I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!

trolleyfreak4.0

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mrbalihai1.0

One of those totally unhip cinematic relics of the Sixties that feverishly attempts to cash-in on the Counter-culture movement, but fails utterly because...it's totally unhip.I knew what I was getting into from the get-go, and the only reason I watched this was because of my nostalgic memories of watching it with my mother when I was 9 years old and her attempt at explaining the concept of "edibles" to me for the first time. I'm not exactly sure how she knew who Alice B. Toklas was, although I was aware that she experimented with pot as a Chiropractic student in the Fifties, but found it made her too "silly" so she gave it up. Anyway, back to the movie. Peter Sellers plays an henpecked, uptight, Jewish L.A. lawyer who's experiencing a mid-life crisis, so when he's given a psychedelic-painted van as a loaner by his auto-body shop, he begins his inevitable transformation into a dirty, smelly hippie wearing a terrible longhaired wig with a beaded headband and starts experiencing the Wonders of Free Love with Leigh Taylor-Young. The scene with the edibles follows, and much uncontrollable giggling ensues. Sellers delivers an incredibly trite and unfunny performance during these lame proceedings and the twee, slightly off-key, chirping of Harpers Bizarre rendering the theme song at multiple points during the film is irritating as fuck:I love you Alice B. ToklasAnd so does Gertrude SteinI love you Alice B. ToklasI'm gonna change your name to mine!...ad vomitus infinitumSo once again, Mom, thanks for exposing me to this lame hippie bullshit early in life so I could reject it utterly and complete my inevitable transformation into an anarchic Punk.

dankwit

hinted at enough elements to make me wish that a fully unhinged late 60s equivalent of curb your enthusiasm had actually happened. at times this also seems like a rough draft of mazursky's bob & carol & ted & alice. takes some decent shots at both sides of the cultural divide. sellers is good and so is leigh taylor young as an earth mother ideal