1975 was one of those pivotal years in movie history with serious Oscar-winners like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and contenders like Dog Day Afternoon, thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, freakout musical adaptation of The Who's Tommy, the ur midnight movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the ur summer blockbuster which put an end to much of serious adult movies, Jaws.
With that in mind, Netflix's documentary Breakdown: 1975 was advertised as being about the movies that came out that year against the backdrop of the Vietnam War's end and the post-Watergate as commentary on the times. Unfortunately, the actual doc is a Boomer therapy session where Nixon was bad, Vietnam was bad, Nixon was bad, the CIA was bad, Nixon was bad, and also Nixon was bad. I'm sensing a theme here.
Narrated by Jodie Foster, the warning signs cropped up early as they showed Network (which came out in 1976) and other movies not from 1975 like Chinatown (1974). As it slogged on, it started just randomly jumping into genres like Blackploitation with examples from the early-70s. Commenting were various female and black chin-stroking professors types as well as Martin Scorsese (director of Taxi Driver), Patton Oswalt (who was six years old in 1975), and Seth Rogen (who was born in 1982).
As they intercut footage to create scenes of Travis Bickle (from Taxi Driver) watching Howard Beale's "Mad As Hell" monologue from Network, I lost interest in whatever this was supposed to be that wasn't what was advertised. I'm genuinely surprised Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) directed this mess.
Score: DNF/10. Skip it.
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