ninafina Funny, good music, great actors, important message.

preppy-3 This takes place in the late 1960s. Claude Bukowski (John Savage) travels from Oklahoma to NYC to join the Army. While in NY he falls in with a group of hippies. They sing and dance about 1960s issues. Claude also falls for rich beautiful Sheila Franklin (Beverly D'Angelo). They all try to prevent Claude from going but he does...and finds basic training is a living hell.The plot is kind of vague as are the characters but this still works. The songs are great, the acting is on target, the costumes are VERY colorful and the dancing is energetic and directed by the legendary Twyla Tharp. Naturally it's dated but you get caught right up in it. Also, like the stage play this has female AND male nudity! This was a bomb when it came out in 1979 but has since developed a cult following. Highly recommended. Look for the late Nell Carter singing "White Boys".

marysz I just watched the movie Hair in TCM, for the first time since I saw after its original release. The musical was already past its prime when it was released in 1979 and Treat Williams was already a little old for the title role. What strikes me now is how well, sexist it is; the female characters are just appendages to the men. They're passive and soft-spoken and just go along with whatever the guys want. "Women's lib" was not on the agenda here. The draft and the war in Vietnam were the impetus for this film and that's what contemporary audiences reacted to.The movie, about a lovable group of ragtag hippies in Central Park has a frenetic quality to it; Milos Forman was the middle-aged director. This film isn't about the young as they were, it reflects Forman's middle-aged male longing for the energy and sexuality of youth. Living on the West Side at the time, I was struck that they cleaned up Central Park for the film. The park was in awful shape. You can see it in the film where the dust rises from the bare dirt in the Great Meadow during the "be-in." The eventual value of this film may lie in its documentary value because it was shot on location in late 1970s Manhattan,

Mimi Andreeva The Musical is completely different category in the cinematography. It's really hard to create a work of art which do not affect by some catchphrases part of the best screen writing but with the whole magic of music that let people's mind fly through the movie make audience entertain. But Hair is not that musical it doesn't let people relax while watching it but make them think and pondering over questions deeply stuck in the human's history of the civilization. The war, and most specially Vietnam War, the consequences after it, the inner shaking that it provokes in human's soul lead Mr. Milos Forman to the path of making that extraordinary piece of pure cinema. A rollicking musical memoir. Affecting drama, exhilarating spectacle, provocative social observer. Fantastic musical, I highly recommend it. We all have to let the sun shine in our souls and realize that from the war nothing good may be borne - if we want to leave a better life we can just if we live in harmony with everything which means to leave in peace firstly with ourselves, and secondly with the others living creatures. What the phenomenal Mr. Forman wants to show us are exactly the ugly faces of the war but by the tragic finale to provoke a feeling of real catharsis that the good will always prevail over the evil.