One of the most openly derided counter-culture 60s classics, I actually prefer this film to “Easy Rider,” “If…,” “Two-Lane Blacktop” and “Medium Cool.” (Though perhaps not “Le Weekend” or “Midnight Cowboy.”) It’s was too boring and arty to excite the intended psychedelic audience back in the day (I mean, shit, “2001: A Space Odyssey” at least has monkeys and space!) and straight audiences could neither get down with its anti-bourgeois sentiments (why destroy such a lovely soutwestern home??) or its extreme earnestness. Anyway, it’s heavy shit, yeah, and there were an awful lot of snickers in the Moving Image audience, both from hipsters and some 15 year old neighborhood girls who wandered in by mistake. The dialogue gets pretty awful at times (but, you know, people on a lot of drugs do talk funny. . .so it’s realism!) and the acting is dreadful. But it is all for real. I mean, the lead actor, the guy you never heard of, gave all of his money from this film to a commune and then robbed a bank. So, you know, this ain’t BS. Nearly every shot is gorgeous — the LA shots packed with signage, the stark naked desert stuff, the color-saturated sleek offices with nifty furniture or the Pink Floyd-enhanced explosions at the end. Dig, man, dig. I love every minute of this pretentious, awful film.