I wish some “based” fellow out there would remake it…
It was just the right film at just the right time to skewer the Sixties generation, who were turning from lives of idealism and awareness towards materialism and narcissistic self-examination.
Even without a television deal or a wide theatrical release, Blue Sunshine became an influential film, or at least a notorious one. The Ramones projected it during performances at CBGB. Robert Smith (The Cure) and Steven Severin (Siouxsie and the Banshees) named their 1983 album after it. Lieberman’s insistence that he never intended to freight Blue Sunshine with cultural commentary notwithstanding, the film seems to have captured something essential about the era. (…)
Blue Sunshine provides a sad denouement of the promise of the generation that dabbled in consciousness expanding at Stanford ten years earlier. In this regard Lieberman’s film has as much in common with Return of the Secaucus 7, John Sayles’ musing over ‘60s-era disillusionment that was coopted by Hollywood in The Big Chill, as it does with Wes Craven’s brutal revenge-slasher Last House on the Left.
BONUS: “Lieberman’s first film, a pseudo-PSA that’s actually effective, but probably not in the way its sponsors realized. A clear, scathing look at ‘Youth Culture’”:
