If SIFF offered an award for the
most unabashedly fun film played during the festival, Bill Fishman's
My Dinner With Jimi would win hands down, as it skillfully
envelops two seemingly contradictory ideas --
broad humor and subtle observations about the 1960s
counterculture and those who shaped it -- in one seamless package.
Howard Kaylan, lead singer of
The Turtles (best known for their 1967 pop hit, "Happy
Together") reminisces fondly, and with as much accuracy as he
can muster (recalling the old saw about not having lived through the
'60's if you could actually remember anything about them), about the
time he and his bandmates toured London, and their encounters with
the crème de la crème of the British rock world, among them Graham
Nash, a very zoned-out Donovan, an acidulous John Lennon, Brian
Jones and, of course, Jimi Hendrix.
The Jimi Hendrix that Kaylan encounters is on the verge of
international stardom – at the time of their meeting, Hendrix was
two weeks away from his legendary coming-out at the Monterey Pop
Festival – and in love with the measure of fame and social
acceptance that he has received in England;
he was not yet the self-described, paranoiac "fugitive
from public opinion" that he would become in less than two
years, although the seeds of self-destructive behavior were already
on display. Quite taken with Kaylan, Hendrix invites him to a dinner that
consists of a greasy spinach omelet, with French fries plastered
with malt vinegar, all washed down with copious amounts of scotch
and Coca-Cola, followed by brandy.
Without giving too much away, the dinner has a rather
disastrous -- and
hilarious -- finale.
Yet the film is more than just a steady stream of personalities; it may be a docudrama (as screenwriter Kaylan himself slyly noted after the screening, poetic license is an author's perogative, especially if you weren't completely compos mentis at all times during the period in question), but the film's hyperactive visual style and its subtle, subtextual, meditations on what made the so-called Summer of Love tick – so subtle that they seem almost like throwaways -- lift it above the average I-was-there mindset that often mars these types of memoirs. Two scenes in particular – including a "discussion" between Frank Zappa and "Mama" Cass Elliott in an LA deli, and the frenetic attempts of Kaylan and his bandmate to avoid the draft by creatively flunking their army physical – are both standouts, as are the actors who have the potentially thankless task of embodying people whose every gesture is so famous that one false note would give everything away; instead, the portrayals are so exact that they border upon the eerie. As of the time of writing, the film does not have a distributor (it was produced by Rhino Records). It should.
Review by Rhino Records · Nitrate Online
