The other night I was revisiting the classic final sequence from Antonioni’s messy counter-culture experiment, “Zabriskie Point.” The film, co-written by Sam Shepard, was a notorious box office bomb. An anonymous commentator writing in the booklet that accompanied the CD soundtrack to the film notes unblinkingly that “critics of all ideologies — establishment, underground, and otherwise — greeted the movie with howls of derision. They savaged the flat, blank performances of Antonioni’s handpicked first-time stars, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, and assailed the script’s confused, unconvincing mix of hippie-buzzword dialogue, self-righteous, militant debate, and free-love romanticism.”
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