Capital Celluloid 2014 - Day 270: Sun Sep 28

Head (Rafelson, 1968): Genesis Cinema, 10am


This screening is part of the Scalarama season which runs throughout September. Full details here.

Head will be shown at the Genesis Cinema on Sunday 28 September along with 11.40am 'Easy Rider', 1.30pm 'Five Easy Pieces', 3.25pm 'Drive, He Said', 5.10pm 'A Safe Place', 6.55pm 'The Last Picture Show' and 9.15pm 'The King of Marvin Gardens' in a BBS All-Dayer event.

Here is the Criterion Collection introduction to this great screening:
Like the rest of America, Hollywood was ripe for revolution in the late sixties. Cinema attendance was down; what had once worked seemed broken. Enter Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner, who knew that what Hollywood needed was new audiences—namely, young people—and that meant cultivating new talent and new ideas. Fueled by money from their invention of the superstar TV pop group the Monkees, they set off on a film-industry journey that would lead them to form BBS Productions, a company that was also a community. The innovative films produced by this team between 1968 and 1972 are collected here —works that now range from the iconic (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show) to the acclaimed (The King of Marvin Gardens) to the obscure (Head; Drive, He Said; A Safe Place), all created within the studio system but lifted right out of the countercultural id.

Chicago Reader review:
After NBC canceled the innovative sitcom The Monkees, the band and their TV brain trust, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, hatched this big-screen psychedelic freak-out (1968), a narrative cul-de-sac of genre parodies, musical numbers, smug antiwar statements, and bilious McLuhan-esque satire. Scripted by Rafelson and Jack Nicholson (who would next collaborate on Five Easy Pieces), it's uneven but mostly a blast, with great tunes like Harry Nilsson's "Daddy's Song," Michael Nesmith's barn burner "Circle Sky," and Gerry Goffin and Carole King's grandiose "Porpoise Song." Rafelson directed; with cameos by Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Frank Zappa, Annette Funicello, Sonny Liston, Teri Garr, and Victor Mature.

JR Jones


Here (and above) is the trailer.

No comments:

Post a Comment