Greetings (1968)

You won't be disappointed!

Sorry, this movie sucks

Simply A Masterpiece

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Brian De Palma's early classic has so much going on it's difficult to not recommend at least some of it. Jonathan Warden, Robert De Niro & Gerrit Graham kick around NYC circa 1968 trying to avoid the draft. In between concocting various schemes to stay out of Vietnam, Walden tries computer dating (disastrous), Graham obsesses about the Kennedy assassination and De Niro begins to make "Peep Art"...stag films under a different name. A lot of GREETINGS is very funny and De Niro is a standout (so much so that he was given a sequel HI MOM release two years later). De Palma worked on the script with Charles Hirsch and though highly episodic, it's a great time capsule of 1960s anti-establishment.

"Greetings" sees a trio of awkward young men acting, well... pretty damn strangely in 1960s New York City actually! These guys are really at odds with their environment and culture. Their eccentricities begin as a source of humor, (even if they might represent the citizen who has "too much freedom"), but eventually, these habits become eccentric, obsessive and finally disturbing. This escalation of behavior might run parallel to Government and society at the time, what with the Vietnamese conflict and the unsettled political climate. Or, it might not! The "episodic" nature of the film, the way it presents scenes like flipping through a scrapbook, is an uneven method in which to present it's satirical comments. In other words: some work and some don't. Sure, I'm sure a lot of the scenes FELT right at the time, (and there is some nice energy to many of them), but unfortunately some of them lack a direction and fall a flat, (but it IS forty years old!).De Niro has his moments too. A draft-dodging scheme he has is probably the best laugh in the film. His comedic skill is drawn upon fairly well in a number of scenes, (after all, he is the pervert of the group!). His friends are not as gripping though. A JFK conspiracy theory nut, (who is probably the most obsessive of all), lacks depth, and is really just there for a repetitive gag that didn't seem that clever to begin with. Likewise the "computer-date" enthusiast, who goes from nut-case to nut-case. He doesn't come across all that well either, and again, the same gag is dragged along for several evenly-spaced scenes.One of the things this film does well is show you New York City unflinchingly. 1968 has been captured very well, and it's astounding to see how unpopulated and thoroughly modern it looked, even then. We see these three shabbily-dressed, purposeless, bumblers haunting the bottoms of skyscrapers and climbing across architecture, all while engaging in some stream-of-consciousness-type strange banter. Weird stuff.The best things are the visuals, followed closely by some comedic flare from De Niro. But overall, it may only be those who have direct connections to this era or this city that may find a whole film out of "Greetings".

I have just seen Greetings for the first time. My immediate reaction was that it is SO 'Sixties. Parts of it resembling an episode of The Monkees. Especially when a group of people are live animated in a park.As Sixties memorabilia it represents both some of the best aspects of the zeitgeist, such as the dreaminess of a character dwelling on a woman in the street, and it's most excruciatingly embarrassing aspects. Such as the unnecessary and not at all erotic nudity thrown in just for the sake of being oh-so revolutionary. The worst of this being in the ridiculous part where the conspiracy theorist is using a naked woman as an anatomy mannequin and she is supposed to be asleep all through his writing on her and rolling her this way and that.It is of course fascinating to see DeNero so young in this film, yet with some of his tics already formed. However, as a visual artist I found the richest part of the film to be the drawn out conversation with Richard Hamilton. The British originator of the term "Pop Art" who effectively explains in detail the rationale of some of his paintings of the period and takes the opportunity to assert that they pre-dated Blow-Up, to which they were already regarded as deriving from.The film is pretty much without a story and it's many episodes range from the excruciatingly embarrassing to the fascinatingly dated via some good humorous elements and a bit of social history. The nutter in a book-shop whose conversation leads inexorably to the logical conclusion that he was going to be "next" is genuinely clever. Overall, however, this film would not have fore-warned me of some of the super work that De Palma would yet make. It feels amateurish. A student quality piece.

"Greetings" is cheaply made satire, which was Brian DePalma's directorial debut and one of DeNiro's first roles. That was my main reason for being very curious of this film. I was anxious to see DeNiro in early moments of his career.Maybe this movie is dated. I wasn't around during 1968, so maybe I just didn't get the satire. Maybe that's why most of this movie flew above my head. Nevertheless, the movie never seems to center on a basic idea. It just meanders on and on, delivering a series of satirical sketches, almost as if they were coming up with ideas as they continued shooting the film. This would be typical of an experimental student film, and I'm sure it would get top honors if DePalma, DeNiro and the other people who took part in this movie submitted this to their film class in college. But I'm not going to purposely lower my standards just because a movie is cheaply made by a couple of ambitious filmmakers who simply tried to salvage whatever they can with their fledgling budget. I'm not going to feel pity for the film's cheapness, like it's some struggling vagrant. I've seen much better films made on low budgets that didn't contain shaky camera work and bad sound. You can at least do something fancy with the camera to show off your skills. Most of the shots you see in this movie are wide shots. There are very few close-ups. It wasn't until fifteen minutes through the film where I realized which one DeNiro was. It's like at those Christmas gatherings where one of the family members doesn't feel like lugging the camera around, so he/she mounts the camera atop some sort of aparatus to capture what's going on but it's just one boring still shot.Anyway, I don't think DePalma will be putting this movie on his most-cherished list. Sometimes early work can be the best work. Like Martin Scorcese with "Mean Streets." I saw him on an interview recently and he claims "MS" is still his favorite out of all films he's ever done. I wouldn't be surprised if DePalma has this movie resting in the receptacle in his backyard.Almost every great filmmaker started out making little forgettable, crappy, no-brain films with their camcorders at an early age. This is like one of those films, except it isn't completely devoid of intelligence and does have some direction. Just not enough consistency.