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DVD Easy Rider
This box-office hit from 1969 is an important pioneer of the American independent cinema movement, and a generational touchstone to boot. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper play hippie motorcyclists crossing the Southwest and encountering a crazy quilt of good and bad people. Jack Nicholson turns up in a significant role as an attorney who joins their quest for awhile and articulates society's problem with freedom as Fonda's and Hopper's characters embody it. Hopper directed, essentially bringing the no-frills filmmaking methods of legendary, drive-in movie producer Roger Corman (The Little Shop of Horrors) to a serious feature for the mainstream. The film can't help but look a bit dated now (a psychedelic sequence toward the end particularly doesn't hold up well), but it retains its original power, sense of daring, and epochal impact. --Tom Keogh
OK, so I get to see this legendary movie on hippy culture in the sixties. I'm all in anticipation, the coke deal, the famous bikes all gleaming for the big trip, and away we go with great scenery and music. They visit a rather precarious hippie commune, beautiful the sequence of all the hippie's faces. Then they follow to closely a parade in a Midwest country and get busted for not having "permission to parade", or some such thing. And then they meet Jack, a rather down and out alcoholic lawier. Jack Nicholson has already the facial mimic and hystrionic displayed in his later movies, and his are among the best dialogues of the movie (if one excludes the "You mean...marijuana???" I mean,gimme a break! it was '69, not 49!) The philosophy of the movie can be summed up in "Integrated, bigoted people fears really free men and that fear makes them dangerous". In 2005 this truth seems a bit obvious, and the story is a bit thin: it's not clear why Hopper and Fonda decide to go to New Orleans in the first place, and the finale seems most gratuitous. All in all, if it were not for the music, the scenery and Jack's appearance, I would be wondering why the hell this movie is so celebrated.
EASY RIDER AND KATRINA
AMC broadcast Easy Rider shortly after the KATRINA disaster. Was this bad timing or brilliant programming?
Easy Rider is, overall, a story about death. Capt. America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), like a modern day Don Quixote, set out for Mardi Gras and the American Dream (freedom).
Instead, they wind up tripping in the Old Cemetery, with flashforwards to Capt. America's burning motorcycle. In the final campfire scene, Peter Fonda remarks, "We blew it".
The film represents the death of the American Dream; but, in respect to the KATRINA disaster, represents the death of New Orleans, and the Death of America itself in the aftermath of the hurricane. Capt. America comes to this realization, as did so many Americans in late August 2005, that "We blew it".
So, was it just bad timing by AMC or extraordinarily brilliant programming? Watch the film for yourself.
FREEDOM WELCOMES YOU BACK AT ANY TIME
I just bought the DVD to watch on a new big television when i get around to choosing one.
I can remember when the film came out. It was even adverised in Readers Digest.
By the time I had bought my first Harley and began to turn on it was the early 70's and the 60's were regarded as a definitive and Golden Time.The film was shown in Dampier in 1972 in a landscape similar to Southern California,.Red scrubby rocky hills brooding on Time. Stained rivers run through sand.Startling glaring sunshine.
So I could relate to the landscape really well, and the tolerant stoned behaviour and the bigotted persecution.
The intolerance is noticed because as Hippies you want to make connection and seek recognition and acceptance from all the community.
You have something major to contribute, namely perception free of attachment.
Thus you are working on being truly free.
The structures in society are not fully based on an authentic rational psychology, they are based on inflationary projection of influential people usually in a state of denial. The broader societal culture needs to allow individuals to experiment,to get things wrong, to apologise without wanting a pound of flesh. It needs to nurture and us and to maintain authentic nurturing behavioural examples that guide us.
It is that insight and the practice of sincere positive sorting out your mind and your actions that makes Free people a threat to
any one in Denial.
Control freaks need to control the culture of society around them in order to maintain their equilibrium.
This is one of the messages of the film. In a conservative confomist culture like the USA what are social democratic norms in countries like Australia or Europe were and are seen as a threat to that society's status quo. The National Denial Structure is about to be unravelled. The conceptual reality is about to be changed and they dont seem to have to tools to travel into new ways of perception.
Any way would like a cd player on my Triumph so I can listen to the great soundtrack from this film.
Technically it may have its faults but overall it got the spirit correct.Also the documentary is invaluable.
Peace and go for a long ride man.
The first, and only, X-rated film to win a best picture Academy Award, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy seems a lot less daring today (and has been reclassified as an R), but remains a fascinating time capsule of late-1960s sexual decadence in mainstream American cinema. In a career-making performance, Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a naive Texas dishwasher who goes to the big city (New York) to make his fortune as a sexual hustler. Although enthusiastic about selling himself to rich ladies for stud services, he quickly finds it hard to make a living and eventually crashes in a seedy dump with a crippled petty thief named Ratzo Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman, doing one of his more effective "stupid acting tricks," with a limp and a high-pitch rasp of a voice). Schlesinger's quick-cut,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Dustin Hoffman - Jon Voight Director(s): John Schlesinger DVD Release Date: Released the 01 January 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This is the original motorcycle movie, starring Marlon Brando as the brooding leader of a biker gang that invades a small town. The film always looked like one of those synthetic Hollywood ideas of subculture life in the 1950s, which means it looks even more artificial today. But it is an actor's piece more than anything, and toward that end Brando's performance really is an important one in the context of his revolutionary reinvention of film acting during that decade. Directed by Lásló Benedek (Namu, the Killer Whale) and produced by the socially conscious Stanley Kramer. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Marlon Brando Director(s): László Benedek DVD Release Date: Released the 10 November 1998 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This subtle, existential character study of an emotionally distant outcast (Nicholson) forced to confront his past failures remains an intimate cornerstone of American '70s cinema. Written and directed with remarkable restraint by Bob Rafelson, the film is the result of a short-lived partnership between the filmmaker and Nicholson--the first was the zany formalist exercise, Head, while the equally impressive King of Marvin Gardens followed Five Easy Pieces. Quiet and full of long, controlled takes, this film draws its strength from the acutely detailed, nonjudgmental observations of its complex protagonist, Robert Dupea--an extremely crass and frustrated oil worker, and failed child pianist hiding from his past in Texas. Dupea spends his life drinking beer and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jack Nicholson - Karen Black Director(s): Bob Rafelson DVD Release Date: Released the 28 August 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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One of the key movies of the 1970s, when exciting, groundbreaking, personal films were still being made in Hollywood, Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest emphasized the humanistic story at the heart of Ken Kesey's more hallucinogenic novel. Jack Nicholson was born to play the part of Randle Patrick McMurphy, the rebellious inmate of a psychiatric hospital who fights back against the authorities' cold attitudes of institutional superiority, as personified by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). It's the classic antiestablishment tale of one man asserting his individuality in the face of a repressive, conformist system--and it works on every level. Forman populates his film with memorably eccentric faces, and gets such freshly detailed and spontaneous work from his ensemble... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Milos Forman DVD Release Date: Released the 24 September 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Few films have defined a generation as The Graduate did. The alienation, the nonconformity, the intergenerational romance, the blissful Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack--they all served to lob a cultural grenade smack into the middle of 1967 America, ultimately making the film the third most profitable up to that time. Seen from a later perspective, its radical chicness has dimmed a bit, yet it's still a joy to see Dustin Hoffman's bemused Benjamin and Anne Bancroft's deliciously decadent, sardonic Mrs. Robinson. The script by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham is still offbeat and dryly funny, and Mike Nichols, who won an Oscar for his direction, has just the right, light touch. --Anne HurleyMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Anne Bancroft - Dustin Hoffman Director(s): Mike Nichols DVD Release Date: Released the 19 June 2001 This item is currently not available.
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