A Movie Recommendation

I am totally fried; this is the longest week of my life and it's only Wednesday. My only consolation is that next week will be even more grueling-- three tests in three days. And that I have no class or work tomorrow (traded a shift with someone at work). I'm trying to get back to a post a day. Today's post is a movie recommendation.

This weekend, I watched a really fun movie with my son (my daughter wasn't back from visiting her grandparents yet). It was the 2003 "My Dinner With Jimi," which I'd wanted to see since it was released. The title is obviously an homage to "My Dinner With Andre," a movie I love.

In any event, the autobiographical "My Dinner With Jimi" was written by Howard Kaylan, one of the singers for the great sixties group The Turtles. It revolves around the short time when their lovely pop hit "Happy Together" was #1 in 1967, the "Summer of Love," and they were sent to England to tour to support the single. On his first night, Kaylan, who was an oddity in the music business-- an LA musician who was actually from LA-- meets all of his idols and then some. In the course of the evening he meets all of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones, Donovan, and of course a guy who he'd barely heard of, but who is, of course, the most sweet, charming, visionary and magnanimous guy in the whole bunch, Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix who had survived, among many things in his musical career, a disasterous tour with the Monkees, and was about to go back to the states with the band he'd formed with two Englishmen, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, and play the Monterey Pop Festival, which would break him out huge. Hendrix has no idea he is about to become a legend, and asks Kaylan, who is as hapless as he is about fame and legend, despite having a #1 hit, what his secret is. I'll leave it at that.

The casting is great, the story is great, with some surprises and some unflinching-- and at times unflattering-- depictions of '60's icons.

"Happy Together" was one of the first songs I remember hearing on the radio as a kid. My daughter and I love to karaoke together to this song. Everytime I hear it or sing it, it reminds me of what a pure piece of pop beauty it was. In the movie, they reenact this video from the Smothers Brothers show. Here's the original video from the Smothers Brothers show.