Director Richard Rush had an incredible style, and the first half of
GETTING STRAIGHT showcases his kind of handing-off of camera movements
within either subtle shots of action, like an apple being passed from
student to student in the opening credits in the central hippie college,
to random conversations...
For instance, an envelope is dropped
on a machine and as the person who set it in place is speaking, the
person answering is on the other side, where that letter wound up: a
beautiful baton-passing flow that would peak with THE STUNT MAN, but
you can't make a miracle out of the sixties, because hippies are simply
the most uninteresting characters to ever wind up on film, ironically
dying to be independent-minded and free, they're all cookie-cutter machines... and while each look like they're wearing costumes in recent
movies, they even looked made up/put-together back then, when it was
really going on (mainly because an actor will go from this movie to an
episode of Gunsmoke)...
Centered on a very uncomfortable-looking,
horribly unattractive Elliott Gould, with big lips and bushy eyebrows
matching a bushy mustache and about ten years too old for the role of a
student revolutionary who was somehow in Vietnam and now wants to be a
teacher...
Looking the age of someone who has been a teacher for a
decade and just horribly miscast here, spouting 1960's
platitudes to his so-called fellow students, and, while he does stand
out from the younger hippies (including Harrison Ford, John Rubinstein
and Max Julien)... being that he's sarcastically obnoxious and selfishly
neurotic like the establishment he's supposed to be so against...
director Rush cannot make these people interesting beyond the first twenty-minutes. Rates: **
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