Mike Sh.

I was born in 1964. The world into which I was born was a fascinating place - Space Age optimism abounded, the War on Poverty was bravely being waged on several fronts, and rock music still had to contend with jazz and folk for the hearts and minds of the young.

However, before I could get to know this world, it changed beyond recognition. By the early '70's, only shadows remained of this world (for example, the folk-singing family who played at guitar Masses at my church).

This lost world inhabits the deepest recesses of my consciousness, and manifests itself in my fascination with movies from that period. Films like "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies" (to provide one example) provide a window into a time when bouffants, beehives, flips and cat's-eye glasses ruled the streets.

So when I ran across this movie, titled "Hootenany a-Go-Go", in the two-dollar bin of local video store, I salivated over another chance to live, even vicariously, in this lost time for an hour and a half or so. And on that score, it didn't disappoint. Sure, the canned folk music was mostly awful, the forced attempts at humor are irritating, and even the featured act of Jim, Jake and Joan (featuring a very young Joan Rivers) isn't all that interesting. Also, the tenuous plot surrounding a racy painting holds about as much water as a ten nanoliter-capacity sieve.

But who cares? For another chance to live in 1964, I'll put up with shortcomings like these.

P.S. - Hooray for Oscar Brand....

The strangest movie I've seen since "Popeye" - part action movie, part fantasy, part comedy and part musical, this movie stars Alan Arkin as a onetime Captain America-type superhero who fell into obscurity after being accused of being a Commie by a McCarthy-like politician. Now years later, a group of scientists, government officials and military types are trying to sober him up and bring him back to superhero trim so he may save the human race from a new peril.

That's the plot in a nutshell, but it's really the songs which make the movie. The President of the USA, annoyed at the bovine excreta being shoveled his way by his advisers, suddenly screams "B______t!", and turns the expletive into a snappy toe tapping tune. If you look carefully, you can see the actor playing the President trying to keep a straight face (and not quite succeeding).

This isn't a consistently good or entertaining movie, but the parts that are good and entertaining are well worth the $10 DVD price.

Although this movie boasts a great cast (including Hugh "Ward Cleaver" Beaumont, Alan "Alfred the Butler" Napier, Nestor "Indeterminate Foreign Guy" Paiva, and John Agar, the patron saint of cheesy '50's sci-fi films), it isn't much of a movie. The real standout, and the guy who really makes the movie is Dr. Frank C. Baxter, Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His tedious and pretentious introduction to the film, complete with halting delivery and awkward gestures gives the movie an element of risibilty that raises it marginally above mediocrity.

What was Dr. Baxter even doing there? He was a professor of English, not a scientist, or even a social scientist. His lone qualification, apart from large bald head and round rimmed glasses, seems to have been a stint as narrator of a series of classroom instructional shorts on science. But whatever may have been the rationale for his being there, I'm just glad he was there. As the good Dr. Baxter himself would say, "Down, down, down...."