Forty years ago, Jack Nicholson and a bunch of dudes who would go on to do Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces co-wrote their first avant-garde, marijuana-laced cinematic masterpiece. It’s purpose: to bring a pre-fab boy band called the Monkees out of the teenie bopper magazines and into the hearts of hippies. It succeeded at the former, but not so much at the latter–no amount of fourth-wall breaking could shatter their image as an artificial construct to the crowd of rockers now keepin’ it real with fourteen minute guitar solos at the Monterey Pop Festival.

In hindsight, however, the Monkees’ movie Head (the idea was that the next film’s ad could say “From the People Who Gave You Head!“) is a lot less goofy than it seemed at the time. Appearances by Dennis Hopper, Sonny Liston, Frank Zappa, and Toni Basil, shocking visual references to violence both real and cartoonish, and satires of the sappy pop cultural milieu of the time, themselves included, make this feel like a movie that’s saying something, even if nobody quite knows what that something is. »continue reading Head: Monkees Movie Comes Home Again