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Too much of everything

Simply A Masterpiece

Great Film overall

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

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.

I don't understand that this is supposed to be funny. Usually, I am a sucker for films that feature offbeat characters and non-linear story lines. I just didn't get it this time.Maybe, it's because that I am not familiar with life in the sixties, other than what I have read. Maybe, it's because I thought that this was going to be more of a violent film with extreme black humour. The humour is sort of black, but there is little to no violence here.De Niro is interesting to watch here and you can sense shades of his most famous character of Travis Bickle in some scenes. The scene in Vietnam works because it comes totally out of nowhere, but for the most part his character just seems goofy. I know that this kind of film was probably something that most people were not used to in the late sixties, but as more and more directors went counterculture in the 70s, this seems extremely boring by comparison and also kind of amateurish.I know that De Palma was still a rookie filmmaker here and this was probably some kind of experiment for him. It's a noble try but not very compelling.One more thing: Even for a sixties song, the tune played at the opening credits is probably one of the worst I have ever heard.

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.

You know those smug, interminable hippie improv routines in BILLY JACK? The ones where you sort of get the feeling they're supposed to be comedy, but you're thrown off a bit by the fact that they're not actually funny? And then you think maybe it's supposed to be satire, except for the fact that it isn't saying anything about the real world or real people?Put together ninety minutes of those things, and you've got GREETINGS.People might look at my screen name and think that my dislike of this movie is based on its left-wing politics, but this film is no funnier (and no more meaningful) when making fun of hippies, JFK assassination bugs, or artistic charlatans than it is when making fun of "establishment" figures and soldiers. Boring and pretentious, GREETINGS fails equally as comedy and as commentary.