Alice's Restaurant (DVD, 2001, Avant-Garde Cinema)

I'd seen this movie in 1969 or 70 when it first came out. Oddly I didn't remember one thing about it once I saw this 2002 DVD version. Now I remember what it was all about. Vietnam. The Hippie peace movement. A super-power (rather than great power) US that inspired its teenage and young adult generation to create a nonviolent counter-culture because they literally hated war and the lifestyles of the violent US "leaders."

Right after the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and during the failures of the Vietnam War, a generation of long haired-Hippies with "flower-power" and acoustic guitars with home spun songs about loving each other evolved in reaction to US war mongering anti-Asian supremacism.

Though this film is about a small group of Hippies who buy a church to live in, and then a restaurant for Alice, the wife of the gatherer of the flock, to sell her delicious food from, the back ground is about a social culture change due to an excess of US governmental violence. Sound familiar? Like history repeating itself in 2002-2006?

Arlo Guthrie is the main troubadour who brings the "family" together through his music, like his real and not real father, who in the picture is dying, had done. Appearances by social changers by way of music, Pete Seeger, join with Guthrie to make lasting political statements through their music about anti-war, group protest, and social change.

History seems to be repeating itself from 1969 to 2006. Because the older people won't love their neighbors and fear them instead, because the older people won't negotiate with their neighbors and must dominate them instead, because the older people won't resist fighting and love war instead. A new generation is posed to take their stand, just like in the late 60's when violence in the US got way out of hand and didn't represent the true will of the American public. That's what this movie is about. It speaks to us now just like it did back when.