Changes

This long forgotten coming of age drama was briefly available on VHS from Prism and is now almost impossible to find. Produced, written, and directed by Hall Bartlett, Changes treads some familiar territory, but does so delicately and in interesting ways. The film features very little dialogue, with the songs of Tim Buckley dominating the soundtrack, which also features Judy Collins' pop version of Both Sides Now. Prism's tape looks great, but is sadly pan and scanned, leaving Richard Moore's gorgeous Panavision photography in less than optimal condition. Nonetheless, this is well worth a look, especially for those with a particular interest in the era, or for those who attended the Berkeley campus, where early scenes were shot. Get a look at how the Campanile, Sather Gate, and Lower Sproul looked in the late 60s! They haven't changed much since then...

An excellent movie about a young man who wants to find himself, very 60ies-like and good photographed. The music is also fantastic. Most of the songs come from Tim Buckley and his album Goodbye und Hello. This is one of my all-time favourite movies, an independent production from director Hall Bartlett, who later become famous with the movie Jonathan Livingston Seagual. If you love the 60ies and want to understand the feeling of this time don't miss it!

Here's the sort of small, thoughtful film that's disappeared between the mass market cracks. Unlikely to ever be released on DVD at this point, it's probably doomed to fade as the few remaining VHS copies of it disintegrate with time. And that's a shame, because it's actually one of the better films about the 1960s, one that deserves to be remembered.

It's a simple enough story: Kent, a typical young man of that time, sets out on the road, confused by the turmoil of his world, as well as by his own inner turmoil. He's looking for answers, for something that makes sense, and doesn't know where or how to find it. He needs to mature, and he knows it, but he still lacks the self-knowledge & direction to truly commit himself to something. So in that regard, it's not just a 1960s film, but one for any time.

Many films about the 1960s, even good ones, have a tendency to overdo things. Films from that time were usually made by outsiders looking in -- and however sympathetic & well-intentioned, they were still outsiders. More recent films too often depend on the same handful of superficial media clichés & basic 20-song soundtrack, laying on the grooviness with a trowel, striving for the look but completely missing the substance.

"Changes" is something different. The countercultural elements are both sparse & realistic, fully integrated into the story. The hippie friend comes across as a real person, not someone playacting -- or overacting. And the flashbacks with Kent's father (Jack Albertson) are convincingly individual, informed by the generation gap but not having to embody its immense burden. These are people first, living in their times, not awkward symbols masquerading as human beings.

Kent's temporary relationship with a slightly older, more worldly-wise young woman brings his life into focus. Again, this is treated as a love story between individuals, touched by the counterculture of the time, but not fully involved in it. This was the case for millions of young men & women then -- not everyone wore tie-dyed clothes & painted his or her face while grappling with some very big, very difficult questions. Sadly, the fashions are remembered (and all too easily ridiculed), while the questions are neglected & forgotten.

If there's anything that might keep this film alive, it's the soundtrack by Tim Buckley. As listeners not even born until long after Buckley's untimely death discover his work, there may be a new audience for this sensitive, moving film. Yes, it has some flaws & is far from perfect -- but it's an honest, intelligent, moving effort. At the very least, I intend to transfer it from VHS to homemade DVD as soon as possible. At the same time, I still hope for an official DVD release. If those times are to be remembered clearly & truthfully, then works such as this must be preserved. Most highly recommended!

Finally saw this very hard-to-find counterculture film, albeit in a version that presumably for reasons of music rights difficulties had several soundtrack passages muted. (The Tim Buckley songs were intact, though, as well as a couple atrocious new songs by the original score composers.) It was letterboxed, which was great because as with Bartlett's best-known film, the rather notorious flop "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," "Changes" is very strong on slick visuals. Storywise, it's not so strong, although why this movie went nowhere while "Easy Rider" became a phenomenon the same year is an open question. Maybe that film's obvious "rebels" more fit a youth audience's image of themselves at the time, while the vaguely disgruntled, clean-cut, middle-class hero here was a figure a little too close to their reality. Neither film has aged all that well, but they're both time capsules.

Kent Lane is the college student who drops out because...well, because he wants something, and...well, he doesn't know what it is, but...well it's definitely not going that whole square degree-to-job-to-cult-de-sac route. This upsets his parents (who as usual in movies of this time seem to be way too old to have a child of his generation), but oh well. So he goes off to "see America," first stopping at his friend Sammy's (Bill Kelly) racetrack and hippie commune-type place, soon crashing his own car, then hitching a ride with a sort of roving youth reporter (Marcia Strassman), then falling in with a mercurial Southern beauty (Michele Carey), at which point the movie bogs down somewhat in conventional romantic histrionics between two characters who are demanding and petulant but resistant to being tied down. Our hero is also on the run from the memory of an ex-girlfriend who killed herself, it seems, I wasn't quite clear why.

There's not much in the way of plot here--"Changes" more wants to catch a questioning mood common at the time among youth, one that now feels pretty trite and cliched. You know, the old "I don't know what I want! I just don't want what my parents want for me! That's a drag!" There isn't a lot of dialogue (until the bogged-down later going), and the little that there is tends to reinforce that there's not much deep thinking going on there. It's one thing for our hero to constantly be photographed in nice settings looking "thoughtful," but the movie never conveys that there's anything interesting or surprising on his mind. (Kent Lane is OK, but he doesn't provide much personality or charisma to fill in that blank, so you can see why his career didn't get much further.) On the plus side, that photography really is fine, and it eschews nearly all of the gimmicks then trendy in films (like zoom lensing). There are a lot of pleasant montages to music that are often from Tim Buckley's "Goodbye and Hello" LP, a record that has only improved with age. But some songs by other artists (including Judy Collins and Neil Young) were silenced on the print I saw, creating long stretches of empty audio.

All in all, a technically very well-crafted if not particularly resonant memento from the era that I'm glad to have finally seen...even if it proved no lost classic. Among familiar faces glimpsed in bit parts, Teri Garr gets a bit as a waitress, with the sole line "Burger!!" I suspect a lot of actors here shot dialogue that was eventually cut as the film leaned more and more towards musical montage in the editing room.

While there's a lot about this film I can criticize; the low budget limitations, the badly dubbed dialogue (sections, not all through), and some pretentious, badly dated elements, it's one of the more interesting, beguiling films about being young and a sort-of rebel in the 60s I've seen.

More poetic than plot driven, with a minimum of dialogue, a young man goes on the road to find himself, and to forget a girlfriend who killed herself when he couldn't commit. He sees the country and has a fairly complex romance with a sexy southern woman a little older than himself.

A quiet, thoughtful film, with great songs (mostly by Tim Buckley). I kept wanting to dismiss this, but found I couldn't. Reviews from the time (a rave in The New York Times), talk about how great the widescreen photography is. Sadly, its only available on a murky 4:3 VHS transfer, and even that is very hard to find.