Finally saw this very hard-to-find counterculture film, albeit in a version that presumably for reasons of music rights difficulties had several soundtrack passages muted. (The Tim Buckley songs were intact, though, as well as a couple atrocious new songs by the original score composers.) It was letterboxed, which was great because as with Bartlett's best-known film, the rather notorious flop "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," "Changes" is very strong on slick visuals. Storywise, it's not so strong, although why this movie went nowhere while "Easy Rider" became a phenomenon the same year is an open question. Maybe that film's obvious "rebels" more fit a youth audience's image of themselves at the time, while the vaguely disgruntled, clean-cut, middle-class hero here was a figure a little too close to their reality. Neither film has aged all that well, but they're both time capsules.
Kent Lane is the college student who drops out because...well, because he wants something, and...well, he doesn't know what it is, but...well it's definitely not going that whole square degree-to-job-to-cult-de-sac route. This upsets his parents (who as usual in movies of this time seem to be way too old to have a child of his generation), but oh well. So he goes off to "see America," first stopping at his friend Sammy's (Bill Kelly) racetrack and hippie commune-type place, soon crashing his own car, then hitching a ride with a sort of roving youth reporter (Marcia Strassman), then falling in with a mercurial Southern beauty (Michele Carey), at which point the movie bogs down somewhat in conventional romantic histrionics between two characters who are demanding and petulant but resistant to being tied down. Our hero is also on the run from the memory of an ex-girlfriend who killed herself, it seems, I wasn't quite clear why.
There's not much in the way of plot here--"Changes" more wants to catch a questioning mood common at the time among youth, one that now feels pretty trite and cliched. You know, the old "I don't know what I want! I just don't want what my parents want for me! That's a drag!" There isn't a lot of dialogue (until the bogged-down later going), and the little that there is tends to reinforce that there's not much deep thinking going on there. It's one thing for our hero to constantly be photographed in nice settings looking "thoughtful," but the movie never conveys that there's anything interesting or surprising on his mind. (Kent Lane is OK, but he doesn't provide much personality or charisma to fill in that blank, so you can see why his career didn't get much further.) On the plus side, that photography really is fine, and it eschews nearly all of the gimmicks then trendy in films (like zoom lensing). There are a lot of pleasant montages to music that are often from Tim Buckley's "Goodbye and Hello" LP, a record that has only improved with age. But some songs by other artists (including Judy Collins and Neil Young) were silenced on the print I saw, creating long stretches of empty audio.
All in all, a technically very well-crafted if not particularly resonant memento from the era that I'm glad to have finally seen...even if it proved no lost classic. Among familiar faces glimpsed in bit parts, Teri Garr gets a bit as a waitress, with the sole line "Burger!!" I suspect a lot of actors here shot dialogue that was eventually cut as the film leaned more and more towards musical montage in the editing room.
Kent Lane is the college student who drops out because...well, because he wants something, and...well, he doesn't know what it is, but...well it's definitely not going that whole square degree-to-job-to-cult-de-sac route. This upsets his parents (who as usual in movies of this time seem to be way too old to have a child of his generation), but oh well. So he goes off to "see America," first stopping at his friend Sammy's (Bill Kelly) racetrack and hippie commune-type place, soon crashing his own car, then hitching a ride with a sort of roving youth reporter (Marcia Strassman), then falling in with a mercurial Southern beauty (Michele Carey), at which point the movie bogs down somewhat in conventional romantic histrionics between two characters who are demanding and petulant but resistant to being tied down. Our hero is also on the run from the memory of an ex-girlfriend who killed herself, it seems, I wasn't quite clear why.
There's not much in the way of plot here--"Changes" more wants to catch a questioning mood common at the time among youth, one that now feels pretty trite and cliched. You know, the old "I don't know what I want! I just don't want what my parents want for me! That's a drag!" There isn't a lot of dialogue (until the bogged-down later going), and the little that there is tends to reinforce that there's not much deep thinking going on there. It's one thing for our hero to constantly be photographed in nice settings looking "thoughtful," but the movie never conveys that there's anything interesting or surprising on his mind. (Kent Lane is OK, but he doesn't provide much personality or charisma to fill in that blank, so you can see why his career didn't get much further.) On the plus side, that photography really is fine, and it eschews nearly all of the gimmicks then trendy in films (like zoom lensing). There are a lot of pleasant montages to music that are often from Tim Buckley's "Goodbye and Hello" LP, a record that has only improved with age. But some songs by other artists (including Judy Collins and Neil Young) were silenced on the print I saw, creating long stretches of empty audio.
All in all, a technically very well-crafted if not particularly resonant memento from the era that I'm glad to have finally seen...even if it proved no lost classic. Among familiar faces glimpsed in bit parts, Teri Garr gets a bit as a waitress, with the sole line "Burger!!" I suspect a lot of actors here shot dialogue that was eventually cut as the film leaned more and more towards musical montage in the editing room.