AFS Essential Cinema: GREETINGS January 17, 2009

GREETINGS turns draft-dodging into subversive comedy as three young men in 1960’s Greenwich Village attempt to get out of their one-way tickets to Vietnam through feigned homosexuality, self-inflicted beatings and Nazi dress. There is time for plenty of asides on voyeurism, pornography and Kennedy assassination paranoia. Clearly De Palma’s attempt to try on Godard for size (perhaps before he found a better fit with Hitchcock), GREETINGS, with its semi-sequel HI, MOM!, also provides an excellent vehicle for the young Robert De Niro’s neurotic masculinity, drawing a line toward a much more dangerously obsessive New Yorker in TAXI DRIVER.

Official Website: http://www.austinfilm.org/film/greetings_second_screening