Critical Reception and Box Office Total
Critics shared some mixed feelings about the movie. Overall, the film has a 55% "Rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 11 critic reviews. ""1969," the directorial debut of Ernest Thompson, is an aimless drama, its purpose and promise lost in a thicket of false endings and a fog of nostalgia," wrote Rita Kempley of The Washington Post. Janet Maslin of The New York Times, wrote that "Mr. Dern, unusually laconic here, is unexpectedly moving as the character who seems most confused by changing times. And Variety said of it, "Affecting memories and good intentions don't always add up to good screen stories, and such is the case in 1969, one of the murkiest reflections on the Vietnam War era yet, notwithstanding good performances all around and bright packaging of Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Downey Jr. in the leads."
The film was a commercial disappointment, grossing $5,979,011 over an unestimatedly large budget.
Read more about this topic: 1969 (film)
Famous quotes containing the words critical, reception, box, office and/or total:
“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“I shall return in the dark and be seen,
Be led to my own room by well-intentioned hands,
Placed in a box with a lid whose underside is dark
So as to grow....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Woman was originally the inventor, the manufacturer, the provider. She has allowed one office after another gradually to slip from her hand, until she retains, with loose grasp, only the so-called housekeeping.... Having thus given up one by one the occupations which required knowledge of materials and processes, and skill in using them ... she rightly feels that what’s left is mere deadening drudgery.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“For, the expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning, from one who has had the ill luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)