Bob Rafelson’s television career came to a head with 1968 Head, a wonderfully parentless concoction of off-kilter artifice and cinema verite absurdity from the halcyon days of the New Hollywood and the waning post-mortem of the psychedelic ’60s. Pitched at the intersection of the two decades, Head is a blissful concoction of hyperactive mania belying serious, doleful interrogation, a film that uses avant-garde channel-surfing as a way to embody the existential homelessness of life at the end of the 1960s. Like the apocalyptic fallout from a decade-long acid trip, its anti-continuity editing mechanics pushed the decade’s assertion of living for the moment to consternated heights where any human ability to consider the future was laughed at by the bedlam of a world where simple notions of time and place were rapidly unwinding in front of America’s eyes. Bob Rafelson’s introduction to the film world, still his secret weapon and best film, suggests the death spasm of hippie culture keel-hauled into psychotropic madness. Continue reading
Films for Class: Five Easy Pieces
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I’ve decided to post shorter reviews of various films I’m seeing for the first time via courses I’m enrolled in. 
The Long Take 