Alice's Restaurant
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Movie Reviews of Alice's Restaurant
Movie Review: Alice's Restaurant
Summary: 5 Stars
Great movie. Brought back memories from the 60's. Arlo is so funny. Really love this one!!!Movie Review: Alices Reasturant
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought the quality of the DVD was good and it was delivered in a prompt mannerMovie Review: fine movie despite a few minor flaws
Summary: 4 Stars
Alice's Restaurant is based on the song of the same name by Arlo Guthrie; and although it's not the best movie I've ever seen it's far from being the worst. The plot moves along fairly well; they could have edited the first hour a little bit more to make the action tighter; the second part moves along at a much better pace. Some of the actors did a great job; other actors were not so convincing. However, the cinematography and the choreography are very strong; and the movie overall is entertaining.
When the action starts, we meet young Arlo Guthrie who's bouncing around having some adventures. He goes to college but he finds it's not for him; and he has a brush with the law after he gets thrown through a window for the crime of having long hair! Worse yet, his father Woody Guthrie (played by Joseph Boley) is dying of a rare neurological disorder in a New York hospital. Arlo splits his time between visiting friends Alice and Ray (Patricia Quinn and James Broderick) who buy a church in Massachusetts and New York where he visits his father in the hospital.
Ray and Alice get some people to help renovate the church into a home with a restaurant in back (thus we have Alice's Restaurant) and the church takes on a beautiful transformation. Unfortunately, a love triangle complicates things between Alice, Ray and a young man named Shelly (Michael McClanathan).
Shortly before Thanksgiving time, a few key events happen. First, Ray and Alice reconcile after a brief breakup--and Ray surprises Alice when he tells her he's invited "a few" other people for Thanksgiving dinner. Thanksgiving turns into a banquet for tons of people although a good time is had by all; and Arlo and his friend Roger (Geoff Outlaw) innocently dump the garbage at the bottom of a ravine where a lot of garbage already lies--after all, what can you do when you need to dump a ton of garbage and the town dump is closed for Thanksgiving? This creates an unexpected problem for Arlo and Roger; they are arrested by Officer "Obie" (William Obanhein) and the local police have a field day using all their equipment to document the biggest "crime" to hit Stockbridge in nearly 50 years. After Alice gets them out of jail, they must pay a fine and pick up the garbage.
And then Arlo gets his draft notice--he must report to a military screening post on Whitehall Street in New York for a physical and more. When they find out that he was arrested for littering and that he thinks little of it, their reaction is remarkable!
Of course, there's already plenty more that I've left out (believe it or not) and there are questions that remain. Ray and Alice struggle to make their relationship work--will they stay together? Will Arlo be inducted into the military? What about the girl that Arlo likes--her name is Mari-chan (Tina Chen). Will she return Arlo's affection? What about Officer Obie--what happens at Arlo and Roger's trial that could derail his "prosecution" case against Arlo and Roger for littering? Watch and find out!
We do indeed get a commentary by Arlo; and that's grand. There's also a marvelous cameo by the great Pete Seeger who plays and sings along with Arlo in Woody's hospital room.
Alice's Restaurant isn't as well edited as I hoped it would be; the story line has unnecessary complications. Nevertheless, it does explore the issues of life, death, hope, loss, love and more. I recommend this film for people interested in these meaningful issues; and people who want a nostalgic look back at the 1960's would do well to get this DVD.
Movie Review: Great document of the times. Less than great movie.
Summary: 4 Stars
`Alice's Restaurant', directed by Arthur Penn, following on his great success with `Bonnie and Clyde' is a great bookend to that other 1960's cinematic document, `Easy Rider'. Both movies are less well known for their quality as works of film art as they are for statements of the counter-culture state of mind in the late 1960's.
I saw the movie when it was first released in theaters and I even bought Arlo Guthrie's `Alice's Restaurant' album (his first) when it was first released in 1967. At the time, I was not especially impressed with the quality of the movie; however the thrill of seeing the ceremonial passing of the torch from Woody Guthrie's generation, represented in the flesh by Pete Seeger, to the next generation was really nice, in spite of the irony that Arlo Guthrie was much less a standard-bearer of that torch than the far greater talents such as Bob Dylan, Richard Farina and Phil Ochs. And yet, it was Arlo that managed to capture the spirit of 1960's counterculture dropouts driven less by doctrinal zeal than by simple self-interest.
Like `Easy Rider', `Alice's Restaurant', the movie has a depressing ending, albeit not quite so tragic. If Penn and his collaborators are to be given any credit, it is that they took the sweet little story behind the 15 minute `talking blues' which was the album cut (the full first side of the album of the same name), and expand it into a morality play about great counterculture ambitions and less great drug culture dangers.
The weakest part of the movie may be the fact that at this age, Arlo Guthrie was simply did not have what it took to hold up a major role in a feature length movie. All the heavy lifting in the acting department was done by Pat Quinn as Alice and James Broderick as her husband who, together, were the earth mother and father of a loose band of hippies living, per the song, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As I recall from the newspaper stories of the day, the skeleton story was almost all true, as there was a real Alice and there was a real `Alice's Restaurant', evidenced by pictures of actresses Quinn standing beside the true to live Alice.
The foreground story, the famous Thanksgiving feast, the disposal of the refuse, the call to the draft board, and the segregation of our hero with the other of society's miscreants is funny enough, but from this distance in time, the background story of the failure of Alice and Ray's little commune is much more durable. It shows how fragile `new' value systems can be, when they don't have all the resources or support of mainstream society.
I watch this movie with great nostalgia for a milieu of which I was a part, and a great longing for the fact that like so many great `60's sentiments, they are preserved only in such greatly metamorphosed form to be almost unrecognizable.
An average movie which captures a distinctly admirable, but ephemeral spirit of years gone by.
Movie Review: Songs to Aging Children Come
Summary: 4 Stars
Enjoyed this movie on many levels; I liked Arlo's non-performance, the way he had of keeping it real even when the action bordered on the absurd. The conflicting tones of the movie, that many reviewers balk at, were for me its saving grace. It wasn't just an animated version of the song, and it wasn't a stoner comedy like HAROLD AND KUMAR--but it almost was--however the Bergman-esque aspects of Penn's portrait of the up and down marriage of Alice and Ray made sure that the movie carried within itself a tragic dimension... So one scene's light hearted and hippie, the next might be unbearably stark and cruel--that change-up gives the movie more energy than I remembered it having.
Otherwise the narrative structure is like the three bears, especially in the way the movie keeps throwing beautiful women at Arlo--in a random way that could only happen in the movies because, let's face it, he's kind of a freakish looking dude. First he's tempted by the pubescent groupie "Reenie" played by Shelley Plimpton--but he turns her down when she admits being 14. (Talk about a cultural difference, they wouldn't show a 14 year old girl topless in the American cinema of today now, would they, but here it's just another day in Arlo's life.) Then he gets propositioned by the older, sexually rapacious club owner Ruth (the only film role for the legendary actress and teacher Eulalie Noble), hard and crass as a bowlful of rocks. He rejects her for being too old. Too young, too old, and then third time lucky he meets the angelic Asian-American Mari-chan, end of story.
In the other story line, I found the triangle story between Alice, Ray and Shelly entirely believable and sad, even though some of Pat Quinn's acting mannerisms indicate she took courses at the Anna Magnani School of Over the Top, while the young man who plays Shelly is so weird and choppy I'm surprised he lived to the end of filming, it feels ike a performance by someone who's dead already. And oh, that Joni Mitchell song at the end! You have to love her and hate her!!!