mobia-1 I'm very fond of films made from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s for their experimental attempts to get beyond genre conventions. I had fully expected "Alex in Wonderland" to be an overlooked psychedelic gem. While the film does have some amazing hallucinatory set-pieces (the most elaborate, a violent war in Hollywood with soldiers firing into a crowd while 2 men in top hats and tails dance on a flaming station wagon to the tune "Hooray for Hollywood"), most of the action is plodding. Donald Sutherland as Alex, goes off on many travels and tangents to entertain ideas for his next directorial effort. None of the episodic scenes build on each other and aside for gloriously lensed shots (by Laszló Kovács) of Sutherland in full hippie regalia walking introspectively in a variety of locations, there is little cumulative insight.

Anscules i saw this for the first time last night and thought it was fantastic - the best Mazursky movie i've seen (by far). i come here and find it has a 5.0 and most people hate it... strange. must have hit me at the right moment. i've been interested in seeing it for 20 years - glad i didn't until now.yes, portions are derivative and pretentious, but Sutherland's incredibly likable and the film has a free and easy feel reminding me of a kind of urban easy rider. it's more of a long poem than a standard movie.the sequence at Mazursky's office is amazing.

Kenneth Anderson Contemporary audiences who wonder how loony, "What were they thinking?" early 70s Hollywood studio disasters like "Myra Breckinridge" were ever made would do well to take a look at "Alex in Wonderland": a near anthropologic look at the confused atmosphere that was Hollywood in the 70s.Donald Sutherland (looking alarmingly like "Myra Breckinridge"s latter-day hippie director, Michael Sarne) plays a young, hot, filmmaker of the sort Hollywood was blindly courting in the years following "Easy Rider." With the entire industry opening up their doors to him to do whatever he wants, Sutherland is hamstrung by his inability to latch onto what his next film project should be. Torn between a desire to do something meaningful and yet still operate within the "system" of Hollywood success, Sutherland, through a series of fantasies and vignette encounters, grapples with the very real possibility that he really hasn't any more depth in him than the Hollywood hacks he derides, and that his half-hearted hippie-era beliefs bring him no closer to happiness or self awareness than anyone else.There is much to dislike about the structure of "Alex in Wonderland" (riffing on Fellini's "8 1/2", the film is mired in too many 70s era movie clichés), but I enjoyed how it shined a refreshingly candid light on that point in time when Hollywood was so unsure of itself that it was handing over millions to any and everyone calling themselves a "director" so long as they were young and espoused a "now" and "with it" philosophy. It implodes the romanticism that shrouds Hollywood's most recent "Golden Age" and provides a well-observed character study to boot.If there is a problem with Hollywood films about Hollywood, it's that those involved (understandably) take the business of making movies so very seriously, but most of us average folks find it hard to identify meaningfully with individuals who agonize and fret in palatial homes and near-perfect weather, while producing for the most part, escapist (sometimes willfully mindless) entertainment motivated principally by the desire to make enough money to buy even bigger palatial homes.

mifunesamurai A film director has trouble in finding a subject for his next film, therefore having a director's block that allows for family confrontation, surreal illusions and the descent into a creative breakdown. I found it interesting and my wife was frightened by it, believing I'm heading down the same road!