OJ: Made in America

i remember watching the live police chase of the white ford bronco (they cut into the ny knicks basketball game to broadcast the live chase via news helicopter) and the trial. the country came to a halt that afternoon, people stopped working and gathered in office conference rooms to watch the verdict being read live on TV (this was pre-internet days). the reaction (in my office and elsewhere) was universal: every white person was taken aback and every person of color cheered. al sharpton then led some type of march thru midtown manhattan and white office workers across the city panicked, thinking there would be race riots in the street or something. nothing happened, of course. crazy shit.

His book is amazing.

i feel im having a sort of american-current-affairs/american-cultural-history aversion right now, even as this is the point i probably need to look at it the most.
im trumped out. and i havent even been paying as much attention as some of you on this site.
but i will prob watch this all the same.

just watched it. It's really good. Although last part, they seem to drop off on the linking-OJ-with-black-America thing that was so good in Part 1. The trial bit is so so so good.
I'm actually still doubtful myself on whether he did it yknow.

How the fuck can there be any doubt?

droid said:

How the fuck can there be any doubt?

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lol, well he dint get found guilty in the criminal court did he

Read his book.

im a big fan of american cultural exports (sometimes i wonder if i have absorbed more american 'culture' than british) but sometimes i think the uk just needs america so it can have a country to project its own stupidity/shame/whatever on to. saves us the trouble of looking within these borders. or maybe america is just better at looking at itself, or accustomed to doing so, in the name of entertainment, in a way that we are not, mostly.

i saw the first part of this. its interesting to me as i never knew much about OJ the celeb/sportsman, and for giving some detail about him as a person, but this reminds me a bit of when the levees broke, a film that does a v good job as a sort of round up of everything that happened about another big american scandal of race, class, etc, but doesnt show much new that anyone who remembers the news in the 1990s didnt learn already.

i watched all of this. to me, it just seemed like a good refresher of what went on during that time. a few interesting details, particularly the interviews with the jurors, but by and large, not many real new insights (though it did make me think the prosecution were just ineffectual and lazy, expecting that the jury would see sense, rather than making enough effort to get this result) - edelman is good at pulling all the sources and material together, but i dont think he brought anything that new of his own thinking. it got most interesting in the final 90 mins, when you see what happened to OJ afterwards, though again, the flaw is that it never tries to get inside, or offer any ideas or theories on OJ's psychology, it just shows, rather than attempt to explain, which is maybe better, but to me, seems a little too easy, and lacks courage.

his life is a tragedy though. and also just plain weird. and damning of modern celebrity culture. also odd to see how for all the racism on show in the 90s, so many white americans now want OJ's autograph.

if all those making a murderer type true crime shows on netflix are like this, i dont think im missing that much.