Word: rafelson
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...Building-type songwriters for hire, which included some of the finest pop-music talent America ever produced, were still cranking out songs by the yard in a last-gasp bid for teen immortality. The time was ripe for a naïve and yet monstruously successful hybrid, and Bob Rafelson knew...
...Rafelson, a jack-of-all trades hipster at Hollywood's fringes, and his partner Bert Schneider, decided to assemble a made-to-order rock 'n' roll band to star in a TV show. Rafelson claims he'd thought of it before "A Hard Day's Night," but whatever the case, the success of the Beatles movie, with the ur-rock video montage of "Can't Buy Me Love," greased the skids in a big way. Rafelson found himself deluged with applicants for the band, turning away the likes of Steven Stills before settling on the four lads who would succeed...
...couldn't last, and it didn't. The Monkees' golden age ended, appropriately, with the concept carried to its logical extreme, a Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson film called "Head" that was essentially about the destruction of the group. The Monkeees were not a Woodstock kind of band, and most definitely not a post-Altamont proposition. But for a brief span, they were a bona fide phenomenon, a brilliant, opportunistic creation that somehow also managed to encapsulate the giddy, innocent sincerity...
...from all social strata lurking in the cobwebbed corners of a modern woman's life, gets neither the zest nor the sick thrill it could use. This is an enervated, despondent entertainment -- especially if you start meditating on what's befallen Nicholson, writer Carole Eastman and director Bob Rafelson since 1970, when the trio made Five Easy Pieces and the cinema world seemed full of promise and not dead ends...
Though Bob Rafelson's film has epic scope, its attitudes are anything but those of the conventional epic. Yet somehow it conveys, as few movies ever have, the miserable realities that underlay the 19th century's heroic age of exploration. Since it bravely takes up a subject remote from the interests of most of the modern audience, the film itself has about it the air of a grand, ferocious folly. Precisely because it is a high-risk venture in a low-risk movie climate, it deserves one's startled gratitude...