Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

Film-Slave I was an unlucky kid and grew up in the 1960s in a small town where several boys fell prey to a pedophile.This film shows how easy it is for pedophiles to pick up naïve boys. I think this film should be shown to every school-age boy as self-defense training.One member of NAMBLA casually mentions how easy it is to pick up boys and the camera follows him into a mall where he leads boys out to the parking lot, aborting his plans just as the boys are about to climb into his van. Chilling!In 1994 I attended a Queer Symposium held during Gay Games in New York. The rules for the crowd were that anyone who identified as "queer" was invited to participate. When representatives from NAMBLA arrived, organizers of the symposium had to quiet the crowd from the stage and moderate the heated audience Q&A.When I went to see this film, I noticed that most of the sparse audience was sunk down in their chairs, wearing hats; it was easy to spot who was there out of morbid curiosity and who came out of livid interest."Chicken Hawk" is aptly titled and wickedly unabashed. Child molesters and pedophiles are complex in their desires, and if one can get past the initial repulsion, these are just men who have justified their aberrant behavior. They don't question it, they embrace it and have found a support system. That is scary.

As_Cold_As_Ice This is a really strange documentary that is literally about men who love boys, one of their major groups in NAMBLA, and it gives the men a chance to explain their side of the issue somewhat.This movie is in no way, shape or form anything other then neutral. We get experiences and defenses from the boy lovers, people who were molested by men as youngsters, psychologists, and members of the gay and lesbian community. If anything, the boy lovers get the most screen time, which allows them to convey their feelings, and also to show what disturbing people they are.Three scenes stand out; the first was one of the boy lovers talking with a young boy outside a shop, his eyes studying him, checking to see if he had a chance to bed him. The next was NAMBLA trying to march in a gay/lesbian parade, with other marchers telling them to get lost, and the last was of a boy lover receiving obscene messages on his phone, and a congregation of people outside his apartment shouting anti-NAMBLA slogans. The last scene mentioned almost makes you feel a little sorry for him, except on his walls are hand-painted pictures of boys with long penises, and the fact that he screws boys.Overall, I thought this was a well done documentary, who showed us for the first time what kind of filth these people are.8/10

utahfilmmaker This movie will unfortunately never get the attention it deserves due to the unsettling subject matter, and the potential confusion some people may have between portraying child molesters and supporting them. This movie portrays several of the members of a group called NAMBLA, whose members promote child molestation as a viable and healthy activity and as even go so far as to claim that it is beneficial to the molested children. It resists the temptation to condemn them, and instead gives them enough rope to hang themselves, which they do. I say this movie is an absolute for any aspiring documentarian because it's very educational on the issue of objectivity. Although there is no voice-over condemning the pedophiles, the audience will leave with the message that these people are perverts and predators. Why? Simply because they *are* perverts and predators, and any objective portrayal of the subject cannot avoid making that clear. It seems almost as if the filmmakers go out on a limb to "show both sides" (witness the negative behavior of the KKK-like anti-nambla group that the filmmakers show), the pedophiles still end up the bad guys of the film, simply because they are the bad guys in real life and any footage of them shows it (I won't list a spoiler, but look at the last shot in the film for a great example of this). This is also an excellent psychological study of how some people, pedophiles in particular, will lie to themselves in order to remain happy. For example, see how the character Leland constantly talks about how it's the children who really go out of their way to "seduce" him, but then when we actually see footage of him interacting with a child outside a store, it becomes clear that he is the predator in the situation and that the child wants to leave, but in the interview after that scene, Leland STILL describes it in terms of the child "flirting" with him. The film makes clear that these people can only live with themselves by constructing an elaborate fantasy world.

Sagita2 I felt that the underlying treatment of this documentary was generally hostile to a fair understanding of men who love boys and the message we have for society.There were many "cheap shots" which I saw Adi taking in his film. Incidentally, not towards both sides, equally, but only towards boy lovers. There were technical maneuvers, such as making close-ups on people's teeth, or looking up at Leyland while he drove-and panning on old, dead trees they passed. And the music that was used-stuff that added to an emotion of we boy lovers not being all there, and even pathological.Now, if Adi had made such a film about black men who loved white women in the 1920s, people would see what I'm talking about. You'd have a movie of "pure" interviews and images from that time. There would be no attempt at analysis. The result would be a film in which there would be a huge uproar in society about the way in which no one attempted to humanize the black men adequately. Adi's career might be ruined before it even started. And you can bet that he would not even begin to allow himself to make an oversight like that.To conclude, i say that "CHICKEN HAWK: Men Who Love Boys" as a film is in the grey area between a constructive communication to the public, and a destructive one. For the media literate it should hold intriguing questions that can be thought about at length before coming to tentative conclusions. For the media illiterate, the film will most certainly be just one more reason to enhance and enable the increasing psychiatrick-industrial complex. They won't desire to look at we "perverts" as individuals, nor wonder how the film-maker got so close to such people who are supposedly forever "beyond the reach" of "ill-equipped" and "weak budgeted" law enforcement agencies. They'll just foam at the mouth and want to KILL KILL KILL like good citizens are supposed to do at the whim of imposed authority.