Magic Trip
| Magic Trip | |
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 Promotional release poster | |
| Directed by | |
| Produced by |
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| Starring | |
| Narrated by | Stanley Tucci |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Magnolia Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 90 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Magic Trip is a 2011 American documentary film directed by Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney, about Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters.[1]
The documentary uses the 16 mm color footage shot by Kesey and the Merry Pranksters during their 1964 cross-country bus trip in the Furthur bus. The hyperkinetic Cassady is frequently seen driving the bus, jabbering, and sitting next to a sign that boasts, "Neal gets things done".[2][3]
Magic Trip was released in the United States on August 5, 2011, by Magnolia Pictures. The film's soundtrack includes excerpts from several songs by the Grateful Dead.
Reception
[edit]In The New York Times, critic Stephen Holden wrote:
This distillation of home movies shot by the author Ken Kesey and his friends, known as the Merry Pranksters, chronicles their acid-fueled cross-country bus trip in 1964 from California to New York to visit the World's Fair. Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe's raised-eyebrow account, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture...
The film begins with a biography of Kesey, a glamorous, blondish roughneck writer known for his novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. His college dreams of being an Olympic wrestler ended with a serious shoulder injury. The documentary includes a history of LSD and a re-creation of Kesey's participation in a 1959 government study in which his moment-by-moment remarks after taking LSD were tape-recorded. (We hear his voice over a faked re-enactment.) The cheesy visual effects accompanying the sequence are meager compared with the full-blown psychedelia in Julie Taymor's movie Across the Universe.[4]
References
[edit]- ^ Magic Trip at IMDb
- ^ von Busack, Richard (August 11, 2011). "Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Journey", Metroactive
- ^ Robbins, Brian (August 21, 2011). "Mountain Girl and the Magic Trip : A Conversation with Carolyn Garcia", jambands.com
- ^ Holden, Stephen. "Stoned Archive: Wild Ride of the Merry Pranksters". NYTimes.com. The New York Times. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
External links
[edit]| Novels |
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| The Merry Pranksters |
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