Ignorant and insulting parody of a beautiful but terrifying era

Rating: Null/10 (19 September 2012)

This movie completely fails to capture the spirit of the era it tries so frantically to recreate; it never seems like anything but a sterile 2000s parody of the 1960s, fairly well executed but very poorly conceived and written.
It tries too hard to be hip, and in doing so it misses the sense of urgency and dread that permeated that decade like the first tremors of a cataclysmic earthquake that can't be stopped but hasn't really hit yet. I and everybody I knew (I turned 18 in 1966) expected to die young, either from the crazy war in Viet Nam or a nuclear holocaust or a drug overdose or whatever; but the sense that death was knocking relentlessly at the door heightened every other experience and made life seem both terrifyingly fragile and infinitely precious. We had to live hard and fast, because we didn't have much time.
THAT is why our generation rebelled so strongly against our parents, who had created such a terrifying world and were so complacently offering us to it as its blood sacrifice - it was NOT just arrogant self-indulgence, as this silly and shallow movie makes it seem.
Just playing the music and acting like bad-as$ party-hearty clowns, trying to convince the world that that's what we were like then, is insulting and despicably ignorant.