Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

Based on the novel by Richard Farina, "Been down so long it looks like up to me" is not so much a coherent story as a series of chapters concerning a young (con-)man's college years in the late fifties. He experiments with drugs, free love and proceeds to party and disregard every rule, as if he were already living the late sixties. This may sound like a fun hippie comedy, but unfortunately it's not.

The film features some familiar faces before they became familiar: A very young Bruce Davison, the late great Raul Julia in one of his earliest roles and even a Pre-Spiderman, Post-Sound of music Nicholas Hammond. Unfortunately, the movie is not about any of them but about a pathological liar named Gnossos, played by Barry Primus.

Gnossos keeps pulling scams and deceiving everybody he meets, but not in a very enjoying of funny way. In fact the character is so unlikable and his misadventures so unrelated to each other that the movie soon becomes tedious. When he starts having bad drug trips this viewer just didn't care anymore and wanted the film to end. But it gets even more depressing from there on.

4 out of 10