitable that he should have gravitated towards San Francisco and that he should have become prominent in local politics under the aegis of the well-meaning (but arguably misguided) George Moscone. The film does not mention the close connections between the doomed Leo Ryan and Moscone, nor the imminent assassination of Moscone and Harvey Milk by Dan White. That was unfortunate, because it underscored the strangeness of this remarkable story. However, it is by no means a fatal omission. I would have appreciated some detail on the attitude of the Guyanese authorities to this strange Temple in the jungle. Did the government of Forbes Burnham and Arthur Chung know anything about it and the danger that cult members were in? Did they make any attempt to intervene? I saw this film as part of the 2006 Times/BFI London Film Festival, and it is regrettable that it did not receive more publicity (not least in The Times itself). The story was told dead straight with little of the ostentatious editing that is now so common in documentaries, and is all the more effective for it. The audience left the theatre in something approaching a state of utter desolation - a tribute to the terrible nature of the story, the integrity of the witnesses and the ability of Stanley Nelson and his colleagues.The film contains many scenes (footage of services in People's Temple) that seem joyous - and they are all the more tragic for that. Yet I could never quite tell what was in the eyes of all these doomed worshippers (many of whom were otherwise helpless, lonely and frail). Was it rapture or was it...terror?
