My Dinner With Jimi [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

At long last, the sixties as seen through the drug-addled orbs of a cat who was really there, living the high life with the Beatles and the Stones.
I first thought this was going to be a documentary...the Turtles released one in 1990 called Happy Together, so I assumed that this would be actual footage from back in the day.
BUT NO, my cats and kittens...
it is much, MUCH more than that.
First of all, it's a comedy, mostly, starring a bunch of fresh-faced kids in their twenties BEING the Turtles, the band from the sixties who were the first rock band to play at the White House. And while that particular story is not told in this volume, the author, Turtles' lead singer Howard Kaylan, has filled the screen for an hour and a half with enough stories to tell around rock and roll water coolers for decades to come.
It seems that fame was thrust suddenly upon Kaylan and his bandmates and we witness his early photo sessions,(with a moustached John Corbett playing Henry Diltz), we go backstage at the Whisky A-GoGo with their manager,(a suitable slimy George Wendt, and learn draft evasion from Frank Zappa's manager, Herb Cohen, (Curtis Armstrong).
The ordeal of prepping for the draft board exams, when both Howard (played by Acadamy Award nominee Justin Henry--Kramer Vs. Kramer), and Turtle partner Mark Volman (a wonderfully comic Jason Boggs) proceed to intoxicate themselves with abandon is only a set-up for the draft board sequence that follows...Taylor Negron is a standout here.
Where, I hear you ask, is Jimi?
Well, the title IS a bit deceiving.
But he's coming.
Not, however, before we meet Graham Nash, Donovan, The Moody Blues, Brian Jones, and, in an amazing scene, the Beatles themselves.
Folks, right here, you got your price of admission.
I promise, you will never forget that scene.
Brian Groh, the actor who portrays John Lennon, would face little competiton in an indie movie award show UNLESS...
he was in the same catagory as the gentleman who lets us into the very soul of Mr. Hendrix himself. The actor's name is Royale Watkins.
Write it down.
He is amazing.
The ending is a little fuzzy, as well it should be, going by Kaylan's recollections, but the movie is a total surprise and a five star gem.
It's all done on the cheap--you can tell that these folks found a great project and did it for a song...
and there are plenty of great songs in this movie too--the soundtrack should come out as a CD.
All in all, if you're at all curious...if you EVER wanted to live or RE-live the sixties, this is your movie.
(Note...there is quite a bit of casual drug use portrayed in the film without moral or social consequence, so if you have little ones, be advised.)

I was so pleased to "discover" this film. As a member of a high school "cover" band in the late 1960s playing Beatles, Turtles, Rascals, Trogs, etc., I've been fascinated to see how badly modern films are at capturing the real Sixties as I remember them. Dark, moody, intellectualized, star-struck recreations miss the key point - that we were young, dumb, talented and clueless. There was an enormous innocence that gets lost in translation. But not here. This time a real participant in the pop rock scene tells us what it was really like - and it rings true to me. Sure it's a low-budget film that lingers too long on scenes that may only be meaningful to nostalgic Baby Boomer garage band members. But this was a bold little film since, rather than layering on the rock legends, it throws aside the rose-colored glasses and the bull analysis of rock "historians." The point is that we were all in awe of the Beatles and, as this film points out, they and Jimi Hendrix, and Zappa, and the rest were all just young talented people who were lucky enough to hit a pop culture wave. The Turtles were among the most tuneful bands, not deep, but upbeat and well orchestrated and great on stage. They were not, however, as pretty as the fabricated Monkees or Herman's Hermitts or other B-level Beatle-imitators. They were not as hard edged as the Stones, Doors, Animals, etc. or as goofy as the Bubblegum bands to which they are often wrongly linked. They had bad management and broke up by 1970. But they were part of the powerful West Coast wave that washed back over England after the British bands influenced us (and they in turn were influenced by American 50s rock). The Turtles were a light-hearted balance to the angst of the Doors and fell apart before they turned dark. I admit I was fearful when I discovered that this was not a documentary, but a reconstruction of the young band in 1967. Those kinds of biopics are inevitably hard to watch. But somehow this film gets the casting right. The Turtles and other pop figures are truly realistic and (except for all the wigs) believable. This may be a problem for some who have canonized these pop stars into saints and have fallen for the performances they crafted onstage and in their records. But we have come to idolize their music and their public images which were, after all, performances. Underneath these were just normal kids and young adults. Howard Kaylan was there. He briefly had a seat at the table when the Summer of Love was a phenomenon and not a pop culture cliché. If he says this was the way it was - I believe him. His Jimi Hendrix, a former American paratrooper and down-right nice guy, makes more sense to me than the sainted psychedelic version handed to us in black light posters since his death. Critics (like the one here who gave the film a low rating) who think THIS is the fake version, can't tell Hollywood from reality. Films like "That Thing You Do" and "Almost Famous" tap into the essential innocence of the era. It is an innocence that will never return - except for each generation of teens in the very fragile moment in their lives. We all get one shot at being naive -and that was true for the Baby Boomer generation. But before the bitterness and cynicism took over, we really did have a moment of hope. This film is about that moment,and the end of that moment. This is about how one pop band discovered that another pop band was human. Despite its small budget and big wigs and dragged out scenes - it is a more accurate work than most of the bigger films that care more about selling tickets than capturing the times and telling the truth.

I just watched this tonight; it's wonderful. Screenplay by Howard Kaylan based on the Turtles 1966 rise to the top & 1967 visit to London. It was touching & hilarious, get this one!