Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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172 of 183 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great DVD - But..., April 1, 2001
I had fun doing a running commentary for this new DVD release which I know you'll enjoy. However, because MGM/UA would not allow our small company to purchase the DVD at a decent wholesale price, they've cut us out from selling the product through our own retail outlet (we can buy it cheaper here at Amazon) where we've been selling our CDs and VHS movies (including Alice's Restaurant) for years. We are boycotting the sale of the DVD until changes can be made. Stick with us and wait. Then buy it here or anywhere. Thanks, Arlo Guthrie
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33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Alice's Restaurant: A Vision of Joyful Abundance, March 6, 2001
The excellent-quality Alice's Restaurant DVD is a cultural gem! Thanks to audio commentary by Arlo Guthrie himself, Alice's Restaurant merits nomination as the greatest movie ever about the 60s or, for that matter, any time of profound social and spiritual change! What adds human depth to this movie is that many people involved in the real-life drama are here, in the same locations, playing themselves!The 60s social/intellectual/spiritual divide is illustrated in Alice's Restaurant by this insane question: can anyone who dumps litter be sufficiently moral to help kill people in another land? The social divide of the 60s has additional clarity in Alice's Restaurant because the movie director was in one ideological camp and Arlo Guthrie was in the other! In addition, an extremely valid spiritual dimension is provided to the story because Alice's restaurant was in a church; a fertile and far-reaching symbol! It makes the movie and real-life story into one wonderful (but never utopian) heart-warming adventure! The movie has an amazing number of dimensions. What amazes most, however, is the Alice's Restaurant song, on which the movie was partly based. It still sounds wonderfully fresh and naïve! It maintains its power because it is not only a celebration of the genuine joys of life, love, and friendship but also an indisputable anthem that fully affirms the great natural value of simply having fun in life when you can `get anything you want'. It seems a totally innocuous, irrelevant song ... yet, that remains its overwhelming strength rather than its weakness. After the movie, how life-affirming and universally joyous an anthem the song becomes! My hat is off to you Mr. Guthrie! Thank you!
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great document of the times. Less than great movie., August 30, 2006
`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.
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~ Arlo Guthrie
~ Arlo Guthrie
~ Arlo Guthrie
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