Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst

This film was originally titled Neverland, which would have been a better choice if it hadn’t run the risk of luring unsuspecting youngsters and their minivan-driving parents into a documentary about the rape, torture and political conversion of heiress Patty Hearst. Unless you slept or were pre-zygotic through the ’70s, you probably remember the story of Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which wasn’t so much an army as a group of confused, dedicated and dangerous youngsters who wanted the ’60s ideology to be realized through the violent overthrow of the existing government. It’s an incredibly weird and automatically fascinating story … imagine if Paris Hilton suddenly showed up on TV robbing real banks and yelling "death to the pigs." Actually, that seems strangely easy to imagine, but then imagine that it wasn’t tied to the launch of a new line of lingerie, and you’ll get some sense of the cultural weirdness that this documentary captures.