I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968): Laughably dated social satire (scripted by Paul Mazursky) about a mild-mannered lawyer who freaks out and joins the hippie counterculture. Peter Sellers plays the role of the lawyer in question, Harold Fine, believably, but the rest of the cast consists of second-tier actors and nobodies, and most of the attempts at humor fall flat, such as the Mexican family suing an insurance company subplot. The unintentional humor, on the other hand, brings a few giggles -- once upon a time, kiddies, before I was born in a strange land called California, people really used expressions such as "Groovy," all the time and preached peace & love gibberish about how everything's beautiful and we all ought to be like flowers. No, I'm not joking -- the ludicrous hippie rhetoric is actually delivered with sincerity: a key thematic moment is when Fine, hassled by two cops, tells them that they don't have to do what they're doing, they can, you know, be groovy and dig it. Whatever the "it" to dig is, the "digging" of which would doubtless by enhanced by artificial joy. Speaking of which, the movie does have one amusing little bit when Fine, his fiancee, and his parents accidently enjoy some "special" brownies -- a classic harbinger of bad drug humor, for what that's worth.

Grade: C+