CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

st-shot Harold Fine (Peter Sellers) is a successful button downed LA accident attorney living life by the numbers with a modicum of passion. Preparing listlessly to marry he runs across flower child Nancy (Leigh-Taylor Young)who offers him an alternative view as well as some mind altering weed brownies that in combination cause him to go Leary and drop out. Hooking up with Nancy they live in his car for awhile before getting a crash pad complete with hanger ons. While Harold is really tuned into Nancy he's turned off by the chaotic leisure and presence of the dead beats. Caught between two worlds, conflicted about where he belongs Harold seesaws with modern day existence.Alice falls somewhere between Reefer Madness and Up in Smoke with its comic exploration of the notorious herb. While it is free of the bug eyed crazies that populated Reefer its just as dishonest with the response by its cast of characters (freaks and straights of all ages) who manage to peak two bites in then go on an oh wow laughing jag for half a day. Made within a year of The Summer of Love and a year before Woodstock it is more a burlesque attempt for mass consumption that would later be more fully informed by the gravitas of Cheech and Chong. Quaint and broad as it may be it does re-classify pot however from the insane drug of Dragnet and Reefer Madness with the comic attitude taken towards Prohibition in silent and early sound films. Sellers rolls well with the fatuous script and Taylor-Young fills the hippie chic bill with ease but Jo Van Fleet as Harold's mother overacts outrageously along with a bit of feigned stoning by the rest of the cast that beats this labored idea into the ground in no time..

jellyfish-hendrix This film was a real disappointment. I found it evidently manufactured by an older mainstreaming Hollywood machine. Jokes were very dated. Jokes seemed to be for those unfamiliar with "The Hippie Problem" facing conservative America. Jewish humor was overdone. Music was forgettably bad. Big splashy posters were good. I recall that hippies lost their clothes at the drop of a hat. Hippies did not sleep with boots on their feet. Marxian humor couldn't save "overcrowding small room" scenes. Not a funny movie. A timepiece that was assembled by old Hollywood. Many hippie references in movies produced in American 1960's missed the mark. Sensationalizing costumes and shuffling wig wearing young people climbing in and out of psychedelically painted jalopies did not reflect the times.

moonspinner55 Screenwriters Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker have a deft idea here--but it only takes an hour on the clock to use up the essence of their idea, leaving nothing but dead space on the screen for thirty more minutes. Milquetoast Jewish lawyer in Los Angeles, about to marry his domineering secretary (an idea which is approved by his demonstrative mother), is reunited with his estranged brother, a flower-child circa 1968. Through the brother's sometime-girlfriend, a comely lass who knows a great recipe for hash brownies, the lawyer realizes he's living an existence without love or freedom. It's wonderful watching bespectacled, buttoned-up Peter Sellers learn how to be liberated...yet, once the lawyer grows his hair out and dons love beads, the picture has nowhere in particular to take us. The satire is unsubtle in its prodding of targets, while writers Mazursky and Tucker ultimately bite off more than they can chew (while leaning precariously on pretentiousness). Still, there are some mild, breezy laughs early on, and the production is bright. ** from ****

Psalm 52 Sellar's character's arc from legal beagle to hippie starts slow. Watching the progress requires paying attention to the details in why his quest for Ms. Taylor-Young is so primal (I related), but once the film hits the mid-point (when she sleeps over his place) it makes sharp observations about: wedding planning, the purpose (love vs. guns) behind the social movement of the 60's against "the establishment", and the hilarious effects of accidental recreational drug use.If you live in Los Angeles, you will appreciate the exterior scenes in the Venice Beach neighborhood and other areas which we frequent in the present world and how much they have/have not changed since the film was made. The ending comment on Sellar's character's choice NOT to walk down the aisle is not entirely plausible (for my taste) as I found "Joyce" a pleasant enough woman to marry and who is 110% in love w/ him.