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Magic Trip

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Magic Trip
Promotional release poster
Directed by
Produced by
Starring
Narrated byStanley Tucci
Production
company
Distributed byMagnolia Pictures
Release date
  • August 5, 2011 (2011-08-05)
Running time
90 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

Magic Trip is a 2011 American documentary film directed by Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney, about Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters.[1]

The documentary uses the 16 mm color footage shot by Kesey and the Merry Pranksters during their 1964 cross-country bus trip in the Furthur bus. The hyperkinetic Cassady is frequently seen driving the bus, jabbering, and sitting next to a sign that boasts, "Neal gets things done".[2][3]

Magic Trip was released in the United States on August 5, 2011, by Magnolia Pictures. The film's soundtrack includes excerpts from several songs by the Grateful Dead.

Reception

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In The New York Times, critic Stephen Holden wrote:

This distillation of home movies shot by the author Ken Kesey and his friends, known as the Merry Pranksters, chronicles their acid-fueled cross-country bus trip in 1964 from California to New York to visit the World's Fair. Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe's raised-eyebrow account, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture...

The film begins with a biography of Kesey, a glamorous, blondish roughneck writer known for his novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. His college dreams of being an Olympic wrestler ended with a serious shoulder injury. The documentary includes a history of LSD and a re-creation of Kesey's participation in a 1959 government study in which his moment-by-moment remarks after taking LSD were tape-recorded. (We hear his voice over a faked re-enactment.) The cheesy visual effects accompanying the sequence are meager compared with the full-blown psychedelia in Julie Taymor's movie Across the Universe.[4]

References

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  1. ^ Magic Trip at IMDb
  2. ^ von Busack, Richard (August 11, 2011). "Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Journey", Metroactive
  3. ^ Robbins, Brian (August 21, 2011). "Mountain Girl and the Magic Trip : A Conversation with Carolyn Garcia", jambands.com
  4. ^ Holden, Stephen. "Stoned Archive: Wild Ride of the Merry Pranksters". NYTimes.com. The New York Times. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
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