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Not to be confused with Hairspray, Shampoo is hardly a riot, but Warren Beatty's send-up of the sex comedy is worth a peek. The gag is that Beatty plays a Los Angeles hairdresser trying to manage his many, many women while attempting to raise funds to start his own salon. Oh, and it's 1968, on the even of Nixon's election as president, as the country made its sea change from permissiveness to, well, to whatever it was that Nixon stood for. (Adding insult to injury, the film came out right after Watergate.) Understandably, Shampoo is pretty hopeless in its datedness now. The jokes and characters are archetypes of America's most ridiculous era, which makes Shampoo serve better as a historical record than a timeless comedy.
