Tonight's movie was "The Trip" (1967), directed by Roger Corman and starring Peter Fonda as a director of television commercials who goes on a nightmarish LSD "trip" after his wife (Susan Strasberg) divorces him.
Now wait a minute.
"Hey Ad! What are you doing watching a movie like this"?
Good question. For starters, Roger Corman is high on my list of worst directors, perhaps even higher than Sam Peckinpah. It's not that Corman pretends any different. He is celebrated for making low-budget C-Grade films and he has made a career out of it. He has no pretense to being an artiste (ala Peckinpah, who is in my doghouse at the moment), and so can be forgiven the lack of quality in his motion pictures. With Corman, you know what you are getting going in, which is why I generally don't watch his films. I mean, I enjoy movies that are "good" bad, like "Plan 9" or something of that ilk, but Roger Corman movies, by and large, are "bad" bad.
The other thing is, I generally am not a fan of movies from the 1960s. This is not to say that there aren't many good and even great films from that decade. See "2001: A Space Odyssey" for evidence. It's just that the Studio System, which produced so many hundreds of great films from the 1930s through the early 1960s (up to 1962), was collapsing by the time the counterculture of the mid-60s got rolling. By 1966 or so, many independent filmmakers were trying to cash in on the emergent youth culture by making movies about hippies, or drug usage, or both. Most of these films were B-Grade garbage or worse, and if you try to watch them now, they seem hopelessly dated, whereas you can watch an even older, professionally made Studio film from the 40s, and it is timeless. The Studio films play just as well in 2019 as they did when they were released.
Not so the films from the Hippie Days. Many of them (not all) are cringeworthy bad.
Please note that I am not picking on Hippies here, just crummy movies. I was a kid in the 60s - and it was a decade like no other - I thought Hippies were fun (and weird) and though I never wanted to be one, they were on the whole cool people who helped define their generation. They believed in peace and love, and most of them went on to lead productive, successful lives even after their acid taking days were over. Interestingly, they were also the last generation to carry on the tradition of marriage and family, which my own generation seems to have thrown by the wayside, but the deal is, before the Hippies settled down, they were Pretty Far Out There for a few years, say from 1966 to 69.
And that was because of hard drugs like LSD, which was introduced into the youth culture by the CIA, but that's another story.
But back to my premise, I would not ordinarily watch a movie like "The Trip", simply because nostalgia for the hippie days and acid trips aren't my trip. I won't misrepresent myself, I took a few trips in the late 70s at Van Halen concerts and the like, but LSD wasn't my thing. It was fun for an hour or two but you couldn't turn it off. And in the movies made in the 60s, to commemorate those times, the young people taking these trips are portrayed as hopelessly naive and lackadasical, and frying their brains on drugs, exactly as the CIA wanted them to.
Though I took my share of drugs as a young person, I stopped 22 years ago, and now I don't think it's a good thing. I could go on a tangent here, or even a tirade, but I think that the exponential upswing in marajuana use among young people now is just terrible, because the pot is legal - they can buy it in pot shops - and it is quadruply stronger than it used to be.
You pot smokers are frying your brains and you don't even know it, because you are doing it slowly, like the frog in the pot of gradually heating water. Man, am I glad I quit. Thank you, Lord.
Grimsley brought the movie over, and that is why we watched "The Trip" tonight. I do have a nostalgia for the fun parts of the 1960s, and the year 1967 (when the movie was made) was the year of Flower Power and also of The Summer Of Love. The Beatles put out "Magical Mystery Tour" that year, so I mean....c'mom. It was an amazing time.
And most of the musicians took at least one acid trip. Paul McCartney was the first Beatle to do so, even before John Lennon. All of the famous pop music we know and love was influenced by drugs in one way or another, usually in a direct way.
But none of this makes Movies About The Hallucinogenic Hippie Days very interesting, because almost all of them were made by B or C grade filmmakers. "The Trip" does have a few interesting scenes, when Peter Fonda runs out of the house he is tripping in, and heads down to the Sunset Strip and the psychedelic rock scene that is in full force in the clubs. His nightmare will continue, now amidst the crowds.
There is a lot of colorful painted scenery in "The Trip", and a brief entry by Bruce Dern as The Guy Who Supplies Fonda With The Acid. Dern is Fonda's "guide", he doesn't take any acid himself.
Most of the movie's 80 minutes are taken up by sequences of strobe-lit kaliedoscopic color patterns double exposed over actors having sex, or Peter Fonda freaking out. There are Go-Go Dancers in the clubs wearing body paint, gyrating away while a wild 1960s style of bluesy jamming plays over the scenery as a soundtrack.
This is Grim's world. He is seven years older than me and his heart is clearly in the Hippie Years of the 1960s, especially in the psychedelic part of that era.
I sat through the film, and it wasn't too bad, not nearly as godawful as last night's "Major Dundee", which was a major studio movie.
But really, "The Trip", though it had an interesting premise and some very colorful and disorienting photographic effects to portray Fonda's experience, really didn't have anything resembling a lasting story, and this is the demise of many an attempted motion picture. So be it, LSD or no LSD.
Don't take drugs. The 60s were incredible but don't hang your hat there. See you in the morn.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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