G, 86 min.
Director: Bob Rafelson
Writers: Bob Rafelson, Jack
Nicholson
Starring: Peter Tork, David
Jones, Mickey Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Victor Mature, Annette Funicello,
Timothy Carey, Logan Ramsey
“Head” is a tough film to
write a recommendation for. Some people may not “get” it. It’s so outside the
box and strange and psychedelic, but those are all the things it’s trying to
be. For those who are into that, this movie is a must see. It doesn’t matter if
you never liked the Monkees. I never really did, but I love this movie.
Bob Rafelson’s and Jack
Nicholson’s screenplay (yes, that
Nicholson) is like a freeform acid trip that sees this strange musical group
doing what they did in their television show, but in a much less packaged format.
They set forth on an adventure of sorts where they just do whatever, but the “whatever”
here seems much more drug influenced than anything they ever did on their TV
show. They’re swimming with mermaids, fighting tanks in the desert, blowing up
Coca-Cola product placements (the vending machine in the desert sequence is one
of my favorites), getting sucked up into vacuum cleaners, running from
policemen, experiencing paranoid delusion, contemplating the meaning of it all,
and pretty much everything else you can experience on a good acid trip. And,
this is a family film.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s
no actual drug use in the movie. That was obviously done before the cameras
started to roll. It’s more like a “Fantasia” for the late 60s music scene,
where we get to see what the lives inside the minds of these sudden superstars
are like, as opposed to the surface promotionally driven machine that we
usually get to see in our celebrity icons. It’s quite fascinating and a great
precursor to the MTV generation.
Like any of these movies
starring music icons of that time, like The Beatles’ “A Hard Days Night”, the
Rolling Stones’ “Rock and Roll Circus”, the Who’s “Tommy”, or Pink Floyd’s “The
Wall”, “Head” operates primarily as an extension of the music created by these
bands. Although The Monkees weren’t known to operate on the same level as those
iconic bands in terms of the music they created, this film certainly functions
on a comparable level to those films. The music produced by the band for this
film is also the finest of their career. It was with “Head” that the Monkees
actually proved they were more than just a sum of their parts. I don’t think
there is much coincidence to the fact that the band’s apparent leader in this
film (although they were a band that never really seemed to chose one face
above the others), Michael Nesmith, went on to be involved in the production of
two independent classics, the 1988 film “Tapeheads” and as a producer on the
cult favorite “Repo Man” (a personal favorite of mine).
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