The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972)

6/10
"Nothing happens" in much of the BBS films but even less so here. Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern play a couple of brothers, Nicholson the younger, straight-laced, depressed one and Dern the older, scheming extrovert. Ellen Burstyn and Julia Anne Robinson are the women in the middle. Dern summons Nicholson to Atlantic City where he's hatching a doomed plan to develop real estate on an island in Hawaii. The film is bookended by a couple of great, sad monologues by Nicholson and it's always watchable due to the acting of the leads, but it's just not terribly interesting. I did find it nailed the curious dynamic between all brothers close in age quite well, and the ending threw me for a bit of a loop. And it had Scatman Crothers! But that wasn't quite enough to get me too excited about it at any point.

Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

8.5/10
I re-watched this last night as I'm slowly going through the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story box set, and it had a much greater impact on me compared to when I first saw it a couple of years ago. I remember not particularly liking it, but now I realize it's more that Five Easy Pieces just isn't an especially enjoyable movie to watch - it's so full of tension it knots your stomach and its protagonist is downright unlikeable. I was more impressed than ever by Jack Nicholson's performance...disaffected, apathetic, seething with an anger that's only a word away from boiling over...it's hardly a "forgotten" role in Nicholson's career but it's one that I think deserves a lot more credit. The other thing I like about the movie is the way it refuses to give us an easy explanation for Nicholson's character's anger - we're left with a feeling that it's something more, or something just beyond the edges of the frame that's being withheld from us. It's a tough feeling for a filmmaker to stir up in a viewer and I think it was executed brilliantly here.

I watched it just after re-watching one of my favorite movies, Easy Rider, and while both movies deal in similar sentiments, Easy Rider is absolute paradise to watch in comparison.

Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968)

6/10
1968 curio starring the Monkees, written and produced by Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson. There isn't a plot to speak of - the four are thrown into a bunch of mostly surrealist sketches that last for about 5-10 minutes apiece, and then they're awkwardly segued into another. Music numbers abound, as well as cameos (Sonny Liston and Frank Zappa to name but two) and Help!-esque self-aware digs at the bands' commercialism and phoniness. The lazy stabs at the establishment, Vietnam, drugs, etc prefigure Rafelson and Nicholson's work with Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, but this is generally a mess. There are a couple of moments of inspiration, particularly the psychedelic opening under water sequence and a wild concert scene towards the end.
Predictably the film was something of a career killer...other Monkees movie projects were cancelled and their record sales took a dive thereafter. Kind of fascinating in a "what were they thinking" kind of way now, though.