Customer Reviews

Following Sean

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Following Sean is a great documentary-- it's not one that hits you over the head with its message, but instead ruminates on life during the 60s and the passage of time. Part of it is about what has become of the 4-year-old child running around Haight St that the filmmaker interviewed in 1969, but it's also about what has become of all of us. The film weaves together the director's own life with Sean's, as we discover strange parallels and sudden twists. When you're done watching, you'll be left thinking about your own friends and family, and how each generation changes while still influenced by the past.

The premise for FOLLOWING SEAN is fascinating. In 1969 while living in San Francisco Ralph Arlyck made a short documentary film about his four year old neighbor Sean which won many awards. Sean lived in a "crash pad" above Arlyck's Haight-Ashbury apartment with his free thinking "hippie" parents, a couple of siblings plus assorted visitors and the precocious child spoke articulately (and to many shockingly) on camera about pot smoking, speed freaks and his contempt for the police. The background of Sean's parents is also interesting as his father is the son of a banking family while his mother's parents were prominent Communists active in the organization of longshoremen.

Arlyck moved back to the east coast following the success of the first "Sean" film but years later decides there might be another documentary to be made if he updated Sean and his family's lives. Similarly to the subject of another well received documentary, STONE READER, Sean and his family are not that hard to find and their lives are not particularly extraordinary. So to pad the movie to more of a feature length Arlyck includes lots of footage about his own family - his elderly left leaning Brooklyn parents, his French wife and his two college age sons, one of whom in my favorite quote from the movie tells his dad he is just "fishing for sound bites" when he grills him on his reaction to the current Berkeley counterculture.

The fact that Sean and his family are currently leading pretty normal lives is interesting in itself and I wish Arlyck had been content in just updating their story and getting some of their recollections and reactions to their lives in "The Haight" circa the late 60's. Yet like so many documentary filmmakers Arlyck just doesn't seem to be able to keep the focus off himself or realize that a longer length doesn't necessarily equate with a better film.

This is not only a movie about "Following Sean" but also a film about following the threads of several generations in multiple families including the filmmaker's own family. If there was anything wrong with this film it is that it had to end. There is still so much we want to know about the direction the lives of the various characters take. Bottom line is that this is one great film. Highly recommended here. Nuff said.

I started watching this documentary thinking it would follow the life of a boy called Sean. The scenes of Sean's earlier life were too short. I did not learn very much about his young life except for the facts that he went barefoot and smoked dope. The director put too much about himself and his family into the film. I would have liked to see interviews with Sean's parents when they were living in Haight Ashbury and shots of Sean with his friends and at school. There was too much of Sean's life missing for the film to be called Following Sean. This said, however, I did enjoy this film and thought it was an excellent insight into the 60's 'hippy era' in America.

In the late-1960s San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury was the counterculture's ground zero. Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck lived in the Haight back then and made a movie about his four-year-old neighbor, Sean Farrell. Sean's parents allowed him to run barefoot in the streets and use marijuana.

In the 1990s, Arlyck returned to San Francisco and tracked down Sean to see what had become of him. Sean and his family have differing opinions on the 1960s and their time in the Haight. The younger members, frankly, don't seem interested in the old counterculture.

If Arlyck had better instincts, Following Sean could have great. He should have used his interviews to bring out the family's story and how the 1960s shaped (or didn't shape) them. Arlyck is a poor interviewer who talks over his subjects when they don't give him the answers that he wants. He also insults Sean's father, Johnny, by saying that Johnny abandons people when they become a burden. A skilled interviewer with a few social graces could have gotten more out of the interviews.

A bigger problem is that, after the first 20 minutes or so, Arlyck makes himself the focus. Following Sean bogs down as Arlyck wallows in self-centered navel gazing and boring tangents. Viewers suffer through footage of Arlyck's two sons and of his cat. The sons show the same level of interest in the film as does the cat.

Following Sean is mildly interesting. For a better look at the 1960s, try the documentary Commune.

This contemplative little film is the best I've seen in a while. The premise of sseing what happened to 4-yr-old Sean leads to a much larger question of what happens to all of us, inter- and intra-generationally.

Even the reviews are likely influenced by the age of the reviewer. for example, I bet those that thought it was slow or it had too much filler are younger...having been raised to think it normal to rush at everything. Even though I'm not that old...about Sean's generation...to me I could have watched something twice as long because for me this was excellent & I didn't want it to end.

Understated, thoughtful documentary about different recent generations in America, and
how their politics and upbringings intermeshed and evolved.

As a film student in 1969 Ralph Arylck made a 15 minute short about a bright 4 year old
boy who lived upstairs with hippie parents in Haight-Asbury. 4 year old Sean had tried pot,
refused to wear shoes, etc.

Now Arlyck sets out to find out what happened to Sean 30+ years later - was he a mess as some
predicted? Had his upbringing left him free as others hoped?

Of course the answer is far more gray and complex. And in
examining Sean and his family, film-maker Arlyck also looks at his own.

A quiet film, not deeply emotional, but a very interesting and worthy essay about parental ideals, family, and life.

I laughed and cried with Arlyck as he created this film about his career as a filmaker and the impact Sean had on his life. Arlyck was able to do what many of us spend our whole life trying... Find the secret of how we mutually influence one another.

A warm, wonderful documentary that makes you think. Poetic and haunting, the fascinating story of Sean and his family is told with wit and grace. Highly recommended! Cudos to Ralph Arlyck for putting this together after spending decades collecting film material.

Somewhere in this footage is an interesting film. If only the director had left his smug boomer life out of the movie entirely, focused on Sean, Debbie and their father John, and actually asked trenchant questions, then this picture would have been moving and worthy. Arlyck tells us this documentary took 10 years to make. If so, then he needs to get a job, perhaps as a grant writer as he was able to get so many institutions to pay for this unsatisfying muddle.