Good story, Not enough for a whole film

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Fresh off of his breakout success Bob, Ted, Carol, and Alice, writer/ director Alex Mazursky made this close to the bone story of a hot new director caught up in a similar predicament. We never find out what Alex Morrison ( Donald Sutherland) settles on but this is the path Maz took and he went straight off the cliff.Sloppy, heavy handed and dull from the get go Alex in Wonderland embarrassingly stumbles along from its early tedious overlong scenes brazenly invoking Fellini along the way before actually hauling the maestro himself into a scene that is painful to watch. In between 8 1/2 references he also turns a chance meeting with Jeanne Moreau on Hollywood Boulevard into a crass Umbrellas of Cherbourg moment. Sutherland meanwhile with his liquid blue eyes reflecting in the California sun, his anti establishment hair blowing in the breeze looks dumbfounded in his tepid angst of struggling with confinement in a middle class gulag. As this unfolds Mazursky paints his backdrop with Alex's "wild" ideas, a heavy handed sloppy costume party complete with requisite dwarfs (one dressed like, you guessed it,Federico) as his nightmarish vision of Armegeddon.Ironically the best thing about Alex is Masurzky's performance as a millionaire wanting in on the movie business. Better the camera had followed him than this mediocre artist and his delusions of "far out" grandeur. As the counter culture version of 81/2 I would say it was off by 9.

Paul Mazursky co-wrote and directed this self-indulgent, though rarely boring, chronicle of an emerging movie director's quest to find a relevant, honest subject for his second picture. With reality and fantasy intermingling (often with a heavy hand), Mazursky is able to try out different filmmaking styles and techniques--some bold and some pretentious. This approach turns the picture into a series of vignettes, not all of which hold together, however there are wonderful individual moments amongst the dross. Donald Sutherland has a magical chance meeting with Jeanne Moreau in front of a book store, and there's an elaborate, surreal scene of war on Hollywood Boulevard (as seen through the jaundiced eye of a movie camera). A prickly bit of overstated authority on the U.S./Mexico border (with Sutherland singled out possibly because of his long hair and beard) is still topical today, however the circus folk and hippie longueurs probably looked embarrassing and dated only a year or so after the movie was released. An excursion to Rome seems included only to get a Federico Fellini cameo in the movie (Mazursky emulates Fellini's "8½" throughout, however the director's bit part is a gambit that fails to pay off). Everyday scenes of family life (house hunting, grocery shopping, etc.) are handled far too lackadaisically, although the depiction of Hollywood, California circa 1970 (wherein the Old Regime has been replaced with the avant garde New Wave) has a pointed preciseness which makes "Alex in Wonderland" an occasionally bracing document of its era. ** from ****

Contemporary audiences who wonder how loony, "What were they thinking?" early 70s Hollywood studio disasters like "Myra Breckinridge" were ever made would do well to take a look at "Alex in Wonderland": a near anthropologic look at the confused atmosphere that was Hollywood in the 70s.Donald Sutherland (looking alarmingly like "Myra Breckinridge"s latter-day hippie director, Michael Sarne) plays a young, hot, filmmaker of the sort Hollywood was blindly courting in the years following "Easy Rider." With the entire industry opening up their doors to him to do whatever he wants, Sutherland is hamstrung by his inability to latch onto what his next film project should be. Torn between a desire to do something meaningful and yet still operate within the "system" of Hollywood success, Sutherland, through a series of fantasies and vignette encounters, grapples with the very real possibility that he really hasn't any more depth in him than the Hollywood hacks he derides, and that his half-hearted hippie-era beliefs bring him no closer to happiness or self awareness than anyone else.There is much to dislike about the structure of "Alex in Wonderland" (riffing on Fellini's "8 1/2", the film is mired in too many 70s era movie clichés), but I enjoyed how it shined a refreshingly candid light on that point in time when Hollywood was so unsure of itself that it was handing over millions to any and everyone calling themselves a "director" so long as they were young and espoused a "now" and "with it" philosophy. It implodes the romanticism that shrouds Hollywood's most recent "Golden Age" and provides a well-observed character study to boot.If there is a problem with Hollywood films about Hollywood, it's that those involved (understandably) take the business of making movies so very seriously, but most of us average folks find it hard to identify meaningfully with individuals who agonize and fret in palatial homes and near-perfect weather, while producing for the most part, escapist (sometimes willfully mindless) entertainment motivated principally by the desire to make enough money to buy even bigger palatial homes.

Made in the aftermath of the sixties - and not without a hint of LSD - this view on the life, times and troubles of a young movie director, is also a must-see commentary on the relations between art and industry, independent film-makers and big-time producers, American cinema and European cinema. Glorious appearances by Federico Fellini (a hard-working man, whom Alex disturbs in Cinecittá while he's editing a TV special) and Jeanne Moreau serve as extra features that will attract every real movie-buff. At the same time, the movie owes much of its intensity (and/or intimacy) to a close-knit cast, where even the director and his wife are listed. And for very good reasons. If you still think at cinema as an adventure in the making, you won't be disappointed by this one.