Taking Off (1971)

Excellent adaptation.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

I am not in Forman's movies but definitely, if not with his first two, with this one he is able to catch the eye. Especially after his previous one in which he presented man's life through the libido's desires to light fires and of the firmen's to put out fires like the libido put out with age.Here age again is central theme. People say that every big producer should have done 80's movie about the American teenagers or movie that shows a bathroom. In this we can see both things. How much the generations walk past each other, how much the adults do not remember their past and how much the present of their children is well known to them. Parents are always worried and will worry, that is the system in which we have decided to be. There is choice but is there any boldness? This movie is not comical, not nasty, not joyful, not sad not strange, not boring, not traditional, not well known, maybe reminds of the opposite of all this but is not one of them. Definitely in it is hinted the talent of the producer which for now is staring deeply into the psyche of his personages and slightly is touching social questions which he will rise in hi next movies.The movie is two-shifted, behind it is the music of the life, the different songs about different moments with different moods in them. It is innovative and it is interesting. But how is made that way I leave to your imagination.http://vihrenmitevmovies.blogspot.com/

I first read about this movie when I looked at the "Harvey Lampoon" annual worst movie lists in a movie source book and it mentioned Buck Henry's losing in a strip poker game. I later found out it was directed by Milos Forman a few years before winning the Oscar for One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest which increased my curiosity factor. What I found fascinating about this movie was that despite being initially about a teenage girl (Linnea Heacock) running away and her father (Henry) looking for her, it goes on other tangents like to a musical audition that the teen girl goes to which features some good performances like that of an about-to-emerge Carly Simon or another singer named Bobo Bates who would later win an Oscer as Kathy Bates. Or when Henry goes to a café, looks at pictures of other missing teens, finds a picture of one already there and contacts the number of that teen's mother (Audra Lindley) who we find out is a member of the Society for the Parents of Lost Children. That leads to another scene of her, Buck, and their spouses (Paul Benedict and Lynn Carlin, respectively) going to some ball where they take some marijuana from Vincent Schiavelli which leads to that strip poker game. Other notable appearances are those of Georgia Engel, Allen Garfield, and the Ike and Tina Turner Revue at a concert appearance. The movie goes from the quietly dramatic to the absurdly comical in natural progression and doesn't have a clear-cut ending but it's such a nonlinear treat, one doesn't care by then. Unfortunately, since Taking Off has never been on Beta, VHS, or DVD, it wasn't until it just emerged on YouTube that I finally got to see this...

This movie is very slow, uneventful and not entertaining at all. It is difficult to believe that it has been done by the man who gave us "Hair" and "Amadeus". However, I did appreciate the last twenty minutes, where you can clearly see the paradox of the parents worrying about the behavior of their child while behaving as decadent people themselves, and then the supper with their girl's boyfriend, where again you can see that your head is not necessarily empty just because you have lots of hair on it...

This is the first Milos Forman's movie in America. It's still got the European style, a very special way to describe the story. Bourgeois parents tries to find why their quiet teenage girl ran away from home. It's a story about the gap of generation, between the straight parents and the hippies children. Forman present a funny and tender look at the youth of America of the early seventies. While the teenage girl is very gentle and quiet, the parents, who are afraid she will take drugs, get drunk and plays strip poker. The movie is now a little bit of a kind of oldie film! Just a take a look at all those typical seventies long hairs boys and girls, the way they dressed. Kinda funny, like seeing teenagers in a Doris Day movie of the fifties. There are lot of very funny sequences of the young girls singing at an audition for a show. We can see young Carly Simon in it. There is also a sequence with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. I like it, even if it's a little bit old today. It's strange to say that, because I was a teenager myself when this film was shot by Forman.