NOTES AFTER LONG SILENCE1989

"In title and content NOTES AFTER LONG SILENCE directly alludes to Levine's '60s protest film, NEW LEFT NOTES, as well as to the SDS newspaper of the same name he once edited. It's also a startling companion piece to Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July. If Stone is ultimately ambivalent about Vietnam, Levine is not. A nameless vet in Fourth of July greets Tom Cruise's paraplegic Ron Kovic with 'Just what we need, another limp dick.' In NOTES AFTER LONG SILENCE, ugly, ruddy close-ups of a flaccid penis begin to dominate the blitzkrieg montage; the limp dick isn't innocent bystander to America's Fall, but guilty witness. Yet the final images are of bouncy shtupping, a make-love-not-war, antiheroic corrective to Stone's mythic posturing." – Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice